Donors give to your church or charity freely. People give because they believe in your cause and mission and want to support it. And so, there are many reasons to respond and show your thanks to donors.
There are multiple ways to thank your donors! It is important to consider the message, method, frequency and sender. Here are some top tips from our ExpensePlus team on why to be thankful and what we could say…
Why should we thank donors and what should we say?
1. Show appreciation to your donors
Most importantly, you should show your appreciation for your donors’ generosity in supporting your organisation.
Whether regular or one-off, their giving will have been an emotional response to your cause.
The literal meaning of philanthropy is ‘the love of humanity’!
Donors will have a subconscious expectation that you acknowledge and appreciate their gifts.
2. Acknowledge safe receipt of funds
The second reason is a more practical one. Saying thank you lets your donors know that their money arrived safely. This is especially important for cheque donations, one-off donations, or the first occurrence of a regular gift. For example, a new or updated standing order.
3. A chance to give updates to donors
Individual donors don’t usually require formal reports like when your charity receives grants. However, anyone who gives money to your organisation clearly supports your cause and is invested in your work.
Thanking donors provides a great opportunity to tell your donors how you are spending their money. For example:
- what new projects have been possible this year (or since your last communication) due to increased giving income, or
- a reminder of your everyday costs which regular donations support.
Also, any thank you communication with donors gives you an opportunity to send other messages too. For example, you can tell them about upcoming fundraising or celebration events or send reminders to complete or update Gift Aid declarations. This may be better received if wrapped in thanks rather than a standalone more logistical mailing.
Be careful to keep the length of your communications (in whatever form) appropriate. Make it obvious what your 2 or 3 key points are without too much detail.
How should we thank donors?
4. Know your audience when thanking donors
There are various communication methods you could choose according to your donor base.
For example, you might want to produce a thank you video featuring messages from your team, case studies of your work, and highlights from recent projects or events. This will go down brilliantly with a certain audience that is digitally connected.
You may decide that a letter or a personal phone call is a better option. If you gather your donor base for an annual meeting or another similar event, you might want to say something in person.
Additionally, remember that this isn’t just about finances. When communicating with donors, you are representing your whole organisation. Your communications might sway their ongoing opinion of or loyalty to your organisation in a number of ways other than their giving.
If you’re fortunate enough to receive legacy giving, consider how your communication with families of the deceased benefactors, or their lawyers, needs to be adjusted whilst maintaining the same principles.
5. Think about scalability versus personal touch
As well as what your audience might prefer to receive, think about your resources and capacity. Thinking longer term, is your communication method still doable if your list becomes five times as long?
Individual phone calls certainly give the personal touch but aren’t practical at scale. A mail-merged letter is the opposite of this – generic and scalable. Getting this right can be tricky, especially as different donors will have different preferences about how, and how regularly, they like to be thanked.
In their blog, the Charities Aid Foundation recommends a more personal touch, suggesting sending handwritten letters from a team member – this may or may not work for you.
6. Offer a mechanism for feedback, but stay compliant
If your communication is ‘one way’ (e.g. a letter or video message, rather than a conversation in-person or via the phone) ensure that there is a clear and easy way for your donors to get in touch with you.
They may want to give feedback, ask questions, or respond to any calls to action you’ve given (such as increasing their gift, or filling out a Gift Aid declaration). There’s nothing more frustrating than being asked to respond to communication and being unable to do it.
Whichever way you choose to thank donors, ensure you have the necessary permission from them to communicate in this way. You should also give a clear option to opt out of future communications. This may be linked to a wider set of communication preferences in your database or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Which donors should we thank?
7. Be consistent in messaging
An advantage to a ‘mass mailing’ or video message is that everyone hears the same message.
If you choose a more individual thanking mechanism, ensure consistent messaging via a checklist or script. If multiple people are doing calls or letters, ensure they receive the same briefing and are comparing notes on feedback. Remember that your donors may be comparing notes with each other. Therefore, inconsistencies in messages could cause unintentional distractions from the core messages you’re trying to communicate.
Don’t forget any brand or design guidelines that your organisation has and make sure you apply these consistently and correctly.
8. Be careful about tiers of donors
It’s inevitable in some organisations that you might communicate differently with different levels of givers.
Perhaps in an emergency, you might contact your higher-value givers to ask for a loan or an extra one-off gift for a special appeal.
However, your principles for thanking donors should be consistent. Don’t forget that someone giving £5 per month might be sacrificing more than their neighbour giving £500 per month. Everything is relative, and as finance teams we rarely know the circumstances of each donor.
When should we thank donors?
9. Acknowledge the first gift of a donor
We mentioned in point 2 above, that a primary reason for saying thanks is to acknowledge safe receipt of funds.
The first gift therefore seems an obvious point for donor communications. It also allows you to tell your new donor more about your organisation:
- what are you up to,
- what are the current challenges, and
- how else they can get involved with this charitable cause they obviously care about.
It also gives you an opportunity to tell them what to expect. For example, is there an annual communication or an AGM to find out about the state of the finances more broadly? Do you have thank you events which you can invite them to?
Lastly, you can also use this communication point to check if the giver is eligible for Gift Aid and ask them to complete or update a Gift Aid declaration. You will want to consider how your charity’s software can help you manage new donors. See below for further details on how the fund accounting software ExpensePlus can help with this.
10. Consider timing alongside other patterns
For some donors, being thanked too regularly might make them feel like they are receiving too much communication. It might also make them question how much of the money they are giving is going on admin, overheads and marketing.
There may also be occasions when you need to do more regular updates. For example, during the pandemic some organisations communicated with their donors much more frequently as the external landscape changed and financial forecasts were more volatile.
We’ve also seen smaller churches in financial trouble print the previous week’s offering figures in the weekly notice sheet by way of keeping the congregation up to date. They felt this was important at the time.
You may want to consider how you can use your thank you communications strategically. If your custom is to only communicate once a year, is it aligned with your annual gift day? Or at the end of your financial year so you can invite pledges for next year? Or at the end of the tax year, so you can provide a donor statement for their tax return?
How can ExpensePlus help you to thank donors?
Using a fund accounting package like ExpensePlus will enable your charity or church to manage their finances more easily. ExpensePlus is designed to help you manage your donations through Gift Aid management and direct integration with HMRC, donation reporting, and donor communication.
Manage Donors
There are many features we’ve built into the Manage Donors Module in ExpensePlus to help you:
- Record donor communication
- Record communication preferences
- Manage donor pledges
- Track donor engagement
- Tag donors
- Generate donor statements to download or print
- Export mailmerge data for mass donor communications
Donation Reports
The Donation Reports, which you can run in ExpensePlus, allow you to easily follow up new donors and identify donors without Gift Aid declarations. You can also filter these reports by:
- Donation methods
- Donation amount
- Groups of donors (using donor tags)
- Different funds
Customised user access
User access to ExpensePlus is highly customisable. Whilst finance team users can see everything, you can restrict the visibility of other users via their user role, category access, or by optionally hiding donor names. This replaces donor names with donor reference numbers.
LoveGiving
Our LoveGiving platform provides an easy way for donors to give online using their credit/debit card.
Donor information (including Gift Aid declarations) are passed through to your ExpensePlus donor records seamlessly.
If you use other payment processors (e.g. Stripe, SumUp), ExpensePlus supports many of these for easy importing and reconciling of transactions in the correct way.
Further Resources
ExpensePlus is an easy-to-use, cloud-based fund accounting package that is designed for churches and charities. It’s used by hundreds of charities across the UK and is rated 4.8 stars (out of 5) on Google with over 800 user reviews.
