Keeping thank you letters fresh for monthly donors?

I’m interested in knowing as well, because I send the same letter every month. I do try to freshen our general emails and letters each calendar year.

I try to rotate out options. One month I may send them a handwritten thank you note. The next month I may send them a thank you video or personalized email. My monthly donors have really enjoyed the video options the most. Those are the ones I get the most feedback from. 

We generally don’t send thank you’s each month for our recurring donors.  They are notified by email and thanked, but we do a quarterly snail mail thank you for them.  Sometimes it’s a handwritten one that I make the board do at the end of a board meeting, sometimes it’s a tailored thank you directly from me talking about the impact that monthly giving makes.  

I also write 4 general thank you’s a year (to one time donors) and simply send a different one out each quarter to whoever donates in that quarter.  I label them as FY Qtr1 TY in the templates area.

Hi,

I write a short thank you note that I can use for a month or two for all our donors, whether they are regular donors or occasional donors, and send it out via email or print it in NFG and mail. I send a  thank you note for every one- time or unusual donation we receive. 

For Recurring Donors, I send a thank you every other month. Again, I use that short thank you I have stored in NFG  for that month. (I might recycle certain parts from emails from previous years so I’m not starting from scratch each time.)  I also use Thank Yous to remind donors about upcoming events our organization has going on. Rarely do I hand write a note.

I think thank you notes are a lost art and I believe if someone gives you a donation, you should thank them for it in a timely fashion,  especially recurring donors, so they don’t feel taken for granted.

We send out receipts for every donation typically within 48 hours. We have a new receipt letter written each month by our executive director. On the backs of the receipts we will advertise anything we have up coming or any big wins we have had as an organization. We also send out a new donor letter (about once a week) to all new donors that is a thank you as well as giving them information about our organization. If new donors give a second gift we then send them a handwritten card and include information about becoming a “Partner in Hope” (monthly donor). A LOT of our donors are older and we still get most of our donations through snail mail so this has been very very effective for us. I hope this helps!

I have a series of email templates that I use. I periodically update these. I have a separate welcome acknowledgment for first time donors and for monthly donors. In the various subsequent emails I either ask them to return a survey, reach out to others, visit our website and/or Facebook pages, thanks from the whole team, etc.  For monthly donors I recently did a special video thank you and a brief mention about a recent project. Some of my regular mail follow up with new donors includes inserting a Sister-Corps Supporter magnet. Other times a tea bag, a packet of seeds with a note about ‘thanks for helping hope take root’. I’ve also printed bookmarks on cardstock as an inexpensive way to say thank you.