(Saying Thank You Is The Ultimate Honey For Catching Flies)
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of being on the receiving end of sincere and genuine thanks, you’ll know first hand how powerful the experience can be. The moment of feeling seen and appreciated can be so affirming, so validating, and, for some, transformational. The desire to keep the cycle going, of doing the thing that caused the gratitude and being rewarded for it, can shift an already generous donor into a partner with a large gift to give. It can motivate a community member to volunteer, to participate at a greater level. It can inspire deep loyalty and a commitment to the mission.
Saying thank you can be a powerful tool, it’s true, but it has to be done well to be truly impactful. “Well” is a subjective term, of course, and means different things in different scenarios. Not every thank you has to be a hand-written letter or a heartfelt conversation, though some of them can be. To help find the right balance of effusiveness and efficiency, we’ve put together our top 3 tips for saying thank you that will hopefully bring some bliss to your expressions of gratitude:
Thank You Notes: Top 3 Tips
#3 Keep it timely, whenever possible. Sure, your grandma probably doesn’t mind if you take a few months to thank her for the sweater she gave you, but for the most part, sending along an expression of thanks should happen as quickly as possible. This is especially true in professional settings, or if the gift was especially generous.
When it comes to saying thank you to donors to your fundraising event, we at Bliss Auctions think: the sooner, the better! To save yourself time afterwards, have a simple plan in place for handling the thank yous. If it was a virtual event, perhaps you’ll be emailing a thank you to everyone who donated, or even to everyone who registered. Help your future self out by having a template* email prepared before your event so that you can send all of your thank yous the next week after your event has ended.
#2 Keep it personal. Even though we just suggested using a template email for your thank yous (more on that below), we also want to stress that, for a thank you to really have impact, it needs to feel personal. People receive tons of generic emails every day, and it’s pretty easy to spot them. It’s fine for some types of communications, but a thank you is supposed to make the recipient feel seen and a generic email does the opposite.
So how can you use an email template and make it sound personal? It sounds like magic, I know, but the real secret is time. Plan to spend a few moments per email making it personal to that person. Mention what they bid on, or how much it means to your organization that they give every year (bonus points if they’re long time donors and you can throw in there how long they’ve been a member of your community). If you’re wondering why use a template at all, it’s because even with this personalization, there will be a lot that gets repeated in each email, and there’s no reason for you to have to type the same words over and over. If this sounds like it will be a significant undertaking, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: it is. But that leads us to our final top tip…
#1 Share the load, Frodo. Just like fundraising, saying thank you is so much better as a team sport. It should be a shared responsibility, a divide-and-conquer situation. Even a one-person organization can recruit a few friends as volunteers to write some thank you notes (or at least stamp and write out the addresses on the envelopes), and a larger one can divide up the list. We know that sounds a bit like herding cats, but many hands make light work, and writing a thank you note can give you quick boost of empathy and good feelings to take back with you to your regular tasks.
Your thank you messages don’t all have to be sent on the same day, you can break it up over a (short) period of time. If you have a very large amount of donors, which is a wonderful problem to have, you can take this lesson from Shel Silverstein about getting through a big task, one bite at a time.
… though we don’t recommend taking 89 years to get your thank you notes in the mail.
*We find ourselves writing a lot of thank you notes to folks, and have some templates we’d love to share with you. These are free to anyone, not just our clients, so please follow the link to Contact Us if you are interested in receiving those templates.
