I recently finished tallying last year’s donations for our taxes. Always a fun task. Going through all the donation letters and emails triggered a few insights I’d like to share. Chances are, you’re missing out on opportunities to engage with your donors.

Sending a yearly donation summary is very helpful

Most of the gifts I make are monthly donations and organizations that sent a summary of all those gifts made it so much easier for me. I also made additional contributions to some of those organizations.  

You may not need to send a summary if someone just made one gift. Your thank you letter can include the important tax information, but there’s no guarantee your donors will keep that.

My suggestion is to send all your donors a yearly summary of their gifts the following January. Send it by mail, if you can. This is also an opportunity to reach out. Make it more than just a receipt. Thank your donors and let them know how their gift(s) helped your clients/community during the past year. Some organizations send two pages – one is a thank you letter and the other is a list of all the donations.

If you don’t send a summary, donors have to go through their donation records and credit card statements and that’s just tedious. 

The Case of the Missing Monthly Donations

One organization mailed me a yearly summary letter that included a short handwritten note and a list of my monthly donations from last year, which was good. What wasn’t so good was it didn’t include any donations from November and December. When I went online to check my credit card records, I discovered I wasn’t charged for January and February either.

I’m not sure why that happened. I set up the monthly donation in November 2022, so maybe it expired after a year. My credit card is good for a few more years. Maybe they changed their payment processor. Sometimes monthly gifts mysteriously stop.

I wonder why someone from the organization didn’t notice this and contact me about it. 

The lesson here is to pay attention to what’s going on with your monthly donors. Put a system in place where you can flag expiring credit cards. Better yet, invest in a payment processor that automatically updates credit cards. And, if you do change your payment processor, make it easy for donors to switch to the new one.

You don’t want any of these donations to slip through the cracks. Even though many monthly donations are $5.00 or $10.00 a month, these small donations make a difference. The organization I mentioned above missed out on four months of revenue from me. Most likely I wasn’t the only one.

Monthly donors are some of your most valuable donors. Ignore them at your peril.

Donor communication is a mixed bag

My folder of donation acknowledgment letters was bursting from the seams, so I recycled ones that were a few years old. I also keep thank you cards and print pieces I like to use as examples of good donor engagement. I recycled some of those too, although there weren’t as many of them (read on). 

It shouldn’t surprise you that some organizations do a better job of communicating with their donors than others. A few knock it out of the park, but most range from okay to nonexistent.  

Some examples of good print communication from my folder include postcards, handwritten thank you notes, short impact reports, a welcome package, holiday cards, and a note from a child with cancer. You’ll notice most of these are relatively short pieces. There’s no need to create something long (and often boring).

If you’re not communicating by mail, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to engage with your donors. Mail is more personal and your donors are more likely to see it. Good communication also includes content that focuses on how your donors helped you make a difference and not on your organization. Try to mail something besides fundraising appeals at least three or four times a year.

Of course, you’ll use email and social media more often. Unfortunately, a lot of electronic communication is not inspiring. I noticed that when I was going through my email gift acknowledgments. 

If you use PayPal for your monthly donations, they send a receipt each month, and all it is is a receipt. In some cases, that’s the only time I hear about that gift. Are you letting PayPal do your work for you?

Other organizations do send their own automated monthly gift acknowledgments/receipts and that’s about it. I’ve mentioned before that these can be helpful, but don’t count as a legitimate thank you or any type of donor communication.

Here’s another missed opportunity. There’s no reason your automatic thank you email, whether it’s for a monthly or one-time gift, can’t be warm and personal. If you send monthly gift acknowledgments, update the content periodically. Kelly McLaughlin of From Scratch Fundraising recommends blind copying a staff person on those automatically generated emails and having that person send an additional more personal email. At the very least, you can differentiate between new gifts and repeat gifts. 

And while you’re at it, make your email subject line more engaging. Say something like Thank you, Julie! or Look at the difference you made and not Donation Received or anything that includes the word transaction.

I’ve found it’s often the same few organizations that go the extra mile, so the rest of you need to step up. Don’t miss out on these opportunities to engage with your donors. Always remember that better donor communication will help you raise more money.

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