Timeliness of Thank You’s or Personalization? If forced to choose, which should you definitely DO?
This post will almost certainly incite derision and maybe a few nods of agreement, probably means there is something here?
In our recently released Donor Commitment Study (available for FREE download in the Resource section on this page) among 1200 recent, frequent, cause donors in the US we found an empirical, math based answer to this question – though admittedly we didn’t set out with this specific goal in mind.
Among 32 possible marketing, communication, fundraising and operational actions that many/most organizations employ as part of their daily activity, we identified 7 that have a math based, cause and effect, relationship with Donor Commitment. And to recap, we also proved the math based, empirical relationship between Donor Commitment (how they feel and think about you) and their behaviors, namely the recency, frequency and dollar amount of donor giving goes up dramatically (131%) as they move (or you move them!) from Low to High Commitment.
Among the 7 is the timeliness of thank you’s. This means if donors think you are delivering thank you’s in a timely fashion (by their metric of timely, not yours) then their Commitment, all other things being equal, also goes up. But this is only half the story. One of the 32 possible actions that did NOT make it into the final equation is personalization of thank-you’s. How should we interpret this, personalization is bad? Of course not.
BUT (we’re not afraid to start a sentence with this word even though our English teachers would grimace) if your organization has made the decision to personalize all the thank-you’s and the stack is piling up on the Executive Director’s desk at the obvious expense of getting them out quickly then we have strong evidence to suggest you probably placed your bet on the wrong horse. Strategically and operationally any organization sacrificing timeliness for personalization should reverse course.
We would never argue that personalization is bad or that it doesn’t matter at all. This is simply counsel for those groups who made a choice, knowingly or not, to sacrifice one for the other.
In fact, using our pretest tool to test the impact of personalization on direct mail pieces, we know it matters a LOT to response, net income, etc…But this isn’t that scenario, this is a different animal, a different question being asked and yes, a different answer.
4 responses to “Timeliness of Thank You’s or Personalization? If forced to choose, which should you definitely DO?”
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Just wondering what the donors in your study considered to be a timely thank you? What is their metric of timely?
Laura,
Great question. In the original study we did not go into that level of detail given the global nature of the study and our need to keep the overall survey relatively short. But, knowing this level of detail is important and certainly something that would be covered in a custom, client specific study. Additionally, for a specific client one could match back survey responses to data housed in the donor database/CRM and potentially identify other useful, descriptive (and perhaps prescriptive) insight into the type of interactions and communications each donor or segment was exposed to and why they feel the way they do.
All that said, we DID conduct a short, one-question poll, separately and among a more generic universe of donors (not as recent or frequent necessarily) as the main study because we too wanted to know the answer, or at least get some guidance on it, to your question. The result is actually posted on our homepage at the bottom right. This space on our site will rotate on a weekly basis with our DonorVoice Poll question of the week, intended to glean additional feedback from the one audience who really matters – donors.
We asked “After receiving a donation, how long should a charity take to thank you?”. Response options and %’s are:
-it does not matter to me, 54%
-within 1 to 2 weeks, 17%
-within 48 hours, 9%
-within 24 hours, 10%
You can read our interpretation of this on the home page poll section but in a nutshell, you don’t get credit for taking a long time or not doing it at all among the 54%, you do get dinged (and probably severely) among the 46% who expect it and especially so if “late” for the 19% who expect near immediate turnaround.
Hmmmm. Honestly, with technology what it is, why should an organization have to choose? You make a commitment and you do it. If the ED is holding things up, he/she needs to be educated.
Pamela,
Agree completely, organizations should not have to choose, though have encountered more than a few over the last week alone or have been put in this situation.