Thanking donors

Walter Winfield

Here are a few questions for my colleagues in development/marketing:

• What's an ideal length for donation acknowledgement autoresponders?

• Should they mimic the acknowledgements that are sent by mail or should they be more like tax receipts/credit card transaction confirmations?

• How often do you (or should you) update the text for your autoresponder acknowledgements?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Cheers,

Walter Winfield

Lupus Foundation of America

Sally Heaven

My opinion - autoresponders sent via email should be relatively short. I think donors expect to see a credit card confirmation so they can be confident that their donation went through, as well as something they can print out for tax purposes if the donation was tax-deductible. One page is ideal when printed out.

I think it's important to thank the donor, but that can be done sincerely and genuinely in one paragraph - 3 or 4 sentences at the beginning of the email.

If you have the bandwidth to accomplish this, I like cross-promoting other things your organization is doing in autoresponders - links to Action Alerts or Surveys. The key is remembering to change the links in the autoresponders when you expire those pages. If you don't have the resources or bandwidth to do that, then you're better off not including it so donors don't click a link to take action and get an "Expired" page. I also recommend source coding the links so you can tell how many actions come in through the autoresponder, since autoresponders don't have the same kind of tracking as regular Convio emails.

Of course, as with anything, your mileage may vary and much depends on the type of donors to your organization and what kind of communications they like to get.