Suggested timeline and method for donor acknowledgements

Jolynn Uyehara

Hi Everyone! I'm curious to know what your protocol and timeline is for thanking donors. I need to create a timeline and am not sure where to start. The issue I brought up to our team was that I feel like sometimes, some donors are inundated with “thank yous” for the same gift. For example, if we receive a gift via check, one of our donor relations officers may call the donor to thank them, and/or send a hand-written note of thanks. Meanwhile, after I process the gift, I send an AI acknowledgement via email, AND a hard copy thank you letter. Would love to hear your thoughts and learn what you are doing at your organizations. Thank you!

Dariel Dixon

@Jolynn Uyehara You can never thank a donor too much. They are the backbone of what we do, and should feel appreciated by your organization. Personal touches like a phone call and a handwritten note are great, and never too much. It might be worthwhile to look at consolidating the letters a bit, but stewardship is such an undervalued part of what we do and who we are. The acknowledgement and formal thank you are not personal touches, and are transactional ends of the process. If anything, it might be worth considering if the email acknowledgement and the hard copy letter are necessary. Most organizations I have been with have sent acknowledgements in the same way the gift came in. Electronic gifts will get an electronic acknowledgement and paper gifts will get paper acknowledgements. The personal touches should stay though…

JoAnn Strommen

@Jolynn Uyehara @Dariel Dixon you got there first and said it better. ?

I agree the personal touches are great. I would look at the need for both an email and hardcopy acknowledgement, especially if these are just acknowledgements. It doesn't sound like any of these pieces have charitable contribution/tax statement.

Jolynn Uyehara

@Dariel Dixon Thank you so much for sharing. Very helpful suggestions. ?

Sherry Aldrich

@Jolynn Uyehara Our organizational gift policy is to send formal acknowledgement within 2 business days.

Rachel Kauer

@Jolynn Uyehara

Hi Jolynn,

It sounds like you have two concerns, both timeline and donor inundation.

Timeline for formal thank you/gift receipt letters:

Regular Gift: Formal TYL generated and mailed every Monday. This way turn around is always within a week, since we commit gift batches about twice a week.

VIP Gift: Formal TYL generated and turned around within 48 hours. We have a set criteria for these, it's any gift that is > or = to $5k.

A formal TYL/receipt is only emailed when a donor donates online. Unless a prospect manager sends a personal email.

Donor Inundation:

Our prospect managers also call, send their own notes/emails and the head of school thanks certain donors over $5k with a personal note each week. There is a ton of overlap, plus they are getting magazines, newsletters, birthday cards, holiday cards and event invites!

My previous org had a great solution which I am trying to implement at my current org and highly recommend.

Create a “Stewardship Matrix!”

On an excel sheet, create rows and segment out your donors by giving level, demographic etc. Then use the columns to make a 12 month timeline with the name of each type of communication (be sure to include mail invites, email invites, appeals, etc.) a donor receives, including columns for response items to gifts.

Then “X” each box which corresponds to the donor segment which gets a certain type of communication.

This will take a little bit of time and coordination to set up, but when you are done you can really see during what months and what circumstances donors are being inundated.

For example, after reviewing the matrix you might find that if an alumni makes a gift over $5k in November, they are getting 3 emails for your fall appeal, 1 mailed appeal letter, 1 thank you letter for their gift, 1 call for their gift from your team, 1 call from the head of school, a copy of the fall magazine and an invite to an upcoming reunion! That's almost 9 touchpoints, which might or might not be too much. But then your team can evaluate whether or not scale down touch points, or maybe rearrange them to spread things out to quieter months.

This will also help create a schedule to stick to when it comes to touchpoints like mailings etc.

Hope this helps!

Sample Stewardship Matrix:

Austen Brown

@Jolynn Uyehara - The general best practice is to acknowledge gifts within 48 hours. While you may already know this, for others reading this thread, automation can help with this. It not only significantly improves the turn-around times, but it also handles prelim data clean-up, emailing ack letters, and streamlines other associated tasks etc. - all without adding tasks to your plate and helping you/your org work more efficiently.