What’s in a thank you?
Howard Lake | 5 August 2010 | Blogs
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the purpose and the value of thanking supporters. Partly, this has been stimulated by some of the discussions on this very site and whether we should thank at all, and partly because we are in the final stages of planning for a new Thank You workshop that we will be launching later this year.
To that end, here are a few observations to share based on personal experience and lots and lots of time talking to donors and prospective donors.
First, I’ll put my cards on the table and say I think it is very important to offer at the least an appropriate acknowledgement for a gift a donor makes, and better still to offer an exciting and inspiring one (hence the workshop).
Secondly, I believe that donors are as interested in the content of the thank you letter as they are in the mailing or other device that prompted them to give in the first place, and this is opportunity that to many of us fail to grasp and make the most of, and to complete the simple cycle of engagement that is involved (ask – respond – thank). Too many thank you letters are still predictable and formulaic and dull as ditchwater.
Of course, if nothing else it is an opportunity (one of a still too limited few) for the charity to engage with the supporter without overtly asking them for money, but purely to make them feel good, feel valued, and feel important. To waste this opportunity is folly indeed in my view, especially in the current climate. As an aside, I’m still bemused by organisations that claim to have genuine two-way relationships with donors which, when examined, turn out to be entirely based on constant asks for money or other support, apart from the odd newsletter.
Thirdly, I believe donors should always be thanked unless they’ve explicitly told you they don’t want to be. We used to have a donor at a charity I worked at who regularly responded with gifts of £2 or less to appeals. She was always apologetic, but was on a pension and gave to a number of causes. Against the wishes of some in the organisation we always sent her a nice and detailed thank you letter, which she never commented on. Waste of time and money it may have seemed to some, but when she died, our charity was the sole beneficiary of a reasonably large sum of money. Of course that could have been motivated by a variety of reasons, but I like to think we may have been the only organisation to properly thank her for her gifts each and every time she made them.
No to thank yous?
I also think that some attention should be given to those donors who opt out of receiving a thank you because this is taking away a hugely important and effective way of communicating to them the difference their money is making. I vividly remember one donor at a Focus Group complaining he didn’t know where his money went – when I looked at his profile I saw he had chosen to opt out of receiving acknowledgements for any donations. When I told him he’d made that choice he had no recollection of taking such an action.
This makes sense if you think about how many times you have made statements or choices about things and then changed them for a variety of reasons later, but not informed anyone of your change of mind – after all nothing is forever and our personal circumstances change all the time.
I absolutely believe it is critical we respect (and acknowledge) the choices and wishes of donors, but it would seem sensible to remind them of this fact every now and then. For example, variable text on their response form saying “You have previously told us you prefer not to receive a receipt for your gift, but it this requirement changes please tick this box”. In that way you are (a) reminding the donor of the action they’ve taken which is nice and personal and always gratifying and (b) given them the option to change their mind with each and every communication you send them.
More radically, it might even be worth a (very occasional) letter to self-selecting no-receipt donors to check this is still what they want and also to gently update them a little on all that has been achieved with their support. This might only be once every three years, but I suspect it would have a big impact. At one charity I was at we decided to mail all our “Do not mail” flagged supporters and ask them whether this was still their preference and to confirm if it was by returning a form. We received our highest cash response outside of an emergency of over 18% and a very, very substantial number opted back into communications from us. We didn’t receive one complaint.
So if sorry is the hardest word, it seems to me that thank you should be one of the easiest, and done right, one of the best in our communications armoury.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.