Are Donors on Your Gratitude List?

With Thanksgiving upon us, it seems appropriate to talk about the importance of thanking donors.

Everyone likes to be thanked for a gift. When it’s a charitable gift, donors also appreciate knowing what their money helped accomplish. It’s important that development professionals and their board members are doing simple but powerful things like sending handwritten thank-you notes to donors, calling them to thank them for gifts, and visiting with major donors to your organization to tell them how they make a difference in the lives of those you serve.

Sometimes, just thanking a donor can result in another gift without even asking. One development director who heard me talk about this in a presentation called me a few weeks later. She said she had met with three donors to thank them, and two of them asked what else they could do to help. She ended up getting two more gifts just from the thank-you meetings.

Here’s another benefit of calling or meeting with donors to thank them. It’s a good way for board members to get comfortable talking with people about your nonprofit. A board that Keith presented to a few weeks ago said their members spent a Saturday making donor thank-you calls. Not only did they end up with additional gifts from many of the donors, the board members felt good about what they were doing.

And in the spirit of the holiday, we’d like to express our gratitude to all of our clients over the years, for enabling us to celebrate 20 years of work we love. Happy Thanksgiving!