OK, “Thank You!”
I’d like to say “Thank you” to all the readers who commented on my controversial No “Thank You” post of last week.
I do so noting there’s no empirical evidence that thanking you will make you more likely to comment again!
For suggesting that maybe “Thank you’s” to donors don’t matter, some of you concluded I’m the rudest of cads, brought up in a home that instilled no values of reciprocity, gratitude or mere good manners. Others think I’m several doses short of common sense.
But actually I was just writing out of idle curiosity … the fellow who first raised the question on his blog, Chuck English had simply observed innocently that he had been unable to find any empirical evidence that thanking donors did matter.
My curiosity stems from the fact that here’s a direct marketing practice we all engage in as a ‘best practice’ … on instinct, on a hunch. If all of fundraising were done on a hunch, we’d have lots of failed campaigns out there, wouldn’t we?!
Thankfully, much good discussion was triggered by the post. I urge you to read the Comments. Several readers pointed to the valuable research of Penelope Burk (author of Donor-Centered Fundraising), who clearly ranks as the leading guru on acknowledgments.
Here’s a reply she wrote to Chuck:
“What I have found over years of research and testing (since 1998) is that it is the quality of the thank you letter content, appearance, timing, and many other issues that are collectively influential. In other words, just any thank you letter won’t get the job done of improving future fundraising performance. When it comes to dealing with qualitative issues in research, it is insufficient to ask a simple question and leave it at that because, while respondents may have all received thank you letters at some time, one cannot assume that they have all received great ones. Therefore, research questions must be followed by testing in order to provide reliable information to the industry.
“From our ongoing review of thousands of thank you letters, we find they fall into two main camps — typical correspondence (over 80% of all thank you letters we have studied) where content is very similar, impersonal, and vague, and exceptional content which communicates much more effectively on many levels. Most donors have never received anything but the typical, predictable and impersonal type of gift acknowledgement, so if they are asked in a survey whether a thank you letter is effective in driving future giving decisions, their answer can only reflect what they have experienced. However, if you approach the subject from a different perspective, such as “Have you ever received a thank you letter that was exceptionally good?” or something like that, while most respondents answer “no”, the ones who answer “yes” can then clearly identify how that correspondence influenced their behavior going forward.
“When we test exceptional thank you correspondence against the typical and measure rate of renewal and average gift value, exceptional letters far out-perform the typical. Because the results were (and continue to be) so significant, I dedicated an entire chapter in my book, Donor-Centered Fundraising to describing what makes a thank you letter superior and how to craft great correspondence.
“Superior gift acknowledgements not only work in terms of furthering donor retention and elevating gift values more quickly, but they say a lot about fundraisers who write them. They take pride in the quality of their work and donors pick up on that message, too.”
So, well-done thank you’s generate better results than pedestrian boilerplate ones. I can buy that; indeed, as Penelope notes, it’s been tested by her and others.
But I’d make two additional points.
First, my experience — yes, I confess to having acknowledged donors — is that those (let’s call them) ‘follow-up’ mailings that really produce results are much more than ‘Thank you’s’. They actually are introductions to the next step we want the donor to take. And it’s how well we communicate the ‘what next’ that really produces the result.
Second, many tests show — and some Comments made the point — that merely adding a reply envelope to an acknowledgment (with no ask) will often yield sufficient ‘unsolicited’ gifts to pay for the acknowledgment communication. In other words, the nonprofit has gotten a ‘free’ shot at communicating more about its program and needs … at least potentially building the donor relationship. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
My advice … treat the ‘Thank you’ as more than a ‘Thank you’.
Anyway, thanks again … not that I think it will do much good!
Tom
P.S. Since most nonprofits these days are not getting a second gift from half or more of their 1st time donors, who apparently are being universally thanked for their 1st gift throughout the nonprofit universe, doesn’t that suggest ‘Thank you’s’ aren’t quite getting the job done? Hmmm … see my two closing points above.
6 responses to “OK, “Thank You!””
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Hi Tom-
There’s another concept out there you might want to explore.
