10 Donations. 3 Thank-Yous. 7 Failures to Communicate.

by Kivi Leroux Miller on February 18, 2010

in Nonprofit Communications,Thank-You Letters,What I Got When I Gave

It’s time to share the results of my 2009-2010 “What I Got When I Gave” Experiment. The point of this experiment is to see what kind of communications response I get in return for unsolicited donations to national charities. This does not include the automated email receipt that I get from the payment processor; I’m looking for communication from the charity directly.

On December 9, 2009, I gave $20 donations to 10 national nonprofits I had previously never donated to by converting credit card miles into cash donations through the Capital One Giving Site. I agreed to share my email address and my mailing address with the nonprofits.

I’ve confirmed with Network for Good, Capital One’s donation processing partner, that the donations were transmitted to the nonprofits on January 15, 2010. The delay has to do with how Network for Good bundles donations and transmits them to nonprofits once a month. So, while I gave in early December, I’m considering the donation date January 15 for this experiment’s purpose. Capital One covers the processing fees, so each charity received the full $20.

Today is February 18. It’s been a month, and I’ve heard from only three of the 10 organizations. This is the same result as last year, when I got four thank-yous in response to 12 gifts. It was a pitiful response then, and a pitiful response today.

First, let’s give a hand to the three groups that made the effort.

This year’s winner for “First Thank You Received” goes to Ashoka. The letter was sent on January 22. The letter is nothing special – your garden variety donation receipt form letter. It says Dear Kivi, but the signature is a blurred scan of a signature. Not fabulous content-wise, but sent within a week, so they get big points for speed.

This year’s winner for “Not Treating Me Like a Total Stranger” is the National Parks Conservation Association, because they treated the donation like a membership. The envelope says “Thank you!” in big letters and “Important membership information enclosed.” The letter says “Dear Kivi, Thank you for Joining NPCA!” (Joining is capitalized, which I assume is a weird merge thing they should fix). The letter says I can find out how my donation is helping by visiting their website, and has a punch-out membership card at the bottom. The letter also says that an invitation to join their monthly giving program was included, but the only thing in the envelope was the letter and a plain business reply envelope. I assume the absent reply card is a mail-house mistake. I received the letter the first week of February.

The Honorable Mention goes to Girls Incorporated. They sent a plain white postcard with some generic thank-you language on the back along the lines of “‘Thank you so much for your gift . . . on behalf of the girls whose lives you change with your support, thank you.” The only thing on the front is the mailing label. I think the card probably looked clean when it was mailed, but after postal processing, it’s all smeared and smudged. I received the postcard the first week of February.

None of these thank-you notes wowed me, but hey, at least they exist.

I also made donations to the following organizations and have not received anything in response to date:

American Red Cross (listed as American National Red Cross)

Defenders of Wildlife

National Multiple Sclerosis Society

Oceana, Inc.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Remote Area Medical Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

I suppose there are lots of reasons why a national nonprofit may not acknowledge a $20 gift, some better than others. Who knows, maybe something is lost in the mail or the spam folder (although I looked there). I invite representatives of the organizations mentioned in this post to share their perspectives either in the comments or by emailing me at kivi@ecoscribe.com.

Excuse or no excuse, these results, assuming they hold true throughout the sector (and other experiments say they do), are very bad news. How can nonprofits expect to thrive off the kindness of others, when the kindness of a simple thank-you note to an unsolicited donation is too much to ask? Of course, it’s great news to those of you who are doing thank-you notes, because it means you are head-and-shoulders above your peers!

In a post I’ll publish tomorrow, I’ll talk about why every nonprofit needs to figure out how to incorporate Network for Good into its fundraising and communications plan, whether you like getting donations that way or not, and how to do that, including some tips from Katya Andresen, Network for Good’s COO. Network for Good processes payments for GuideStar, Facebook Causes, and many others. Ignoring them isn’t an option.

