Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Yesterday I wrote about how you can use thank you notes to set yourself apart from the competition, because lots of nonprofits (1) don’t do thank you notes at all, (2) don’t do them very well, or (3) overlook easy opportunities to touch their donors’ hearts.

Here’s another story for you about the power of a personalized note, even if the text of the note isn’t that stellar.

When I receive thank-you notes from charities, they usually get filed immediately in my tax deductions folder. But there’s one note that I’ve left on my desk for months now.

We vacation on Ocracoke in North Carolina’s Outer Banks every year, and this year, I noticed that Ocracoke Island Realty asked people renting houses to contribute to local charities. They would match the donations dollar for dollar. (Word to the wise: If you live near a vacation hot spot, copy this idea immediately!)

So I gave $10 each to a few of the charities, including Ocracoke Child Care. We always see the same wait staff working at two or three places, often in the same day, so I know that child care must be critical for the hard-working people who make my week of vacation such a pleasure. I expected the realty company to acknowledge the donation, but I did not really expect individual thank-you letters from the charities.

The typewritten part of the note I received from Ocracoke Child Care is about as short as you can get, something close to “Thanks for the donation. We really appreciate it. This letter is your receipt.” Not much more than that and certainly not remarkable.

But the letter is still on my desk because of what fills up all the white space left under that short official note — this drawing:

I have little kids and therefore more of this kind of stuff around my house than you can possibly imagine. But this grabbed me nonetheless. Why?

In part, because it was so unexpected, but primarily because even though I have no idea what these people actually look like, I can see the center director Amanda, who signed the letter, sitting down at one of those little tables and asking Yoselyn to grab a crayon and draw this picture for me. I can see her asking the little girl what this is (as it might not be quite obvious to the untrained eye) and adding the title and signature to this masterpiece. They took a little extra time to personalize this letter in a way that only an agency that works with little kids can, and I only sent them $10! But you can bet they’ll get more out of me next time we reserve a house.

Now, of course, kid artwork isn’t going to be appropriate for everyone. But every nonprofit can come up with some kind of equivalent way to personalize their thank you notes and make a much more direct, human connection between the donation and the standard thank-you letter in reply.

Here are a few more goodies for you about thank you notes from some notable voices:

From Jeff Brooks: 40 Thank You Notes = One Grateful Donor

From Katya Andresen: Thank Three Times for Each Ask

From Sandy Rees: Ten Ways to Energize Your Thank You Letters

I’ll talk more about thank you notes during next week’s webinar on nonprofit writing. Tell me about some of your favorite thank you notes by leaving a comment.

Photo by JosephH on Flickr

After many years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington DC, my husband and I moved back to his hometown of Lexington, North Carolina in 2001. Living in a small town in rural county has given me an entirely new appreciation for the complexities involved in nonprofit management, fundraising, and marketing.

We have all of the various nonprofit agencies that you’d expect to find in any town, from hospice and the free clinic to the humane society and Girl Scouts. But we only have about 20,000 people in the city limits proper and 160,000 in the whole county. That equates to about 8,000 households in Lexington and about 20% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. The local economy has been crushed by the outsourcing of textile and furniture manufacturing overseas. In other words, the services of all of these nonprofit agencies are desperately needed, but they are all competing against each other for slices of an already thin and crumbling pie.

How can a nonprofit stand out under these circumstances?

I met with one of our local nonprofits, Davidson Medical Ministries Clinic, last week to talk generally about nonprofit marketing as they consider investing more resources in this area. We discussed this and that, but what I really wanted to impress upon them is that nailing the basics is going to be far more effective in this environment than any newfangled approach.

Take the very simple, but much overlooked thank you note, for example. The first step is to actually do them. I made a batch of donations in the last month as part of my What I Got When I Gave experiment and have yet to receive a thank you note for the majority of the donations.

The thank-you notes I have received from the clinic have been professional and personalized - no big problem there. But I suggested that they could step it up a bit by including a note from or even a snapshot of a person who is receiving care at the clinic (with their permission, obviously). That kind of thank-you would more directly connect me with why I’m giving them money in the first place.

This made sense to them immediately. Sandy, the executive director, had her own memorable experience with a heart-felt and specific thank-you note. She shared a story with me about how even though she was exasperated from a long busy day, she decided to work a little harder and later to bend a few rules to more quickly process paperwork so they could provide care for a man who came in one day with a young family. While his wife and children were covered by Medicaid, he wasn’t, and with no health insurance at all, his diabetes went untreated for so long that he was at serious risk for even more devastating medical problems.

While his family waited for his new prescriptions to be filled at the clinic’s pharmacy, his small son asked Sandy for a piece of paper and a pencil. She assumed he was just bored and wanted to draw. But a few minutes later, that young boy came back with a picture he had drawn for Sandy of his family that said “Thank you for helping my daddy.” Sandy had to excuse herself so she could go cry in her office.

Thank you notes matter. A lot. Spend time on them. Even if you only customize 10 thank-you notes a week with more personal messages, stories or photos, that’s 10 more happy donors who’ll be likely to do even more for you next time you ask.

P.S. Thank you notes will be one of the topics covered in next week’s webinar, Nonprofit Writing Stinks! How to Bring Your Writing Back to Life.