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TY Thursday: Keeping Gratitude Fun with Gamification

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A guest post from Taylor Burke, courtesy of TechnologyAdvice

Practicing gratitude can actually change the chemical makeup of your brain. When you give or receive thanks, production of dopamine and serotonin in your brain increases. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to trigger those feelings of happiness again. People who practice regular gratitude actually begin to look for the good over the bad in the day-to-day.

Gratitude has a scientifically positive impact. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to thank your donors. And there is a little trick that you can use to capitalize on that neurochemical release even further — gamification.

The Effect of Gamification

Like gratitude, gamification also has an effect on the brain. During game play, dopamine is also released. That feeling of winning is what makes games addictive and is exactly why marketers, human resources leaders, content creators, and others are introducing more and more gamification into what they create. It’s an excellent tool for engaging employees in training, getting readers to come back to your website, or creating positive feelings associated with your brand.

When gamification is used for donor thank-yous, it can double the positive experience for your donors and make them want to donate again to recreate the feeling. Here are six ideas for how to incorporate gamified experiences into your donor thank-yous.

  1. Friendly competition

Creating a little friendly competition between individual donors or between your nonprofit and others can be a great way to both amplify engagement and thank donors for each action they take along the way.

Take Brackets For Good, as an example. They allow nonprofits to compete against one another like basketball teams do in tournaments, in order to take the top fundraising spot. Donors who participate feel a boost from the gratitude and reward that comes with the celebration of a win.

  1. Increased Understanding

Your best donors deeply understand your mission in a way that allows them to become your ambassadors. However, thanking for them for that understanding can be more difficult than thanking them for a donation — how do you know who has the most knowledge?

This example from Greenpeace shows how gamification can help. Donors are educated by taking a quiz and when they accomplish it well, praised for their understanding.

  1. More Referrals

Speaking of donors as ambassadors, gamification can be used to thank those who refer friends and family to become supporters of your nonprofit. Using referral software or your own in-house tools, each of your donors can have a dashboard that shows them how many people they’ve referred, as well as a leaderboard comparing their success to other donors.

  1. Level Up

Too often, small-gift donors don’t get the recognition they deserve. Gamification is a great way to change that.

Create a system where donors earn badges or stickers as gratitude for various actions : making a donation of a certain amount, attending an event, sharing something on social media, and so on. Donors will be encouraged to accomplish the next step in order to earn their “reward.” Plus, donors are likely to add those badges and stickers to their own social profiles (which creates its own kind of marketing).

  1. Set a Goal

A great way to push donors during a short time period is to set a specific campaign and goal. You can then create a progress bar or other dashboard– like the example below from San Diego Zoo–that donors can collectively track.

Once the goal is complete (and the “game” over) thank your donors who participated with a celebratory email, social media badge, or event.

  1. Make it Experiential

Everyone loves to take on a challenge because accomplishing it makes us feel good. Plus, being able to share our progress with others gives us a social boost.

You can thank your donors by giving them an opportunity to show off their engagement with your organization through a gamified challenge, like Cancer Research UK’s Dryathalon, which encourages donors to fundraise by abstaining from alcohol for a month and getting donations as they do. Be sure to celebrate each milestone participants reach and have a big show of gratitude at the event’s conclusion.

When it comes to making your donors feel good, games and gratitude go hand-in-hand. Add some fun to your donor experiences and reward them for their continued support. They will reward you in return.

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Taylor Burke is a contributor for TechnologyAdvice.com and former nonprofit marketing director. She writes about marketing and communications.

TY Thursday: Thank Your Donors by Showing What You Share

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cycling togetherWhen you think about creative ways of thanking your donors, take a lesson from my wife. Rona runs a real estate company, not a nonprofit–but she understands how to make friends for her organization. She stresses what they share.

A lot of Rona’s home buyers care about housing for all. That means Rona supports groups like the Somerville Homeless Coalition. She truly cares, but her gift lets her clients know she cares, as they do.

A large number of Rona’s clients are cyclists. That means Rona posts news about bike trails and biking to work on her company’s Facebook page. It’s not strictly about real estate? That doesn’t matter. It shows clients that she understands them and appreciates the things they appreciate.

Your nonprofit can do this too. And you should.

What Your Donors Love, Besides You

There’s a saying, “People give to people.” That can mean they give to help people (not organizations). True. It can mean they give because a person they know asks them to give. Also true.

But the most important thing it means is that your donors have to know, like, and trust you if they are ever going to become to your loyal supporters.

They have to think, “That organization includes a lot of people like me.”

So, your job is to find out what counts as “people like me”–and show that they are right. Your organization does include people who care about more than just one thing. You and the donors have a lot in common. Share that!

Get to Know and Love Your Donors

How do you actually find out what your donors care about? A few good ways:

  1. Asking them. You can do this whenever you have a conversation with a donor and make a note of it in your files. Or, you can make a more organized effort, using surveys and focus groups. Do it gradually if you have to, but keep on asking.
  2. Social listening. Set up Google alerts for the internet, and set up lists and use tools on social media, to find out what your donors talk about a lot, and what they love and hate.
  3. Analytics. You can use the built-in tools on Facebook or Twitter to learn a lot about your audience in general, and that will give you some clues about your prospects and current donors, too.

Once You Know Your Donors, Share that You Care

With the results of your conversations, surveys, focus groups, searches, social listening, and analytics in hand, you probably know a lot about your donors! And now you can do what Rona does.

Example: Are you a healthcare organization with a lot of supporters who care about the environment?

  • Put an ad in the program of the local environmental group’s event.
  • Find ways of working together to make the community a healthier place to live.
  • Let your donors know you did, because it matters to you too.

And in your newsletter, email, blog, and/or social media, you can not only publicize your donations to and collaborations with environmental groups. You can regularly include articles about environment and health.

Showing your donors what you share is another way of thanking them for their gift…and making it more likely that they will give again.

TY Thursday: Thanking Donors Makes You Happy

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grateful happyWe’ve been talking about the hows and whys of thanking your donors, every Thursday for over a year. But we still haven’t mentioned the best reason to say “thank you.”

It will make you happy.

As reported in Inc. magazine, “A team of researchers out of Indiana University led by Prathik Kini recruited 43 subjects suffering from anxiety or depression. Half of this group were assigned a simple gratitude exercise — writing letters of thanks to people in their lives — and three months later all 43 underwent brain scans.”

The results?

The participants who’d completed the gratitude task months earlier not only reported feeling more gratefulness two weeks after the task than members of the control group, but also, months later, showed more gratitude-related brain activity in the scanner.

And their attitude of gratitude is linked with happiness, optimism, calmness, willpower, and other psychological benefits. Saying thank you is good for your mental health! Share on X

“Something as simple as writing down three things you’re grateful for every day for 21 days in a row significantly increases your level of optimism, and it holds for the next six months. The research is amazing,” Harvard researcher and author Shawn Achor told Inc.com.

Be good to yourself: say “thank you”

Writing thank-you letters is a way to express gratitude. We know donors want it. We know nonprofits benefitHappy grateful from it. And now, we know it’s a work task you can carry you that will actually be good for you.

So, why not try it? Write three thank-you letters every day for the next twenty-one days. You’ll be making your outlook brighter AND making donors feel appreciated. A happy result!

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