Next week, I’ll post some tips on how to write good thank-you notes. Here are a few earlier posts until then:

Stand Out: Write a Decent Thank You Note
Stand Out with Thank You Notes, Part II
Saying Thanks Even When It’s Inconvenient or Time-Consuming

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up on our webinar schedule . . .

February 23: How to Make Your Website More Interesting
March 9: Integrating Your Online and Offline Marketing and Fundraising Campaigns
March 18: On-the-Spot E-Newsletter Makeovers: Get Your E-Newsletter into Better Shape
March 23: Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media

(If you want to comment on this post and are on the blog homepage, go back up to the top and click on the number to the right of the title. Annoying, I know. I’m looking into a new template.)

Tagged as: net2thinktank

Fundraiser & Donor

I would like to correct a statement on a previous post. US Charities are only required to issue tax receipts for gifts of $250 or more. Many receipt for gifts much lower than that, of course.
It is true that many measure the diminishing returns as the gift amount gets much lower. This is most likely not out of lack of gratitude or stinginess, but more in an effort to make sure those funds are put to great use. The person who asks about the fancy response piece cost vs. the $10 gift, for example -- what's the tipping point? $1? $15? $25?

And there are different receipts required for different types of gifts (cash v. items, for example). So the person who was upset about the donation of books being difficult might not be aware that there are laws (and forms) specific to such giving, and yes, they do make things more complicated, thanks to the IRS.

I would advise that these organizations are contacted to find out exactly what their policies are. What is the point of this exercise if not to find out what is happening behind the scenes? I would be interested in an active follow-up so that there is some further education. Perhaps donors could learn something here, too?
KCCP

Thanks for sharing. Your experience really wakes up everyone that may be guilty of not sending out letters. Not only that but it goes to show how I simple thank, written as though you care, can make the world of difference as to whether or not a person wants to donate to your organization again or not.
Mary Reynolds

Thank you Kivi,

Thank you for your blog and calling out the non-profits that are slacking in this area of donor appreciation. With the economic times as they are, we cannot be remiss in being thankful. I have worked in the non-profit sector for 15 years and as a previous Director of Development I constantly emphasized to my staff the value of the thank you note, no matter the size of the dollar amount.

There are no excuses. Often I would take blank thank you cards home with me in the evening and write out a personalized appreciation note while visiting with family or watching television. Now, in my consulting role, when I hold workshops and seminars I have one entire session dedicated to training the non-profit participant in donor management and how to thank the donor. Creativity goes beyond the written card.
Sarah

Ok, I figured it out once and for all! Our problem is that, though the donor names are on the checks, the addresses or other contact info isn't. For a long time, nobody knew that the contact information is available on the web site. I'm glad Kivi posted this otherwise I never would have figured out that there are people going unthanked! Hopefully that was the situation with some of the ones who didn't thank her and now they can fix it.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Hi Sarah,
I'm glad you were able to figure it out. Makes some of the lesser kind comments I've been hearing worth it to know it helped some smaller groups figure this out!
Thanks for sharing your story!
Kivi
Sarah

Katya,
I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you...I've been working to figure out what has happened at my organization with our Network for Good donations. I'm not 100 percent sure yet but I think that when the Network for Good checks come in they don't have the donors names on them. The person who previously got the email alerts and had access to the account that lists names didn't know that and the finance department didn't know that anyone had access to the names -- I guess thinking they were all anonymous. I am mortified to find out all the donations we have not thanked and am working on a solution. Is this a common problem?
Sarah
Phil

Tests like yours Kivi have been carried out on both sides of the Pond for many years now and I don't. think I have seen the % response rate change in that time, despite the mechanisms for thanking donors getting easier and cheaper.

Some charities do offer donors the option to opt out of a thank you response "in order to make sure more money goes to the cause you have donated to", but many impose this bizarre rule of no donation under a certain amount to be thanked.

Electronic donations should at the very least receive an automated thank you response with information/updates on the projects being supported. How simple is that to do.

Someone who has taken the time to send you a modest donation but thinks enough of your organisation to part with what is probably a hefty £% of their income at the very least deserves a "thank you".

