Saying Thanks Even When It’s Inconvenient or Time-Consuming

Wow – yesterday’s post about thank you notes and the lack thereof got the conversation started! Thanks to everyone who took the time to add some thoughts to the debate.

Several people mentioned that the practical realities of nonprofit management mean that getting thank-you notes out promptly, especially when donations come through non-traditional channels for your organization, can be difficult.  Many nonprofits are chronically underfunded and understaffed and often under-skilled in the technology that could make things easier. I get it — really. Been there, done that. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a relatively small gift of $25 may not produce more than a shrug from the development office. I get that too, although I’m certainly less sympathetic to that point of view.

But here’s the thing. Think about how much time a typical nonprofit spends on generic “outreach,” like newsletters, with the purpose, at least in part, of generating new supporters.  If you are so pressed for time, wouldn’t those precious hours be better spent thanking the people who have taken the next step and given you money, no matter how much or through what method?

Just yesterday, before I wrote the post, I did a webinar on Nonprofit Marketing with Next to No Budget. One of my key points was to focus in on the people who matter most and to get personal with them. I specifically pointed out that saying thank you and doing it well, just by itself, was a major strategy for making your nonprofit stand out in donors’ eyes, because so few nonprofits do it well. If you are going to spend anytime on communications at all, shouldn’t it be with the people who have already demonstrated a commitment to your cause by contributing?

Advice to My Frazzled Nonprofit Friends

Give higher priority to your thank-you notes than to any other piece of communications you work on. The newsletter doesn’t go out, the website doesn’t get updated, your report to your board doesn’t get done, until you have sent some kind of thank-you to your donors. Take control of your work life and make it happen. If you don’t, I can pretty much guarantee that over the long haul, you will remain underfunded and understaffed.

Do what NPR did with my gift. If you get an email address, copy and paste it and shoot out a generic thank-you. This is what they sent me, with “NPR Thanks You!” as the subject line:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for your 2008 contribution to National Public Radio, made through Capital One. Your support helps NPR provide Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Car Talk, News & Notes, From the Top and other news and cultural programming to listeners from Alaska to Florida and many countries overseas.

Again, many thanks for your generosity. NPR simply could not do it without you.

Sincerely,

Annie Callaway Davis,

Vice President for Development

(Sent by)

Dayna Taylor
Grants & Contributions Administrator

Granted, I would not hold this up as the best thank-you note ever, but the point is that they sent it, and they sent it promptly. It was the first one I received. I’m not rushing out to put NPR in my estate plans because of it, but this is good enough for me to donate another $25, should they get around to asking me to, and who knows after that. You can do this – anyone can!

Dealing with Donations Through Payment Services

It doesn’t matter whether you like getting gifts through Network for Good (NFG) or any other payment processor or not – you have to deal with it! The donor should get to make the decision about how they donate. You should certainly encourage them to use your preferred channels and to make that super easy, but don’t dis donors who don’t do it your way.

I happen to think that Network for Good is one of the best things to happen to the nonprofit sector in a long time. Yes, I’m friends with Katya Andresen, the COO, but I became friends with her because I admired so much what she was doing at NFG and on nonprofit marketing in general. NFG makes online giving possible for so many nonprofits who couldn’t pull it off on their own and they have also opened up lots of new ways for donors to fund causes they care about online. Look who NFG processes payments for now:

* Charity Navigator
* Guidestar
* Causes on Facebook
* Causes on MySpace
* Capital One (which I used as part of my experiment)
* Change.org
* And many others!

If you hope to use social media to raise money, you are going to have to figure this out, no matter how big or how small your nonprofit is.  NFG is trying to make it easier for you. They take care of the emailed tax receipt so the donor knows the transaction was successful, but it’s up to you to make the personal connection with your supporters. And right there in the email you get from NFG when they process a donation for you, they remind you to thank your donors directly. Sure, any system can always be improved, and Katya told me today that she and her staff are keeping track of all of the suggestions in the comments.

About Those Eight Nonprofits that Didn’t Acknowledge My Gift . . .

I just did some research on Guidestar. Only one of the eight is truly a small organization with a very limited budget and staff. The others are huge in comparison – they all have gross reciepts over $1 million. Two fall into the $30-80 million range and three are bringing in more than $100 million. These gifts were made over three months ago. It’s not about doing it in a timely fashion at this point, it’s about doing thank-yous at all. These organizations have the resources to acknowledge small gifts contributed online, if they really wanted to.