I’ve always heard that you should not include an ask with a thank you. But we’ve been doing it for one of our clients for years. It’s a soft ask… just an envelope with some check boxes and dollar amounts on the wallet flap.
That little envelope delivers (on average) a 14% response rate (yes 14… not 1.4) and hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue for almost no cost (since we’d be sending the acknowledgment letter anyway).
But I’ve heard some say we shouldn’t do that. One fellow even told me that he believed the other 86% have been irreversibly upset by our follow-up ask. But I see no evidence of this.
Do you know of any research proving or disproving the conventional wisdom regarding soft asks in acknowledgements?
Please answer Greg’s question!
As a young-er fundraiser, I have been (well) trained to send the thank you note quickly, and I, in turn, instruct others to do the same.
That said, it doesn’t bother me a great deal if I DON”T get a thank you, but I definitely don’t think about that organization much again.
What I didn’t realize until it happened recently was how much it bothered me to get a VERY delayed Thank You Note. I made a (first) gift in November of 2011 and did not get any acknowledgement of my gift until I received my tax receipt in January. Then in February, I received a hand written note from the Director of Development. That annoyed me so much, I called the President of the nonprofit, who I knew & had discussed fundraising with before & told him this was just ridiculous! I’m probably not his Development Director’s best friend, but to me that was worse than not thanking me at all!
Jodi (re: Please answer Greg’s question!)
Donor-Centered Fundraising may have helped support the theory behind the letter in the first place, but the statement “Forty percent of respondents to … surveys said that asking for a donation in a thank-you letter is rude. A further 20% said they would stop giving if a charity treated them that way.” from http://expertfundraiser.org/2011/01/17/should-a-donation-thank-you-letter-ever-ask-for-a-donation/) seems to point in the direction that a “thank-you, may I have another” response is generally unaccepted.
Having said that, however, you should read the rest of the article which will ultimately lead you to the place where everyone should begin – TEST, TEST, TEST!
Thank you letters have been very effective fundraisers for our organization. On average, we get more than one fifth of our net income from direct mail from our thank you letters. We pay a lot of attention to the quality and strength of the letters and we make sure that they are tremendously donor centric. We do not include any ask in the letter, but we do include an envelope and a reply piece.
Amongst our highest donors, we tested two groups of 25,000 each. At the beginning of the year we sent a very sincere, simple thank you card to 25,000 for their past generosity – no ask, no reply piece, no envelope. The other group did not receive this. Both groups gave almost identical numbers of gifts that year, but the group that received the thank you gave almost $450,000 more for that year.
I can’t add a study, but I can share a result of an ongoing Thank You program –but it was voice, not mail. To your point, the TY was an initial step in a cultivation process. It’s been awhile but I recall some of the key figures.
The NPO I was with had a large list that had hardly been mined, and we were acquiring several thousand new donors each year. Major donor work was going very well, but sub-major had been flat. We created a TY phone call strategy for gifts from $100 to $2500, to mine our lists and increase retention.
The first call was a simple ‘TY for your gift, would you like an update call in a few months?” Almost no one said ‘no.’ That was the entry, and donors typically were very pleased to receive the no-ask call.
Three months later the second call would give additional information and share a story, but no ask. Typically donors would ask more questions, and at this point the donors often asked if they could give more. We also did some mild probing to find out more about the donor to determine next steps (we had 3 streams for followup).
The 3rd call was more ‘reporting’ and stories, but included an ask for a specific program or project at a specific amount. Donors responded well, and cultivation was ongoing.
We started the program with 1 caller to see if this might work out, and added about $200,000 to the coffers that year. After 8 years, we had 8 people calling full time, each with a case load of 750-1,000 names, and were generating over $6 million a year. ROI was around 8:1. Avg. gift size from this segment increased around 5-fold, and the number of 5-figure gifts grew from rare to dozens. Core donor retention rates topped 90% (new donor retention was much better than other methods, but I don’t recall the numbers).
Basically, we used the TY as an occasion to begin a conversation with our donors, and that paid off in funding, retention and donor experience. It required an initial investment, special training, and a core belief that people want to be thanked personally.