Thanks for the wake up call no true fundraiser will mind receiving.
Leslie Clay

In comparison, Hope Cottage is probably considered a small organization ($1.2M budget and a development staff of 1.5). As Chief Development Officer, I spend at least 20-30 minutes of each day (sometimes at night at home) handwriting thank you notes for meetings, gifts, introductions made, etc. Our donors are thanked at least twice for EACH donation (even if they make them on a monthly basis) - once with a receipt letter, hand signed (no auto signature) by our CEO and a hand written note from me (Chief Development Officer). I have told our admin that we need a 3-5 day turnaround on thank you letters. We just sent each donor from this past year a letter thanking them for supporting us in 2009 and telling them exactly what their gift accomplished. Again, each letter was hand signed with at least a "thank you" and many of them included a short note from either myself or the CEO. My thought is you can never thank a donor enough AND this is no statute of limitations on thank yous, so if you are tardy on saying thank you to a donor, do it now. And thank you Mom for making sure I knew how to write a proper thank you note and for instilling in me the importance of doing so.
Angie

As someone who's worked with non-profits myself, I'm torn on this. After all, sending a physical thank you card/note (and the packet of stuff you got from National Parks Conservation Association) costs money - and your $20 just went to the printing of said items to thank you for the $20. Even if it's an e-mail, unless it's an all-volunteer organization, you're still paying for the labor of someone to follow up.

It's like when I get a fundraising letter from an organization that's four-color printing with lots of bells and whistles - how much money was spent on said plea that could've been used elsewhere?

But at the same time, I remember how upset I got when I went to donate $10 to the American Diabetes Association, and the cheapest donation listed was $50. $50 is a lot of money for some people. My budget only allows for $10 or so every couple of months ... and I like to spread around what little money available for donations I have, since there are so many good causes.
russell james-taylor

I stumbled upon your article regarding non-profit organizations thank you processing and was not at all surprised as to the response of some beneficiaries.As someone who donates from time to time ,I have found that the smaller the organization, the more likely one is to receive a more personalized response.
The nicest response I received was when I sponsored a local school soccer team in South Africa.
It was a simple hand written note that said " Dear Sir/Madam ,thank you very much for the gift of yourself and our first goal is for you."
I am of the opinion that charities often forget the donors' motivation for giving , and that the essence of charity is lost in administration.
cosmas amwayi

This is to inform you that somebody hacked to my email address and have learned that he send a comment to your website and using my blog www.urbanministry.org/blogs/cosmas/2010/01/13/hivaids-epidemic-and-social-justice/ to solicit funds. please delete the contents he send to your website and wish to clarify that i work as a volunteer coordinator with techmission wich manages urban ministry and we don't solicit funds.
whoever deed this deed it in bad faith and may have been intended to taint my reputation.
Have a great day

Thank you

Cosmas Amwayi
Sue Anne Reed

Kivi - Interested in your thoughts on the "thank you" email that you might get from an individual non-profit's web site. Would you consider that an adequate thank you? I noticed in a previous comment that you didn't think the Network for Good thank you was sufficient, but if the message came from the organization itself immediately following the donation -- would that suffice? Donor acknowledgment / recognition is a current hot-topic at our non-profit.
Steve Kehrli

Dear Ms. Miller,

Imagine my dismay when I learned that your kind gift of $20 had not been acknowledged a full month after notification of the donation was sent to PETA by the Capital One Giving Site. PETA’s policy is to quickly and accurately acknowledge donations intended to support our vital work to end cruelty to animals. Please accept my apologies for our unacceptable delay in welcoming you to our organization’s valued list of supporters.

The proliferation of third-party giving sites has challenged our ability to respond as quickly as we would prefer to do. PETA always has more opportunities to help animals than we do resources, so each and every donation is viewed as critical to our lifesaving work. We are striving to insure that compassionate people who give through third-party sites are acknowledged as promptly as those who give through our PETA.org site or through the mail.

