How A Thank-You Can Revolutionize Donor Retention: Insights with Joe Leach and Tom Lynch

Discover how a simple thank-you can transform your nonprofit's fundraising. Join Nonprofit Expert, presented by DonorPerfect, featuring experts from CauseVid and AppealMaker. Learn how gratitude boosts donor retention and satisfaction with practical tips, strategies, and data. Enhance your donor relations and boost your fundraising success with this insightful episode.

Connect with DonorPerfect
LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | X

Learn more about Donor Retention

Transcript

DonorPerfect 0:03

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect.

Darryl Moser 0:15

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert podcast presented by DonorPerfect. My name is Darryl Moser, I am a DonorPerfect product manager and my passion is all things tech related to helping nonprofits succeed. Today we will talk about thanking donors and how technology can impact your thank you communication by making them more personal and giving you more options that require minimal effort. Today we have with me Joe Leach, ceo of AppealMaker, and Tom Lynch, co-founder of CauseVid, makers of DB Video. Let's first dig into the data. How important is thanking donors? We took a look at the 10,000 donor-perfect clients and we found those that thanked their donors gave again 11 days sooner and their gift was twice that of those who were not thanked. Analyzing 10,000 donor-perfect clients, we found that those who were thanked gave again 11 days sooner and their gift was twice that of those who were not thanked. Another study among cultural institutions Another study among cultural institutions donors identified their number. One reason for lapsing was because they were not acknowledged. The second reason was that they were never asked to give again. It's almost as though their gift did not exist. So thanking donors is absolutely key to your fundraising strategy. As a matter of fact, there is a whole series of philanthropic psychology communication that is out there today that really provides emphasis on how important personalized communication and recognition to the donor will produce the strongest impact and the most donations. So, with that, let's start digging into how tech can actually help you thank your donors. We're going to begin talking a little bit with a ApealMaker and so, joe, I'd like to hear from you how does the automatic thank you letter work and what was the motivation behind creating it? So the automatic thank you.

AppealMaker 2:28

I think I'll start with the motivation that might kind of set the stage for for the rest of it. It was the most searched for keyword when we were doing our marketing. It was the most, it had the most interest from organizations and it had to do with they were trying to find an easy way to do it. There were many organizations that were completely on board with this idea. They had seen the statistics that you, they had seen the statistics that you had just presented and they knew. But it was difficult.

AppealMaker 3:09

It was kind of a pain to get thank yous out on a timely basis and I know we're going to talk more about the timing later, but that was that was what they were looking for as a quick way to do it. And I will just say you know again, we use all kinds of advertising to try to attract new clients for the appeal maker platform and in every case when we promote the thank yous receipts, any kind of transactional, after-gift type communication, people are just wildly interested in learning more. So we developed a way to get thank yous out quickly and affordably. Getting them out quickly wasn't a problem, but for a company like ours to do three pieces or 10 pieces or 15 pieces economically was difficult, difficult. So the secret is we did find a way to do it systematically cheaper, but we also do it because we know that's part of the comprehensive plan of doing it. I didn't answer your question yet about how it works. Do you want me to go into that yet?

Darryl Moser 4:42

Well, yeah, I think talking a little bit about how it talks to the CRMalMaker will do is it will look at your records that are tagged in a number of different ways, just based on how you want to go about it.

AppealMaker 5:14

But you'll set up a query that says whenever you see this field tag data, pull that name in and send this mailing piece. And the way it's set up is you can, you can pick any template in our system so you could send a postcard or you could send a letter, you could send a gift receipt, anything you want. Customize it. And once you set that template up and say this is my automation, then every day, three days week, it will go and pull those names and send the mailing out.

Darryl Moser 5:52

Perfect, perfect. So basically the nonprofit organization doesn't have to do anything after the gift is entered into DonorPerfect, the printed thank you automatically goes out using the template that they've chosen Wonderful, wonderful, and, joe, you know, compared to what it would be like if they tried to print these in-house and, you know, print them off in the laser printer and stuff them and mail them, what does that take in time? Well, I know even with our automated system.

