Top tips to thank donors for online contributions to your nonprofit

Online nonprofit fundraising strategies are incredibly important, it would be foolhardy to delay making any needed  revisions to your donation landing page and continue to monitor how your audience are interacting with these pages.

Over the coming months I’ll be writing an ongoing series with suggestions and tips for how you can improve your donation pages to make sure that your audience are given every opportunity to donate easily when they to visit that page on your website. Every action you take with social media and content improvement is helping to spread the word about the aims of your nonprofit and the value of the kind contributions received – the ideal visit or return visits to your site should become more and more likely to result in an online donation. Online donations keep growing so now is the perfect time to work on enhancing your donation page(s) if needed.

Today I wanted to write about what happens immediately after a donation is received – how do you currently thank your online donors?

At times it may seem that a business seems preoccupied with obtaining a transaction and then forgets the great value in showing appreciation. Happily this is not often the case for nonprofits but with that said it’s never a bad idea to ask  yourself ‘do we do an excellent job of thanking our donors after they contribute to us?’ If the answer is that you do a ‘fair, good or very good’ job of thanking donors – isn’t it time that you did an excellent job?

Imagine yourself as the donor; after making a donation you’ll likely see some fairly standard text on screen showing appreciation followed by an automated email thanking you for your recent contribution. Both are good – but surely can more be done to say thank you to donors.

Personalize your thank you emails with fresh, relevant and exclusive content

While automated emails are important how difficult would it be to further personalize the email of gratitude and add some very recent, very unique news about your fundraising activities that could be changed on quite a frequent basis, perhaps weekly? If possible share information that will inspire the donor letting them know immediately about how that donation will assist with very tangible and current initiatives.

Create exclusive ‘thank-you’ video content for donors

Create unique video content as a powerful way of thanking your donors. These videos should be exclusively accessible immediately after a donation has been made. It affords an excellent chance to personalize your organization’s appreciation for the support that has just been shown. You’ll find many great examples on YouTube but I’ve included one example I like especially below. As a new donor few things could be more rewarding than seeing the faces and hearing the voices of those who will benefit from your support. You can include those who work for your charity and/or people who have been helped by the work you carry out.

An example of a ‘thank you’ video to donors from The Nature Conservancy

Give your donors a voice at the time they make a donation

You could also follow up the donation page with a short survey asking important questions about what prompted them to give today and how they learned about your organization. Encourage them to ask any questions that they might have about your overall mission and fundraising objectives.  At that point in time your donor relationship has just begun so it presents an ideal opportunity to learn more about your donor and simultaneously provide them with a voice.

Encourage sharing of donations via social media

Install plugins or website scripting that allows a donor to share the news of their contribution via Facebook, Twitter or Google+. We’re social creatures and sometimes it simply feels good to share the news that we’ve done something good. As importantly for your organization it helps to build awareness for your cause.

There are of course other ways to say thank you to your donors but hopefully these four ideas will help improve your online appreciation process. If you employ other methods or have seen unique approaches please do share them in the comments below.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.