PETA is making groundbreaking progress against cruelty. As noted in the financial statement in our 2009 Annual Review at http://www.peta.org/annual-review-2009/ PETA is also efficient. We certainly intend to improve our efficiency in processing third-party gifts that support this lifesaving work.

Your membership welcome packet will arrive soon. I hope that the progress PETA reports to you in the coming year might inspire you to try our acknowledgment process again. Thank you for all that you do to make the world a better place.

Very truly yours,

Steve Kehrli
Development Director
PETA Foundation
Jeff Regen

Thanks for your blog post. At Defenders of Wildlife, every donation to through our emails or our website receives a prompt email thank you indicating the difference they are making--typically within minutes of their donation. We often follow-up with more information on the impact of their donation as well, especially if to a campaign. As you point out , we need to develop such systems for alternative giving channels. Unfortunately, we're not currently getting email or mailing address into our database on donations coming through Network for Good. I don't believe Network for Good is passing us this data, tho I could be mistaken. We're looking into it.
Douglas Clayton

To come at this topic from a slightly different angle... Sometimes I shake my head at the sheer mass volumes of time, money and energy spent on soliciting donations, managing benefits and thank yous to donors, and wriggling around regarding restricted funds and percentages of donations 'reaching the target' instead of being spent on administration and fundraising.

Wouldn't it be lovely if all that energy and time and expertise could be spent doing the mission-based work of the nonprofit, instead of managing donor relations? As a donor myself, I'm far less concerned with getting a thank-you letter, a branded mug, or my name on a wall, and more concerned with seeing the demonstrable impact the non-profit is having. Even if I have to go to their website myself to look and find out...
Pete Forsyth

Kivi,

I checked with our Head of Community Giving, Rand Montoya. He explained that the Capitol One partnership essentially combines two factors that really slow things down: (1) The information doesn't come to us for several weeks, and (2) These donations are processed internally more or less like check donations, which typically get a 2-3 week turnaround.

So, nothing arrived here until early February; I believe he said your receipt/thank-you either had just gone out, or was about to.

Though it's not officially my department to do so, I want to let you know I am personally gratified by your donation and your support of the work we do!

Pete Forsyth
Public Outreach Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Kivi Leroux Miller

Hi Pete - Thanks for the explanation! I appreciate it. As with all the organizations, I wholeheartedly support the work you doing.
Kivi Leroux Miller

I am perfectly happy to receive email correspondence only for an online gift. A well-written email thank you that also says I will be put on an e-news mailing list so I can continue to learn about all the good work that will be done with my gift would be wonderful.
Haworth Cat Rescue

Hi Kivi

Very interesting blog (I found it via Sandy Rees' Get Fully Funded on Facebook).

We're a small charity in the UK, so we don't - as far as I can see - qualify to join Network for Good. However, we do have similar organisations here in the UK, so the points you make are valid.

Would you consider a thank you reply from the charity to be acceptable if sent electronically - assuming the donation is received electronically?

Also, is there an argument that some donors may not want the charity to "waste" their donation by writing a thank you? Particularly if the donation is received electronically and the thank you sent snail mail? And if the donation is relatively small (not saying I agree with this, but I've heard this banded about in chat rooms, forums etc).

We recently considered paying for a mail out by a company which does this sort of thing. They did not send a thank you for donations of less than £65, which I reckon is about $100, maybe a little less.

Our approach is to reply by the same medium (ie electronic donations get an email, cheques get a card) and we then add them to the appropriate mailing list (email or snail) unless they specifically ask us to not to acknowledge or send the donation anonymously (presumably to avoid further requests from us, lol).

Great post, I will explore your blog further.
Katya

Sarah, please let me know more about your donations and I'll help. Network for Good has real-time donation tracking reports available to every single nonprofit. We are happy to help you get access to all the data you need. -- Katya, COO of Network for Good
Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoa

Kivi,

Thanks for your post.