AppealMaker 6:21

It takes time. So I can't imagine if you were starting from scratch. I mean, you can have a template set up. There's also the cost, the internal costs. There's the time and the cost. But I would say if you're going to send out 10 thank yous, you're going to have a half an hour. I would think. At least just you know the doing it. I think when people are trying to justify that it's okay to do it internally, they are thinking about it in a minimalistic way, like well, they'll add up. Well, it only takes 20 seconds to print those out of my printer and it only takes me two minutes to fold them. And it only takes me. But there's moving from the task. You're on concentrating on that and making sure everything's right. Then getting them done, I'm just going to take a. I'm going to say it's 15 minutes at a minimum, if not half an hour. And if you give me an opportunity to go on and on about my favorite subject of opportunity cost, I'll do that, but for now I digress.

Darryl Moser 7:35

Okay, all right, no, that's a really good metric. So if we use that average and we say that it's three minutes per letter on average, imagine if you're a nonprofit that has 3000 gifts a year, that is actually one month of human effort to thank your donors. And think about how you might be able to use that one month of effort somewhere else in your organization. That could better your fundraising or even better your cause. Awesome, awesome. That's a great summary of what AppealMaker does and how you've used tech. Appealmaker does and how you've used tech. So, tom, a question for you what do we know about videos and how are videos received in our current culture?

CauseVid 8:12

Great Thanks for the question, darryl. So videos in a company to printed thank yous are a great way to connect on a personal level with donors. Videos can be highly personable. They also allow you to engage in ways that you can't necessarily with text. You can show tone and emotion and body language and things like that. And so the DP video platform, coupled with CauseVid, allows organizations to send what we call a video email message, which basically is a branded email that has an animated image of the first few seconds of the video which causes the donor to then click that video, which brings them over to a landing page where they watch the video, and all of the branding is consistent with the organization. So, as opposed to watching a video on YouTube or something else where you don't have full control, the DP Video Causeway platform allows you to really have control of that messaging.

Darryl Moser 9:05

Perfect, perfect. So this is so personalized and, tom, I know we've talked about this in the past this just feels like the modern version of the handwritten thank you, note. Right, you get the personalization. Now you get a video with it, right?

CauseVid 9:20

Right, and you know we have a lot of customers that say that they've replaced some portion of their handwritten note campaigns with video. You know I don't know about you guys, but I spend so much time typing on the computer these days If I actually had to write out 20 or 30 thank you notes as I do, you know, around the holiday season it's quite the task. And across our Cosvid platform with DonorPerfect Video, we're seeing about a 75% open rate of these video emails and subsequently about a 50% engagement rate with the video content 75% is huge.

Darryl Moser 10:07

I believe that the normal open rate and actually I just received some statistics from Constant Contact that our open rate is somewhere around 45% for regular email, so you're bordering on almost double the open rate, and that open rate from constant contact is about 10% higher than the normal average. So just the technology that we're using here, the ability for it to impact and reach people, is so much more significant. So great, great to learn and expand a little bit upon what a video email is. Tom, you had mentioned that donors actually share their thank you videos. What provides that inspiration and what impact does it have on organizations?

CauseVid 10:39

You know from what we've heard from different organizations, a lot of times they'll say things to us like I actually got a message back from a video email message I sent a donor and that message back is a thank you for thanking them, which we kind of chuckle about, you know, because you don't usually get that type of engagement with other types of communication. You know, one great example of what we suggest organizations do with their video is provide some sort of behind-the-scenes look too into what's going on at the organization, and so I think it's the type of content that people are receiving, the fact that it's personalized, which gets people really excited about sharing it. We also see cases, too, where you know people have forwarded or shared on social media those video messages Again, messages again really just has to do with how unique a method of communicating this is with people.

Darryl Moser 11:31

Understood completely and there was actually one donor, perfect, where the major gift officer. I understood that they were actually video thanking every donor and just checking their retention figures are over 60%, where, our understanding is, the industry average is closer to 40% of retention of donors. Are you hearing this from your clients, tom, that their retention numbers are going up?

