Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

TY Thursday: When & How to Treat Your Donors Like Friends

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When your personal friends speak to you, do they only recall the gifts you gave them?

No. They wouldn’t be your friends if they did.

Your real friends know what matters to you and what hurts you. You have a history of shared memories…and in that history, “I got this flower vase from Jen” is much less important than “Jen and I go on the Walk for Hunger together every year, and then we go out for pizza.”

You treat your friends with the same love and care they show to you.

Does your nonprofit treat donors like bank accounts? Or do you treat them like friends? Share on X

You can. You should. And a good database will make it easier.

Find out how. Read my guest post, 5 Ways Nonprofits Can Treat Donors Like Friends, on the Bloomerang blog.

TY Thursday: What It Takes to Write a Great Thank-You Letter

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bride writingDid you ever sit down to write a batch of thank-you letters and realize, “I don’t know who half of these people are”?

If you’ve gotten married recently, you might know what I mean. There are all those gifts from people who are friends of your parents. You might know them by name…or not. You might recognize their faces…or not.

But they wished you well and sent you a gift.

So you want to thank them. You want to appreciate their time, effort, and expense. But you end up writing a dozen, or two dozen, or a hundred letters that all sound the same. “Why am I doing this?” you think. “Will it make a difference to this person anyway?” And what should be a joy becomes a tiresome duty.

It’s a sad situation. It’s a situation that too many nonprofits find themselves in when they sit down to write thank-you letters to donors.

And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The 3 Things You Need to Write a Great TY

You can make writing a thank-you letter a joy if you prepare in advance. Here are the three things you need to have on hand before you write your TY (or record it on video).Continue Reading

Fundraising Tuesday: Show Me You Care

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careToday I received a letter in the mail from my health insurance company.

You are taking a certain medicine, they said, so every year, you should have a certain kind of blood test.  Are you doing that?  Will you ask your doctor to make sure?

The company called the letter a Care Alert, and everything inside it reinforced the message, “We Care.”

The envelope didn’t: it looked as if it might have been one of those Explanations of Benefits that don’t explain anything at all.  And of course, one of the reasons they care is that if I look out for myself, I can avoid serious health risks that would end up costing the insurance company a lot.

Still, the message itself was caring.  It was personalized, and it treated me like a responsible adult who can make good decisions with the proper information.

A Modest Proposal: Show You Care

I would like to propose that nonprofits aim at making all their communications as personal and as caring as the letter I received.

What would it take to do that?

  1. Knowing, and remembering, a lot about your supporters.
  2. Thinking, “How can I make my agency useful to this person?”  What topics matter to him or her?  What information would she or he find useful–not in a general way, but here and now?
  3. Calling on them to take action…and showing them how.

The tools exist to make all this possible.  Databases, constituent relationship management software and processes, email tools, various programs that remind you it’s time to send this kind of message to this specific person: they’re out there, and not that expensive.

But is your organization willing to spend the time and attention it takes to treating every client, constituent, prospect, or donor with at least as much care as a health insurance company showed to me?

Yes, I’d like weekly email from Communicate!

Get more advice

Yes! Please send me tips from Communicate! Consulting.

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