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I want to ask you a really important question what happens when a small dollar donor makes a donation to your organization online no really like what are the steps that happen after you process that donation through your payment processor well the first thing that should definitely happen is that donor should be receiving a thank you email from your organization but there are a wide range of thank you emails and receipts you could be sending to donors and today I want to share with you a really great one that I recently received and talk about some tips that I think you can take from it to use in your own donor stewardship my name is Vanessa Chase lection and the president of the storytelling nonprofit so donor experience is a really important part of the puzzle of retaining our donors over the long run and you know there's a lot of parts and pieces that go into donor experience but I always think about it as just the experience that donors have with your organization after they'd made a gift and unfortunately there's a wide range of experiences out there for donors and I think the ones that are memorable that do a really good job making a special meaningful experience for even small dollar donors are the ones that are more likely to retain their donors over time now I have to say I recently had an experience making a small dollar donation to an organization where I made my donation I received kind of like a I guess like a receipt a transaction receipt in my email shortly after I made it and before I received any thank-you and in fact I haven't received one I got another fundraising email from them less than five hours later yikes so I was pretty surprised by that but I have to say I don't think it's super uncommon for that kind of thing to be happening so I wanted to talk today about what we can do to really step up the experience and one great experience that I had recently was with making a donation to 350.org and I want to talk a little bit about their emails and about the experience from my perspective as a donor here we are over on my desktop I downloaded PDFs of both these emails to show you so as I mentioned they're both from 350.org they were small dollar donations I made and they really stood out to me for a couple of reasons first of all I received two thank you emails from them within the span of 24 hours one was the general thank you which you can see here and then the other was a specific one for a new donor which I received the next day but I just want to talk about some of the qualities of both these emails that really make them strong compelling thank you emails and really contribute to a great and exceptional donor experience so first and foremost one of the things that I love the most about this first email is the the way it speaks to kind of the story of us and the way that it really speaks to the movement so this second paragraph here really talks about the ways that donors are contributing to this and contributing to the victories that three fifty.org has had and so that really makes donors feel like they're a part of something that their donation is going towards something significant and really signaling that your donation matters so it's a value to us it's a value to the movement I think that's something that's really great to be echoing and reflecting back to donors so one of the things that's really nice about this letter too is that in the second part of it they transition here with this sentence the impact of your support is being filled far and wide and this year we're going to we're going even bolder to combat the climate crisis so they talked about I think the areas that they're working on and in a lot of ways I think this gives some accountability and transparency as to how the donations are used and how donors are a partner both through their donation and their activism with 350.org so I think these things are really good they're really good for relationship building they're really good for transparency they're really good for accountability and for helping donors feel connected to what they're a part of as a result of donating to this organization so those are some things I really like about the first email and I'll just show you the second one here so this is the second email I received about 24 hours after I made my first donation and I have to say even though I'm a fundraising professional and I've been working on donor stewardship for a long time this was probably the only experience I've had receiving a separate and second thank you email specifically for a new donor and I was genuinely surprised I don't ice others in my inbox I was actually kind of delighted to see a second thank you email and to also acknowledge that it was my first time donation and as you may know in your own small dollar Jonah program you're definitely getting new acquisitions every month and so this may be something you want to think about in terms of customizing and personalizing the experience for new small-dollar donors to the organization there were definitely some things I loved about this email and I'll just point them out quickly since we're taking a look at it I really like the inclusion of some of the images and the work in action specifically their protests and the work that you are on climate change in actions showing really the movement and the kind of wide array of people who support this work I thought that was really interesting just to kind of connect that and show donors that they're part of something really big much bigger than themselves and they I think one of the things they also do is use this email as a way to educate donors and really bring them into the fold a little bit more you could probably assume donors and if something about your organization if they've made a first time donation maybe they're already on your list maybe they've been signing petitions things like that but I think that this this email in particular just kind of gives like some good baseline information I would say it really answers the question who who are we and what do we stand for and what do you stand for as a result of donating to us and being a part of the donor community to this movement so they do that here in a couple of paragraphs one of the other things that I think is really great about this is that they've also given donors a way to take further action so they just kind of a plug a really soft call-to-action here to check out featured campaigns and maybe find a local climate action group so again it's a way to engage donors a little bit more if you're tracking donor engagement and trying to figure out ways to deepen the engagement ladder and continue to really turn donors into deep-seated activists and donors this might be a really interesting thing to test and check out and lastly the other thing I thought was really great about this email was this kind of last sentence or two here you know if you've questions out of your donation or work you can reach out to us and they have a specific email set up for donors which I thought was really great one of the things I think makes a donor experience special especially in the major gifts realm is this idea of kind of like concierge service towards donors and while that's not possible to do for every donor it is possible to bring elements of that experience into the small dollar donor experience and this one I think does a really good job with that it gives us information a way to open up two-way communication should we feel so inclined and be able to reach out with questions or you know comments about the work and to really participate a little bit more and be connected to the organization in a different way [Music] thing exceptional to be remembered I hope they give you some good inspiration and food for thought for your own donor stewardship initiatives I thought to hear from you in the comments below have you ever tried updating your donor thank you emails or is this something that you are proactively thinking about sending to your donors let me know below I'd love to hear from you you're thinking about other ways that you can step up your donor retention strategy I'd love to send you towards a tool that I've created to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your donor stewardship it's called the donor stewardship assessment tool and I'll leave a link just below if you'd like to check that out it's an online assessment you can take to understand how effective your stewardship is and figure out some ways that you can really improve it to improve your donor retention and hopefully your fundraising bottom line thank you so much for tuning in today and joining me for this tutorial if you were interested in seeing more fundraising and communications tutorials for me be sure to hit the subscribe button