What Would You Do?
A reader recently asked me what she should do about thanking donors who gave to her organization back in 2009.
Apparently, this nonprofit staffer receives the names of donors from a volunteer (it is a small organization that relies heavily on volunteers). Then she sends out thank you letters. Most of the time, she is able to send the thank you's within 48 hours.
However, for some unknown reason, she just recently got a list of people who gave back in 2009 through various federated funds (United Way, Combined Federal Campaign, Workplace Giving Campaign, etc).
Should she go ahead and send out thank you letters even though they are so late? Or let them go, talk with the volunteer, and hope this never happens again? What would you do? Please provide helpful comments.
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Comments
Absolutely send out your thank you letters now. Draft a heartfelt note, being sure to include an apology for the delay, and get them in the mail asap. Then I would recommend, depending on the size of the list, either calling each one individually to thank them personally – or breaking them down into lists of 5-10 and having board members personally call.
People always appreciate a straightforward apology when you muck up (are you listening Steve Jobs?) and, if anything, they’ll love you all the more.
Sometimes there is delayed reporting from certain agencies. Your writer might want to look into how this delay won’t occur again.
Wow – that’s such a good one. My instinct is always to be as transparent as possible. In the donor’s shoes – their gifts have never been acknowledged and there is a possible bad taste from that. However, to continue to ignore that is to ignore the problem and potentially exacerbate it. To acknowledge it is to potentially win back those donors or, and it is possible, further secure their loyalty by admitting the issue and being completely transparent – with a thank you as well.
As for how to write that thank you note – I think there are a number of ways to do it. I’m wondering whether a personal thank-you note (handwritten) is overkill?
Are thank you notes better late than never – what do others think?
Ouch!
I completely agree with Pamela and Debra on this one — thanks are very much in order, and yes, better late than never.
The nature of the thanks+apology (handwritten or not) would depend on the organization and its normal methods of communication, on the donor (long-term or one-off), and on the number of letters that need to be written – but absolutely, transparency: mistakes need to be acknowledged.
You’ll also want be really careful about how soon and in what way you hit those donors with another appeal – I’d be inclined to segment them into another list, make your next contact (after the thanks+apology note) an update on your mission without any appeal attached, then ease them back into the regular mailings after that.
I’m also wondering about the system that let this happen. Could names of donors be cross-referenced against bank statements or other records, rather than depending on one volunteer to submit a list of names? It’s one thing to recover from a one-time mistake, quite another to leave in place the system that let it happen. (It might not hurt, too – without pointing fingers, of course – to explain to the donors how the error came about, and what steps the organization has taken to ensure the same thing won’t happen again.)
I can remember being in this exact situation a couple of times and it was so frustrating. We would get lists of people who had made gifts to the United Way campaign, months after the gift was made. And United Way expected us to thank the donors promptly.
So we did what others are suggesting here. We wrote a nice thank-you letter stating that we had just received the info about their gift and then went on to express our thanks. There was no need to trash United Way in the letter. We really wanted the focus of the letter to be on the appreciation for the donor.
Sandy Rees
I completely agree with what has been said above. It’s always better late than never.
Take into consideration that if you do not send a late thank you note with an apology, you will more than likely never be able to pitch those donors again and will lose them completely.
But by thanking them and apologizing for the late reply, there is a good chance that you will be forgiven and will win those donors back again.
Remember that they have already shown a willingness to give, and will therefore be likely to give again (if kept happy). So it is of the upmost importance to try to retain those donors, even if it means that you have to put your hand up and admit to your blunders!
Another point I would like to make is that people appreciate it when someone can take responsability for a mistake… and they immedietly become suspicious when you start pointing fingers. So instead of completely blaming the fault on the volunteers that brought the list in late, take a more personal or organizational responsibility for the mistake. Ex.
“Due to a miscommunication in our organization we never became aware of the donations we received from yourself and a group of others. This month we became aware of this fault and have since then remedied it. Upon fixing the problem we also became aware of your donations and realized that we were never able to thank you properly for it. So we would now like to take the time to say thank you and to also apologize for our lateness in doing so.”
Alright, so it does not have to be just like that, as that was just quickly of my head, but I hope it got my point across.
Another thing you should do is to make sure that you let the donor realize that he was not the only one who was forgotten (as you can see in the above example).
By making him/her part of a group of people forgotten it will make it less of a personal thing, and will ease the hurt or anger that he she may be feeling about it. People always feel better about something if they know that it has happened to others and that they are not the only ones!
Hope this helps!
What a great opportunity! Use the delay to, as Rob suggest, show you’re human, while stressing your regret for the delay.
I’d say never, never, don’t send a thank you. Even one that is slightly stained (by delay or another factor) is far better than none at all.
And it’s very likely that a thank you explaining the delay with a mea culpa (because ultimately, you are at fault) will help your donors feel closer to you – as one human to another, vs. one human to an organization – than ever before.
Go to it!
Best,
Nancy
Yes, send as soon as you can and i agree with sendig a heart felt note. Most of your loyal donors will understand.
And new donors will see that you are not just sweeping it under the rug.
Donna Dempster
Development Director
The Knoxville Museum of art
We have this same problem with Workplace Giving gifts. The agencies only send us the names once a year, so we just explain to the donor that this is how it works, and we thank them profusely. We also invite them to sign up for our e-newsletter, which we rarely ever get an email address.