Appreciating Generosity – Saying Thank You Matters

Coming off the excitement of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals over Thanksgiving weekend, our peers in the non-profit sector are just getting started. Many of you have geared up for Giving Tuesday and the final push of fundraising activities leading up to the holiday season.

For many of us, this work would have started months ago – planning holiday direct mail appeals, e-blasts, pulling lists, and performing maintenance clean-ups on your databases in preparation for the end-of-year tax receipting season. If you haven’t done so, I would suggest popping over to our other article called “Getting Ready for Tax Receipt Season” for some great tips on how to get started. The second best time to start is always now!

The Importance of Saying Thank You to Your Donors

But the topic I want to bring forward today is something we often look past during this busy time of year, and that is Appreciation. What are we doing to thank our donors who generously gave to our organizations this year?

The holiday season is usually the time for fundraising shops to pull out all the stops – launching your most impressive marketing and fundraising campaigns to ensure donations are received prior to the end of the year. We are so busy trying to make our fundraising and budget goals at the end of the year that we sometimes forget to thank these donors properly.

Statistics show that on average it is a lot more efficient to keep a donor than to try and find a new donor. So how are you going to keep your existing and new donors who are feeling generous and want to give a meaningful gift to your organization this holiday season?

As the holidays create so many interactions with your donor base we should be even more focused on how our organizations can show their appreciation. Of course, thanking your supporters should be a year-round endeavor, but for the purpose of this article, I believe the holiday season is the perfect time to start thinking about your stewardship plan for the new calendar year. Here are some tips on how you can start building a stewardship plan for new and current donors from December until the summer.

Creating a Stewardship Plan

Start by brainstorming the different ways you can communicate your appreciation to your donors and volunteers. Stewardship should be a part of your fundraising strategy and budget – communications should be multi-channeled and customized to the donor/volunteer. What I mean by that is that each channel should be based on how you would like to develop your relationship with this supporter. This means a donor that gave a one-time donation online would be thanked differently compared to the table sponsor at your gala (who may also be a prospect for a major gift ask in a couple of months).

Identify the different groups of donors you have. Then for each of them create a stewardship checklist clearly indicating each stewardship activity that should follow up the gift. This will often be broken down into different giving levels. The important thing is to make it so that after each act of donor generosity your organization has a list of each way you will genuinely thank them.

Also, keep in mind that there will be high-priority donors that require customized stewardship plans based on how they would like to be acknowledged, involvement with your organization, and plans you may have to solicit them further.

Take it one step further

Stewardship is part of the relationship building process and the goal is to keep your organization top of mind – especially after the holiday festivities.

There are a variety of ways to show appreciation such as thank you letters/emails, phone calls from volunteers/senior leadership, in person meetings, social media, traditional advertisements, etc. Most shops have a very small budget for stewardship, but this allows organizations the opportunity to be creative with what they can do to be impactful.

As I mentioned before, the goal is to let the donors and volunteers know that you acknowledge their dedication to your cause. But more than that the goal should be to give them ways to engage with upcoming activities or information about your mission. These activities should be about giving back to the donor!

Perhaps your thank you notes include a link to your yearly open house. Maybe your thank you calls, after a run, could include praise for the community formed around the event and provide a social media link where volunteers can connect. There are limitless possibilities.

Execution

Once you have your plans and checklists in place, the planning is mostly complete. Now we want to thinking about how we are going to bring this stewardship plan into action. Creating workflows and streamlining processes will give direction on how your stewardship plan will work. There are also a variety of free tools available that will allow you to automate some of the more generic thank you’s which will save you time and money. Resources that you can focus on additional stewardship activities.

If you have questions about where to start with creating and evaluating your stewardship workflows and processes, Sentinel is happy to help. Feel free to reach out to us here.

Come back next month as we dive deeper into the topic of appreciating generosity!

If you would like us to tackle a topic or problem of interest to you, in future articles, please let us know here.

Sentinel Consulting is a consulting firm that focuses on helping non-profits strengthen their operational efficiency. We speak the same language as our clients because we were all fundraisers at some point in our careers.