December 9, 2015 | Categories Donation Processing, Donor Management, DonorPerfect Fundraising Software, Fundraising Strategies, Social Fundraising, SofterWare Products

The Easy Breezy Guide to End-of-Year Acknowledgements

Most nonprofits know that you can boost engagement with a prompt and sincere thank you letter or email. With all the work that goes into preparing your end-of-year donor acknowledgements, how can you maximize their impact?  Our tips make sending your year-end letters even more effective.

Personalization Is King!

Your acknowledgement email or letter needs to be about your donor, not you. It should show the donor how their contribution made a difference in the community or helped to achieve your mission. A donor management system will allow you to create personalized donation acknowledgements using your donor’s name (or even a nickname). You can also incorporate information about their last donation, if they volunteered or even the last time they had contact with your nonprofit. These details are incredibly powerful when engaging donors.

Invite More Engagement

Your constituents have tremendous power to advance your organization’s mission in ways that don’t involve donating money or spending a lot of time volunteering. In fact, in their normal everyday activities, your donors can impact people that you can’t even dream about reaching. Here are a few easy (and free) ways you can ask donors to help:

• Encourage them to follow you on Facebook and then comment on, like and share your nonprofit’s posts, events and photos.
• If you are a local nonprofit, ask them to review your organization on Yelp.
• Are your constituents on Twitter? Ask them to tweet links to your nonprofit’s events and mention you as a #FF on Fridays.

Your donor’s friends and family will see this activity and learn about your organization. Consider adding one of the suggestions above to your end-of-year acknowledgements. You’ll offer your donors a unique and personal way to participate in your mission.

Use a Good Donor Management System

Using DonorPerfect’s Receipting Tools, you can quickly and easily send out personalized acknowledgements to your valued donors, as well as thank them for gifts you’ve received. Contact us today to get started!

This DonorPerfect Social Series is designed to help you tackle the toughest of year-end tasks. From fundraising efforts to donation processing to reporting, the 12 Days of Year-End Fundraising covers trending topics to help your nonprofit succeed in all of your year-end endeavors.