Best Practices for Thank You Notes

Kathryn Roberts

Hi!

Would anyone mind sharing their best practices for thank you notes? In the past at my institution, everyone handled their own thank you notes. Now with AM, the students can do it online but the departments still want to write thank yous and we think that the donors should be getting one before the stewardship reports go out. We want these to go through our office now instead. Does anyone do something similar or have a good practice in place?

Thank you in advance!!!

Michele GuyorBorthwick

@Kathryn Roberts Our practice prior to AM was still that thank you notes were done through the Advancement office not departments however, I will share with you that AM has made the process much easier on me and the students. As they no longer have to make an appointment to come visit my office to handwrite a note, writing it online through the portal allows the student to complete the task when it fits in their schedule and not necessarily between 8:30 and 5 office hours. They can also finish it over multiple visits to the portal if they need to. We can also ask for more info from them along with the letter – like a photo, and other short answer questions, i.e. Hometown, why did you choose your major, even favorite ice cream flavor (if you want to ). Once they have finished the required questions and letters in the portal, their information is moved to “submitted” status, my Financial Aid colleague checks it to ensure that it is complete (no four word letters like “thanks for the cash!”), then she changes the status to PA Reviewed (which I believe is one we created for our use) and then I review/edit the letter before sending it to the donor. I copy/paste the photo, and the letter into a Word document and mail it. The additional questions, along with the thank you letter and photo, will be a part of the annual report.

Our stewardship of donors is done annually through this report so getting thank you letters out prior to reports is not typically an issue with the exception of the small number of students who never get around to doing it. We are pretty fortunate and had a 97% participation rate this past year.