25 Ways to Thank Your Donors

If you are a nonprofit organization, chances are that at least some – and perhaps a considerable amount – of your operating budget each year comes from donations. Philanthropy is on the rise, In 2013, total giving in the United States added up to over $330 billion dollars, and 72% of that represented gifts from individual, as opposed to corporate or foundation donors.

So, what are you doing to let your donors know how grateful you are for their support? The philosopher William James said “The deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated.” This is something to keep in mind if you want to keep your supporters on your side, get more support from them in the future, and best of all enlist them in helping you attract others of like mind.

Here are 25 great – and simple, and relatively inexpensive ways to let your donors know how much you appreciate their support.

  1. Send a handwritten note.
  2. Be sure to spell their name right.
  3. Have an executive or board member call to say “thanks”.
  4. Tell a story so that the donor knows how their gift benefitted someone.
  5. Make your thanks personal and specific (“your gift of $100” not “your recent donation”).
  6. Invite donors to a luncheon or dinner to recognize their gifts.
  7. Give a personal tour of your operation.
  8. Invite them to sign up for your newsletter, or visit your website to learn more.
  9. Recognize donors in your newsletter.
  10. Highlight a specific donor in your newsletter, and talk about their accomplishments.
  11. Include a simple inexpensive gift with your acknowledgment, e.g. a drawing from a client.
  12. Tell them how many other people are in THEIR community (of donors).
  13. Respond quickly to any donation, no matter how large or small.
  14. Send a follow up 30 days after your first acknowledgement.
  15. Share progress reports throughout the year.
  16. Record a video thank you and direct donors to where it is posted.
  17. Use video or written testimonials from people who were helped by the gift.
  18. Use Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms to thank and recognize supporters.
  19. Include a photograph with your thank you, relevant to your mission.
  20. Send an “end of year” statement for tax preparation.
  21. Mail a news story relating to the program the donation supported.
  22. Endorse donors on their LinkedIn profiles for “philanthropy”.
  23. Send a Thanksgiving card in November – “We’re thankful for YOU”.
  24. Post names on a donor wall in your public lobby.
  25. Send all donors an annual report and highlight the importance of donations to your group.

If you are already employing some of these ideas, good for you! Now, add a few more. If you have been searching for meaningful ways to say thank you to supporters, try a handful of these suggestions and just see how much of an impact they make.

A Dollar Here, A Dollar There…

As the saying goes, pretty soon you are talking about real money. And when you talk about real money, Amazon might come to mind, because they are a company who has figured out how to make big-time money! Estimates are that Amazon revenue will near $80 billion dollars this year. Their customer base keeps growing, with nearly 250 million people considered to be active customers, meaning that they have made a purchase within the past 12 months. I’m sure these numbers make company founder Jeff Bezos smile all of the time. And now, Amazon would like to make their customers, and your non-profit organization smile as well.

And they will do this in the easiest way possible, by giving some of those Amazon billions to charity.

Whether you are a non-profit looking for new ways to raise a little money and remind your supporters of the good work you are doing, or a person who wants to support a favorite cause, you need to know about AmazonSmile, the company’s new program that will give back to the charitable community a small percentage of money spent on qualifying products. Small is a relative word, our calculations suggest that, within a year or two, the AmazonSmile Foundation could be directing as much as half a billion dollars to U. S. based public charities annually.

The donations will represent .5% of the purchase price of a very wide selection of products. Sure, that doesn’t sound like that much, but the average Amazon customer spends about $245 a year on Amazon, which means that each customer could bring about $1.25 of donated money to your door. Do you have 1,000 supporters? That’s worth over $1,000.00. 25,000 supporters? About $30 grand a year.

If this sounds like a good idea, there are some things you need to do to take advantage of it. First, you will want to make sure that your non-profit organization is among the nearly one million groups already recognized by the AmazonSmile program. If it isn’t, you can go to the registration page and ask to be included in the future.  The process is simple and straightforward and the requirements are pretty basic as well. Please note that you will need to name an organization administrator, and provide an email address, Employer Identification Number, and a means to receive AmazonSmile donations via electronic funds transfer (basically you will need to have a bank account!).

Charitable organizations that are on the registration list already will be contacted by AmazonSmile the first time anyone chooses them, and will be asked to register with the program in order to begin receiving donations. If a group does not respond within four quarterly donation cycles, anything that had been pledged to this group will be distributed to other registered organizations, and their donors will be prompted to choose a different group.

The next step is to grow awareness of the program among your employees, your supporters, and everyone you can think of who would be in favor of shifting some of that Amazon money from their bottom line to your “special needs fund” – or whatever purpose you could find for the extra money. There are a few steps involved, so pay attention and communicate clearly.

First, shoppers should know that donations are made from purchases which come through the AmazonSmile commerce site, not the main Amazon shopping platform. This means that you have to be logged in to http://smile.amazon.com and not just http://amazon.com . The good news for the customer is that nearly every product they might be looking for is available on both sites.

Next, the individual customer needs to choose a charity which the donations will benefit. The opportunity to choose will be offered automatically the first time someone logs into the AmazonSmile site, and there is a “Change Your Charity” option available under the “Your Account” tab, so no selection has to be forever. Unless you make changes all donations from AmazonSmile that are created by a purchase will continue to go to your current choice. This means that, conveniently, a shopper doesn’t have to make a new choice each time he or she logs in.