And I'm so sorry. The cause I just joined hasn't sent a thank you since 12/10!!! *sigh*

That's being taken care of tomorrow. :)
Tom Oates

I dropped a clip and link of this item on the member contact page of one of the offenders. After posting my note, the follow-on page virtually promised that they wouldn't get back. I found the candor disturbing.
Mike Laskavy

Hi Kivi -- Sorry for the late response, chalk it up to an overworked development person in a small nonprofit. Which brings me to my question: it seems the charities you tested are all large and well-known. Have you tested small charities? One of my key duties is writing thank-you letters. We send a thank you letter to anyone who sends anything. I know it's very time-consuming, but it's a must, and the big guys should know this. I'd be curious as to what your response might be from small charities who can't afford to be cavalier about their communiques.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Mike - I tried it with a smaller number of small groups and the result was about the same -30-40% responded with a thank you.
Sarah

Kivi,
I work for a nonprofit and we are constantly examining our thanking process for different types of donations. We haven't had a lot of donations from Network For Good, but what we have gotten has been hard to decipher. I personally donated through them (several months ago) and allowed access to my name, address, etc. just to see when we would see it at our agency and we still have no record of it here...though the amount was debited from my checking account. Is it possible that there are some kinks in Network for Good's services that obscured your information to these groups?
April

I am a Donor Stewardship Coordinator with a smaller but well known non-profit(who was not on your list). I think part of the stewardship problem is that by law non-profits do not have to send a receipt/thank you note unless the donation is $25 and above. The two non-profits I have worked for have both set this as their standard. In some cases I agree but not in others. The large and now international non-profit I worked for first had the resources to make sure all their donors received thank you's and the smaller one I currently work for does not. We just do not have the money for all that postage and you would be suprised how many people do not give us their email address.

That does give me an idea though for reaching the under $25 donors. I am now going to pull a report weekly for them and see how many emails I get.

All in all I find stewardship to be a major problem for many non-profits and something they all need to work on. Ours is still a work in progress but I am proud of where we are going.

Thank you for your wonderful blog!
Beth Kanter

Your point about small organizations versus large organizations - and thanks - our founder at the Sharing Foundation, has this ironclast rule. All donations are thanked within a week and with a handwritten thank you note. Even the $10 ones. Her hand hurts during the holidays.
Wendy Harman

I woke up in the night and thought to myself, "You egghead, you didn't even thank Kivi for her donation." So, thank you for helping people prevent, prepare for and respond to emergencies.

I'd also like to invite you to join us by visiting www.redcross.org and your local chapter to find out how to volunteer, donate blood, and/or take a course.
Wendy Harman

Hi Kivi -
This is Wendy from the American Red Cross. You got us on this aspect of donor stewardship. What will follow are excuses. A little more than a year ago we experienced a significant "reduction in force" and with it went the people responsible for working with Network for Good and the donors who choose to give through them.

We've been aware that this is a hole we need to fill and will most likely put resources towards Network for Good donors as a result of this post. While I thank you for that, please know that I personally think we've made the best, most strategic decisions we can with the resources we have. This doesn't mean we don't appreciate NFG donors as much as donors who join us in other ways and hopefully we'll be able to show them that very soon.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Thanks Wendy for the reasonable explanation and insight into the Red Cross's approach. I think the Red Cross is in a unique position because people will always feel compelled to give to the Red Cross during disasters. But it's all the non-disaster work that the Red Cross does that I'm sure is much harder to fund day in and day out, and where stewardship becomes more important.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Hi Kyla,

I do not count that email you get immediately after a donation that is processed through Network for Good as the "real" thank you. Network for Good is the middleman, and while they are a polite middleman, they don't represent the organization. I expect follow-up from the organization that's receiving the gift.

Even if nonprofits were to assume that this receipt was a thank-you, they should still be following up by putting donors on e-newsletter lists, etc. That's basic donor stewardship 101. That's happened in only one of 22 cases in this year's and last year's experiments.