Keep the conversation going – leave a comment here or on the other post.

Tags: nptech, thank you notes

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The Dismal Results of My Online Giving Experiment

Or, Can a Girl Get a Thank-You Note, Please?

Back on November 24, 2008, I cashed in a bunch of credit card miles through Capital One’s No Hassle Giving Site, converting them into cash gifts to charities. Capital One partnered with Network for Good to deliver the donations to the charities. I specifically selected 12 national charities that I had not previously contributed to, but whose missions I support, in order to see what the communications response would be to my $25 gift. On the form, I opted-in to share my contact information with the charities and provided both email and mailing addresses. I called it the “What I Got When I Gave” experiment.

I’ve been waiting all this time to report back on the experiment in hopes that the results would change, but they haven’t. It’s pitiful. Of the 12 national charities I gave to, only four — a measly 33% — acknowledged the gift in any way. (I also gave to three regional charities where I live and the percentage was the same – only 1 of the 3 acknowledged the gift.)

The fastest response came from National Public Radio, which sent me an email thank-you note addressed to “Dear Friend” on December 10. Personalization would have been nice, but at least they get the Gold Star for timeliness. I haven’t received any other communication from NPR since.

The next three all came within a day of each other, on January 6-7, 2009. Both Interplast and The Alliance for Climate Protection sent paper thank-you letters, addressed to me personally.

The Alliance mentioned receiving the gift through Network for Good on December 15, which would have been Network for Good’s next payment distribution day after my gift. Given the holidays, I have no problem with the date I received the letter. It was a standard form thank-you letter – nothing stand-out about it, but adequate.

Interplast’s thank-you letter was great. I’m a big fan of their blog because of their effective storytelling, and the thank-you letter does the same thing. Instead of a bunch of generic successes (which are better than none at all, I guess), they tell me a story and include before and after pictures! I’m constantly telling people to include pictures in thank you notes (see here and here), so I’m glad to see a nonprofit doing it well. Way to go, Interplast!

I haven’t received any additional communication from either Interplast or the Alliance for Climate Protection since the thank-you letters.

St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital didn’t send a thank-you note, but they did add me to their Hopeline email newsletter list and I’ve received the January and February 2009 editions.

I’m obviously really disappointed in not hearing a peep from the other eight. But, ever the supporter of nonprofits, I have come up with several potential reasons (uh, excuses) why this may be the case:

• $25 is chump change to them and doesn’t merit acknowledgment. I know there is significant debate out there about what you do with low-dollar donors. I hoped that $25 was high enough to generate some kind of response, but apparently not.
• Since I cashed in miles, they don’t think it’s a “real” gift (even though Network for Good sent them real money).
• It was the holidays and the gift fell through the cracks.
• Giving through Network for Good is not their preferred means of receiving online gifts — they’d prefer to get them through their own website — so they are not set up to acknowledge gifts like mine.
• The post office and/or Gmail’s spam filter ate their thank-you notes.

Do any of these hold water with you?

You may also be wondering what I was really expecting. I think each charity should have acknowledged the gift either via email or in print. Either one or both is acceptable, given that it was an online gift. Since I supplied my email address, I would have been fine being added to an e-newsletter list. Or, they could have strongly encouraged me to join a list in the thank-you note (or subscribe to a blog), with very explicit instructions for how to do that and a motivating description for why I would want to. So, none of the four who responded knocked it out of the park for me, but they all get kudos for responding at all.

Right about now, you are probably dying to know who the other 8 organizations are. I’m really torn about naming names, because as I said at the top, I really do believe in the missions of every single one of them and I would hate for their inclusion in this post to tarnish them in any way. So I’m not printing them here, at least not right now. But I definitely thought about it . . . C’mon, people, can’t a girl get a thank you note?!?

What do you think? Do these results surprise you or not?  Are any of the rationales for no response legitimate? What would your group have done with a $25 donation from out of nowhere? Please leave a comment and let’s talk about it!

3/12/09 Update: Here is my follow-up post: Saying Thanks Even When It’s Inconvenient or Time-Consuming

3/13/09 Update: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Prospecting” section picked up this post. Read more comments there.

Tags: nptech, thank you notes

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Stand Out with Thank You Notes, Part II

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.

Tags: thank you notes

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Stand Out: Write a Decent Thank You Note

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.

Tags: thank you notes

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