That’s pretty much it. Once everything is set up, people make qualifying purchase, and the AmazonSmile system sends donations via EFT every 3 months. For more details of the program, see their website.

As we said at the start, it will only be a dollar here, a dollar there, but sooner or later…!

Can’t See the Trees for the Forest?

I don’t think I have to make any apologies for this article. Anyone who knows me or follows Innovaision’s weblog, or Twitter Feed, or LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+ pages knows that we think Social Media is awesome! Any business that is not taking deliberate steps to craft and execute a smart Social Media policy is at high risk for failure, and probably sooner rather than later.

Still, it would pay to take a moment to reflect on the value of plain old-fashioned relationship building – the pre-Internet variety. Unless you are a truly global business, chances are your marketplace is a lot closer to home than the reach you can achieve through technology warrants. Even if you are a really big business, with a true universal market, if you have competitors it is likely that you fare better close to the location(s) where your office/plant/outlet is located. If only for the fact that potential customers are more likely to see your building on their way to work, or have a friend or relative who works for you, people are comfortable doing business with those they feel connected to (isn’t that one of the big draws of Social Media after all).

While you are working on your master plan to dominate the world, it pays to attend to the market that is right under our noses. The people we can drop in on, or invite to coffee or lunch, or who we see at the PTA meetings or at church or when we are out to dinner with our families. In other words, when looking at the big forest, pay attention to the nearby trees as well.

Don’t each lunch alone, when you could be treating someone to a meal and talking about your business at the same time. Take an afternoon once a week or once a month and just drive around your community and drop in on people who might be helpful to your business pursuits. Join the local Chamber of Commerce, participate in community initiatives, make sure your face is familiar to the people who live and work in your neighborhood. You may be astounded to find that your greatest business successes will come from local connections. After all, someone out there is spending a lot of time on their Social Media plan trying to reach people you can shake hands with ten minutes from now!

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Notes on the endurance of social media platforms

I was reviewing a recent report from Marketo, one of my favorite “thought leadership” companies in the realm of – particularly digital – marketing. The title of the report is “Sample Social Media Tactical Plan” and you can follow that link to download your own copy (in exchange for your email address). I decided to save the document for future reference, and discovered that I also had the 2011 and 2012 versions of their same guidelines. I may have been sleeping in 2013, or maybe they didn’t publish that year, but no matter.

Intrigued, I decided to look for the similarities and differences in the three reports. What (if anything, had changed over the past few years? Here’s what caught my eye.  Obviously, the trending social platforms of the moment get attention. In the fast pace of our online world, whatever is catching people’s attention at the time is worth noting (see “trending topics” almost anywhere). So, Digg shows up on the ’11 and ’12 lists but is not to be found in 2014. Sphinn (has anyone ever heard of that?) apparently changed its name to “Marketing Land” in late 2011, but the name change may have signaled a course correction as well…the new incarnation didn’t make the later lists. Friendfeed and Del.icio.us are both still around, but apparently not as influential as they were a few short years ago.

So takeaway number one from this review is, pay attention to what’s new and hot, but realize that going from hero to zero can happen almost overnight. New social media tools and platforms will continuously appear, and should be checked out. Be careful however before you invest too much time and energy in a platform that may be short-lived. I’m pretty certain that Pinterest and Instagram have some staying power (picking on two list newcomers for example) but feel less comfortable about Vine, as hot as it may be at the moment. Advice: Proceed with caution when it comes to tools that have note proven to be durable yet.

What was more interesting was the inclusion, as well as the relative ranking (based solely on how early they are discussed in the reports) of the same platforms over all three of the reports. It probably won’t come as a big surprise that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and “blogging” were at the top of the list each year. Twitter got bumped from the “top four” in 2012 by the relatively new Google+ but has reclaimed the 4th position this year, while G+ drops to fifth. These are all time-tested tools and ways to gain and retain online connectivity over the long run. Advice: Build the foundation of your online social media planning on the platforms that have demonstrated durability. Based these reports and my own experience, I would definitely consider including Google+ and YouTube in any list of “must consider” social media environments for your business.

Here are the lists from the three reports. Again, the order was developed based on how early in the report each was mentioned, which in the context of the entire document, did in fact suggest preference if not recommendation.

2011                                       2012                                       2014

Facebook                             Blogs                                      Blogs

LinkedIn                              Facebook                                Facebook

Twitter                                 LinkedIn                                 LinkedIn

Blogs                                    Google+                                 Twitter

Podcasts                              Pinterest                               Google+

Flickr                                    Twitter                                   Pinterest

YouTube                                Reddit                                   YouTube

Slideshare                             Digg                                       Vimeo

Del.icio.us                            Stumbleupon                         Vine

Digg                                       YouTube                                Instagram and Instagram Video

StumbleUpon                        Flickr                                     Tumblr

Reddit                                   Slideshare                              Flickr

Sphinn                                                                                 Snapchat

FriendFeed                                                                          SlideShare

 

What is your social media strategy? Do you have one? How often do you review or modify your plan? Please let us know how Innovaision, LLC can help you.

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