It's simply a blown opportunity and given how easy it is to add someone to an email list today, I just don't get it.
Kyla Cromer

Hi Kivi -

I commented earlier that this hasn't happened to me, but I wonder if I'm counting "the automated email receipt that I get from the payment processor" you mention as a thank you? If you get a chance, maybe you can clarify that. Thanks!!
Jon

Kivi,

Please follow up with this and let us know of the remaining 7, how many next contact you not with a thank you, but another ask for money :)

At my organization we pride ourselves on our relationships with donors, even going as far as calling folks who give as little as five dollars. It's a worthy investment that pays off ten-fold plus down the road from solid relationships.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Thanks to all of you for sharing your stories!

I do find it a little ironic that the smaller organizations seem to have a better handle on this, given that they have fewer resources. But as Tom points out, the sheer volume is also a factor. I would think that big organizations would have adequate resources for farm out writing a decent letter to a good freelance writer and then as Tom said, automating the system. We all know large national orgs that are spending incredible sums of money on new donor acquisition through direct mail; investing in keeping the donors they have seems like a pretty smart investment. The fact that many new donors test with small donations before making a big donation is well-established.

I also think the fact the donations can come in through unexpected channels is also a problem for big orgs who have very entrenched ways of doing things. I blogged today on how all nonprofits need to be aware of and work with Network for Good, simply because they are the donation processor of choice for people like GuideStar, CharityNavigator, and Facebook Causes.
nelson layag

Hi Kivi,
I recently joined a board that also had problems sending thank you's in the past (in fact brought that up during my discussions prior to joining). It boggles my mind that this is so overlooked - especially for "community based" organizations. Glad to say that we ensured that this is no longer an issue (our board chair even wrote short notes of thanks on each letter). Also, at a recent event, a board member from an organization I recently donated to (who I never met), made a point to search me out and personally thank me for the small gift I made to their organization. Do you think I'll give again - absolutely - probably bigger.
Karen Zapp

Thanks for sharing Kivi. It is an interesting experiment to read about each year. And the results are disappointing. Sadly I have an example to share with you too.

I wrote about a donor who has been ignored by a nonprofit last fall in my newsletter. He consistently gave substantial amounts of money (I suspect he qualifies as a mid-level donor if not a major donor); and has written several letters requesting info on how else he can help by volunteering. ZERO response. If you want to read the story just follow the link and scroll down a little until you get to the main article titled: Major Donors – Cultivate Them Right and You Receive Even More of Their Generosity . . . http://bit.ly/2uSaoY

It’s another example of a charity too focused on the money and not showing proper gratitude to donors.
Danielle Denhardt

Kivi - Thanks for another great post! I recently took over as Donor Relations Manager for Fancy Cats and the first thing I'm implementing is an organized Thank You Program. In the past, our organization's practice has been to send out form thank you letters with a donation receipt in January to all donors from the year before (i.e., January 2010 to all 2009 donors). This has always bothered me, but I wasn't in a position before now to offer to take over the job.

So, thanks to your information, I am now doing what should be done! I will be mailing and or emailing a personal thank you note to each and every donor by running a donations report on the 1st of each month. As such, each donor should receive their note by the 15th of the month following our receipt of their donation.

Keep up the great blog posts! And I can't wait to read the book!
Tom Oates

I once worked as a fundraiser for one of the non-responding organizations, though not in individual giving. I can imagine scenarios where this happens too easily—a swamp of year-end giving, like most years; record snows in DC, where most of the groups are located and lost at least a week; concerns about doing a thank you just right, which drags on and trumps the goal of a timely response. These will compound each other.

This doesn't excuse, but explains, the lack of a timely thanks. It happens. If you've not been there, you're not in the game. The trick is to learn and develop strategies.

My practice has been to get an automated response out instantly online, or by post if necessary. Technology makes this rather easy and sophisticated merges with conditional structures can give a rather good result. For many small donors, think less than $50, this will be sufficient. Larger, long-term and new donors should get additional follow-up. All donors should get routine cultivation/soft-ask follow-up, responsive to their identified interests if possible.