CauseVid 11:57

We absolutely are. And in talking with that client that you're referring to, I mean they set about 20, 30 minutes aside every week to just kind of go through and record those video messages and the way we tell people about it is sort of it's like sending a voicemail message, except your camera's on. So leave a personable introduction, talk about why the gift is important, what the impact is, and then say if you need anything, feel free to reach back out to me. Right? It's short and simple, it doesn't have to be complicated.

Darryl Moser 12:29

Do clients sometimes feel the urge to overproduce their video?

CauseVid 12:33

Thank you, I think some do. You know, a lot of times when people think about video and how to use video in their nonprofit organization, people think about highly produced, very expensive pieces of content. We recommend that these video thank you messages be really more off the cuff and a little bit more. You know, basically like I just picked up my phone and I wanted to send you a message, daryl, because I was thinking about you, or I was thinking about something you and I talked about a few weeks ago, and so they don't need to be highly produced. And the reality is, with today's camera phones you actually get pretty significant video quality with the options that are out there today, With high megapixel cameras and image stabilization, you can film some great things on an iPhone, as Apple likes to tout.

Darryl Moser 13:25

Right, right. The next thing that I wanted to touch on was the impact of how timely the thank you is and what is the impact on fundraising. What are your thoughts on that?

CauseVid 13:35

You know, I think across the board for our clients we see people kind of thanking inside of a seven-day window. You know part of this has to do with when they can allocate the time to create the videos. But you know, it's one of those things where as soon as someone makes a donation, you know they're likely to get an immediate acknowledgement from. You know the platform that processed the transaction. And then you know a few days later if it's three, five, seven, if they get another video message. You know, I think that that's a reasonable timeframe. And again, you know I think that that's a reasonable timeframe. And again, you know you can. You can not only thank the donor but you can also tell them about something else. Right, to keep them engaged, to sort of build that donor stewardship. You know donor journey, if you will, as you do you know other types of communications to them, not just video.

Effective Donor Thanking Strategies

Darryl Moser 14:21

Great, great. And Joe, your product is actually wrapped around. The idea of expediting that thank you, the physical thank you letter going out. What would your recommendations be in terms of turnaround time and what kind of impact do you feel that that has on donors that are thanking through?

AppealMaker 14:37

AppealMaker. Look at any studies about the, not only the psychological but the biological effects of a thank you. There are two things that impact that more than anything timing and the and how genuine the message is. So the the more genuine, the faster you can get that out, the higher the impact. So it comes down to cost, because you can. To me, I think every two or three days is the perfect cycle. It's depending upon how many acknowledgements you're sending out. It's still really inexpensive. Our system is still quite inexpensive. It's maybe if you mailed one or two piecess going out and you say, well, I'll go every seven days and build up more and get a little bit cheaper price per piece. You can do that. But in the end I think the sooner the better.

Darryl Moser 15:58

Makes sense Makes sense, and the more efficient you can be in that way, the better off the org is going to be and the less time they're going to spend on it. The other thing that our industry talks about is that the donors should be thanked seven times. Now, you know, people oftentimes extrapolate that in their head and they imagine sending seven letters out. But what does that really look like? For most organizations, you know, is seven over the top know is seven over the top.

AppealMaker 16:31

So I think you made a very good point is that we imagine it's seven letters, or it's a video and a letter, and you have to remember that how you present the, even the thank you page, right From when, when a gift is given, for example, electronically, that's a thank you and the genuine nature of that, just changing your text a little bit to make it feel more genuine, or, let me just say, to be more genuine as you're, you know, coming up with what you're going to put there. I think the other point is that seven, if you take that seven times and say, all right, we will span that out over a little bit of time because, yes, seven may be too much if they get it in the next week, but if we take those seven times and span that out over a little, you know, over a period of time, sending up some stewardship communications, you know, two weeks later, a month later, those kinds of things can all, can all add up. So, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's over the top.

Darryl Moser 17:37

Great, Great Tom. What are your thoughts on that?

