January 2025: Creative ways to thank donors
Happy New Year!
This month, I want to share 3 creative ways to thank donors while the New Year energy is still fresh. Gratitude and retention are all the rage in January, as they should be. Your organization hopefully sent a gushing thank you email to year-end donors, and maybe you mailed thank you cards or made phone calls, too.
Here are a few other low-cost ideas sure to surprise and delight your donors because… nobody's doing them!
3 creative ways to thank donors
1. Digital ad campaign
I'm running this campaign for a client right now. We're reaching their 2024 donors with a lovely impact and gratitude video. On Meta, this costs between 1-10 cents per ThruPlay depending on the size of your list, meaning you can reach 100 donors for $10 or less! Such a worthy investment in recognition and retention.
2. Automated voicemail
I keep recommending this because very few nonprofits are doing it! Platforms like Slybroadcast make it easy to record one fun or heartfelt message and automatically drop it in your donors' voicemail boxes. Guess what the open rate is for a voicemail? 95%. Probably 10 times higher than people reading your emails.
3. SMS or MMS message
I have never received a text message from a nonprofit thanking me for donating. What's up with that?! It's not expensive to send a text to your donors. Your email provider might have this capability built in, or I recommend KindKatch for video text messaging. While many of your emails get missed or ignored, 95% of text messages are read within 3 minutes.
A note on over-thanking:
This month, I received so many thank you emails from nonprofits I did NOT donate to at year-end. They're kissing my feet for helping them reach their campaign goals, saying I've made their dreams come true, when all I did was mark their emails as read. Head scratch
Sadly, I also received fundraising appeal emails throughout December from organizations after donating to their campaigns.
These are two sides of the lack-of-segmentation coin that make donors feel undervalued and non-donors feel confused.
My advice: Only thank people for making it all possible when they've actually done something. And please exclude donors from your appeals once they've contributed to a campaign. This is a form of acknowledgment that is, in my opinion, just as important as saying “thank you.”
Next month's edition of The Good Stuff will unpack the many (complex) changes Meta has been announcing that may significantly limit nonprofit advertising capabilities.
In the meantime, take care!
-Caroline
P.S. I just got an email from a client saying, “Thank you again for the great work you did with us on the year-end campaign—we received a lot of positive feedback and saw a fantastic return in donations.” Melts my heart. If your organization is in the market for a partner to conceptualize, design, and implement a winning campaign at any point this year, let's chat.
