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Acknowledgement Letters Best Practices

Mackenzie Bode

Wondering what is best practice for gift acknowledgements. Online vs Check/Cash. sending electronic vs snail mail. Each gift or end of year summary. Personalized, by department or basic shell for all. Would love to hear what other higher education folks do!

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JoAnn Strommen

@Mackenzie Bode Welcome to the BB Community forums.

I looked at your profile to see what type of org you worked for (helpful to know and connect).

I don't know that there is one ‘best practice.’ While we all want our communications to be seen as personal, the reality is there probably is a difference between a college of 10K alum and a large state U with hundreds of thousands of alum/donors. While today's technology allows for so much more automation/personalization at the same time it's less authentic and most people know that.

Are you just asking about ‘acknowledgements’ or ‘receipts’? Do you do both or have a combo?

Some factors to think about in regard to your questions:

From your donor's point of view. If I make a gift in March, should I have to wait until EOY to get a receipt? A timely acknowledgement/receipt is essential, IMO. With technology today, every communication should be personalized.
From your staff/resources/technology - online gifts, can you automate a personalized electronic receipt? Do you have staff to generate hard copy for those gifts? What is best use of resources? We use donation site to issue email and electronic receipt for all online gifts.
best practice - how often should I be in touch with donor? Can I send a receipt that describes the impact their gift has made now? We send mailed receipts for all checks received. I hope so. I'm not a fan of year end summary, myself. We do not use here other than for staff payroll and monthly donors.
Can department do a separate thank you/acknowledgement? We are a small state school and we issue receipt doc but send dept monthly list of donors to their funds and ask them to send another TY acknowledgment

I've rambled a lot without giving you a ‘best practice.' What can reasonably be done by your office and what would your donors expect?

Mackenzie Bode

@JoAnn Strommen

Thank you for your response JoAnn- you make some great points! Do you mind me asking how many staff members you have in your office?

We currently do a receipt for all online gifts in addition to an acknowledgement letter (hard copy) for all gifts. The acknowledgement letter hard copy serves as a receipt as well for all non-online gifts.

We then have levels, so $1k and up ALWAYS gets an acknowledgement letter that's personalized for our ED. $5K and up from the President. and so on.

Appreciate your insight!

Faith Murray

@Mackenzie Bode, I think @JoAnn Strommen's insights are excellent. We believe in the value of a personal touch, and I like to think we do well because our appeal response rates and major gift solicitation successes are above average for our size org. That doesn't make it “best practice”, but it does show it works for our cadre of donors.

We allow our donation forms to send automated receipts just because it's the norm and if a donor doesn't get one they're going to think their gift didn't go through.
We then send hand-signed thank you letters to all donors, online as well as snail mail. Our CEO and our President sign the letters (for context we process about 10K gifts per year). This letter allows us to showcase the impact of their gift and serves as a tax receipt.
All donors $1K and up get a hand-written thank you card from our CEO or Prez. Gifts above $5K also get a thank you call, when possible.
At year's end we send tax summaries to all our major, monthly, and legacy donors, as well as the dozen others or so who request one. We use this as an opportunity to send an accompanying major donor newsletter to showcase impact and set the stage for next year's ask.

Donor demographics vary by org, though, so I'd weigh carefully your donors before settling on a process. An org that handles 100K gifts per year could not possibly hand-sign all the letters. An org with a younger audience, high email click rate, and a majority of online gifts will want to lean into that area of engagement. An org with money to invest in personal-looking email automations or personalized video thank-yous (there are some truly neat options out there!) might find that these set them apart from the mold and foster better engagement. You'll have to make an educated guess and experiment a little!