CauseVid 17:39

I would absolutely agree. You know, if we take monthly donors and we set them aside for a minute, right, most donors that we see being thanked, you know we're making one or two gifts a year and so therefore the thanking process, as Joe alluded to, really can be stretched out over time. And if you think let's just take, you know, an electronic gift for a minute, right, so as soon as you click process payment, right, you're going to get a thank you page. So there's one. You know you're going to get an email that's an acknowledgement of the gift. There's two, right, you're going to get probably a tax letter at the end of the year. That's three, right.

CauseVid 18:17

And so now you just sort of have four or five interactions that you can do over the span of, let's say, you know, six months or a year, right, to really fill out that. You know seven touches. You know there's a lot of data that does back that up. You know we see it in other industries too, not just the nonprofit space, and you know, sales organizations, same thing, right, you got to touch somebody seven times before they engage with. You know, engage with you. So we are you know full heartedly believing that.

CauseVid 18:38

And again, you know, the more personalized and the more genuine you can make it and the more you can tie back the impact of the gift. You know, as the organization is doing things throughout the year and you're providing updates, those can be thank yous as well. You don't necessarily have to say thank you in a communication.

Darryl Moser 18:56

Great, great. And the next question we're all about the tech and the efficiency of communication and using some higher technology, but one of the things that nonprofits struggle with is content. How do I write the thank you letter in such a way that it actually is going to be impactful? They may not be the best writers and well, we know the chat GBT has just shown up, but what would you recommend either of you recommend to include in your thank you letters or video to try and help it be personalized and impactful?

CauseVid 19:26

So I can start on the video side of things. You know, we we kind of say a few key things are required. So the first thing smile and wave at the beginning of the email Because, again, the DP video platform takes that first five seconds and creates that animated image that gets embedded into the email. Have such high open and view rates has to do with that. People recognize, or they begin to recognize, the person that's communicating with them and so when they get an email they say, oh, this is from Tom, I want to hear what he has to say, and so they're very eager to click through and to watch that content. So smile and wave at the beginning, then in the video to actually say the person's name. If you have any personal information that you know about them, also add that. So maybe it's you know. Thank you so much for just joining our monthly giving program. Or thank you so much for repeating, you know, the same gift that you made last year.

CauseVid 20:19

Try to add something, you know, that's personable to the person. That will get them to then engage with the content longer. You know there's some studies out there that talk about you know, if you don't engage somebody in the first, you know five to seven seconds of a video, then you're likely to lose them on the back end of it and then, finally, you know, provide a couple sentences about the impact that their gift has. You know, again, these videos don't have to be complicated. I think the really successful videos that we see our clients create are between 25 and 40 seconds. And you know, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be, you know, minutes and minutes of content.

Darryl Moser 20:58

That's a really good point, really good point. And, joe, what about in the written thank you? What is some really good content to put in there to really touch the donor?

AppealMaker 21:12

touch the donor. Well, obviously, personalization is key and I would say, particularly if the thank you is about a particular gift, you absolutely want to include the gift amount, you want to acknowledge the specifics of it. And the other thing I would say is you can't spend too much time either cleaning up your data in DonorPerfect or to set a protocol for anyone that's entering new data or you're adding new prospects or donors. If it takes twice or three times as long to enter a name, to get everything right, and I'm talking about having a specific salutation line that is thought about from the perspective of when the person gets my communication and I use this field in my letter how is it going to read, and that just you cannot spend enough time making that as perfect as possible. With that context in mind and I really love Tom's idea of adding some stewardship reporting information in as well saying this is the impact that that gift is having.

Darryl Moser 22:25

Yeah, I think that last point is really relevant. We see that in some of the surveys as well is people sometimes stop giving because they say I didn't know how you ended up using my money. So if you know that they were giving to a specific campaign, make sure that you reference that inside of your thank you communication. Just say that they know and have an affirmation of the cause that they were actually giving to, that they were actually giving to. So in communicating with donors and thanking them, are there any mistakes, any faux pas that they could end up slipping into their thank you communication? What should they avoid? What should they do to not make that mistake?