Please don't confuse the simple process I describe with an easy one. It takes work. At some of the larger groups the volume is HUGE. Things will fall through the cracks. New deadlines will compete and intrude. Staff resources will be inadequate. It's not fun—kind of like shoveling the driveway after another blizzard. But unlike snow-shoveling, it's what some of us are paid to do.
Dawn

Thank you for this article. I work for a not-for-profit, and I am the one who handles all donations received. I take pride in knowing that, had you sent us a donation, we would be on the good list. When I receive a donation, the thank you letter goes out the following day. There are times when this can take longer, due to special fund raising events, vacation, or heavy load in donations. This includes all in-kind donations as well as monetary gifts.
All corporations should read this article and learn from it. Making and keeping donors happy is the key to return donations.
Kivi Leroux Miller

Wow, Kathy, and I thought my experience was bad!

I give monthly to a few organizations and one of them sends me a thank you every single month. That might actually be a little overkill. I'd be happy with a thank you a couple times a year. But nothing at all, especially for a cumulative gift of that size, is really bad!
Kathy

First, congratulations on putting out a first-class blog, time after time. Yours is probably the only e-news feed that I consistently read from beginning to end.

Your "10 donations, 3 thank-you's, 7 failures to communicate" post really hit a nerve with me. Until October 6, I was a director at a major national nonprofit (not one of the ones highlighted in your experiment). In October, I was among several people laid off in a budget-related RIF. But for the first three quarters of 2009, I was giving my organization $30 every two weeks--for a 2009 total of almost $600--through a payroll deduction. I have NEVER received any acknowledgment of that substantial gift--other than a personalized, but utterly impersonal, computer-generated solicitation asking me to increase my giving, which arrived in the mail just before Christmas, approximately two months after I was laid off. It was "signed" by the president of the organization, who knows me well, but it did not even acknowledge that I had any connection with the organization other than that of a donor whose giving level could be increased. When it came time to do my 2009 taxes in January, I couldn't even get them to send me a statement of how much I'd given.

I hope somebody is paying close attention when you write about this!!! The cavalier attitude of many nonprofits toward the people whose donations keep them alive is unconscionable.

Thanks again for raising these issues, Kivi!
Robert Day

Thank you for this post. It is a gift in itself to those of us who work for non-profits.

I continue to be amazed that so many charities don't get this one simple truth - no one has to give anything.

I recently donated a van load of brand new books to the local friends of the library group. The value was over well over $5,000 and the time it took me to sort, pack, load and unload is even more valuable to me. The library rewarded my thoughtfulness by making it very difficult to get the books to them. After I worked their complicated system and unloaded their donation I stood for a moment waiting for someone to at least say thank you. They didn't. Later that day I sent an email to the library director expressing my disappointment at their response or lack thereof. Three months later I am still waiting for his reply. My next donation of books will go somewhere else.
Danielle DiGiovanni

P.S. I found your post through a tweet from Beth Kanter, not a google alert.
Danielle DiGiovanni

I'm sorry to see that the National MS Society is on the no thank you received list. I'm an avid supporter of the Central New England Chapter, and they've always been great in their communication with me. I have walked in the Boston MS Walk for the last 8 years (and will be back on April 11th) and was a volunteer at the Cape Cod Challenge Walk last year.

85% of all donations to the National MS Society go directly to helping those with MS and their families, so I know from experience that your donation was greatly appreciated.
Danielle

Sometimes google alerts and other various listening platforms take a full day. But I bet you'll get some comments soon :)
Tina Cincotti

Holy @%&*#!!! I thought all the other comments were going to appear once I posted mine. NONE of these groups have commented on this yet?? That's even more stunning to me than the original experiment, which is horrifying enough...
Kivi Leroux Miller

I did post late in the day on the East Coast where most are located. We'll see . . .
Tina Cincotti

Thanks for listing the offenders this year, Kivi. I think last year was fair warning to all. And it'll be interesting to see who responds.
Kivi Leroux Miller

I decided that naming names was the only way to get people to wake up (we'll see if even that works!). I support all of these groups or I wouldn't have made the donation. But as an individual donor and as a professional in the field, the lack of response is extremely frustrating.