AppealMaker 23:02

I've got two things. A back to what I said is that if your data is not correct misspelling something, having a vague message without any personalization, having a salutation that looks like it was automatically generated these will wipe out the value of the thank you.

CauseVid 23:27

Just a little joke in here as we're going along. So my wife and I give to our university, but she's really the one like she's on the board and everything, and for whatever reason, the direct mail always comes dear Thomas and Pamela Lynch, and she infuriates her because she's the one that's really the donor, not me, and for whatever reason it's, we both went to the same university, right, so we're both there. But you know it, just it's funny. And she rags and rags and rags to the. You know the advancement. People like put my name first and it's still. It's even years. It's, it's funny.

Darryl Moser 24:00

So that's a data thing? Yeah, for sure.

CauseVid 24:02

Yeah, maybe that that'll give you some ideas, but yeah, so what are some some faux pas that you know we would recommend avoiding when it comes to creating videos? I mean, there's certainly the obvious ones saying the wrong person's name, you know, not looking at the camera, having, you know, a very, very distracting background going on. Know, what we recommend is just don't try to be, try to be genuine, Don't be too scripted, you know, don't? You know, look like you're reading something off of a computer and you're not really in the frame. You know, just again, it comes back to that idea of you're leaving somebody a voicemail just with the camera on.

Darryl Moser 24:45

Makes sense, makes sense. So now an open question for the future of thanking donors. You know what? What could happen in the future that would use technology and just take it even one notch higher. Any thoughts on that?

CauseVid 24:59

So I mean, we believe at Cosvid that the trend of personalization will continue.

CauseVid 25:04

You know, whether that means more virtual reality types of things, or meeting people in the metaverse, or for virtual reality types of things, or meeting people in the metaverse, or you know other types of technology.

CauseVid 25:19

I think you know people want to be, they want information that is in the format that they are comfortable engaging with, right. So this concept of meet someone where they are right. So if I, if I make, if I write out a check and I send it to my favorite nonprofit, you know, and they send me a text message back, that's probably not, you know, meeting me where I am, whereas you know if I send a Venmo to my favorite nonprofit and they fire me a text message back saying, you know, hey, thanks so much. Those kinds of things are more aligned. So I think, from our perspective, we see the trend really just getting more refined as it comes to meeting people where they are. And, you know, when it comes to video, there's certainly a lot of stuff going on in the realm of AI at the moment. Some of it's a little scary, but you know, I think that again, it's personalization, personalization, personalization.

Darryl Moser 26:10

Sure, sure, it makes complete sense. Again, it's personalization, personalization, personalization, sure, sure it makes complete sense. And I mean just even taking the technology that we see in other places in our world. I mean the concept of will there be a 3D video, thank you? Or what if there was a virtual reality handshake that ended up happening that comes along with your thank you message, however that may be transported. I mean, who knows? There's a lot of tech that could evolve.

CauseVid 26:33

Yeah, to add to that, I actually saw a video recently that you know kind of had a digital billboard outside of a nonprofit organization when somebody walked by the system sort of knew that they were a donor and they put their name up on there and said, hey, you know, thanks for your support, and you know. Then they walked away and it went back to you know then then they walked away and it went back to you know whatever content it had on it before. So you know, I'm certainly sure there might be some interactive types of things that are pretty clever, that may evolve in the future Great.

Darryl Moser 26:59

Thank you so much for the input that you provided and just sharing about your technology. Just to wrap up here, I wanted to provide a little summary. Appealmaker is the solution that integrates directly with DonorPerfect and allows you to automatically print thank you letters and mail them out without having to use up any of your staff time, and CauseVid is the solution that is used for DP video, where you can take video thank yous of yourself and send them out to your donors, giving them that personalized touch. Tom, joe, thank you so much for participating, and I want to thank you all listeners and looking forward to our next podcast.

DonorPerfect 27:40

Thank you for listening to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. For more information and a special offer, visit DonorPerfectcom. Slash podcast.