Episode 179 | The 20 Ways to Thank Your Donors in 2020 Fundraising Freedom Podcast with Mary Valloni

Today, we are jumping into the topic of thankfulness. As we gear up for our Thanksgiving holiday this week, I wanted to be sure that we talked about how we can thank our donors. So, we're going to talk about the top 20 ways to thank your donors in 2020.
As you know, this is such an unusual year. In the seventh step of my Fundraising Freedom process, Make Your Difference, it’s all about thanking people and getting people engaged in the work that's being done so that they keep coming back year after year. In that chapter of my book, I discuss the five love languages. Many of you are familiar with Gary Chapman's Five Love Languages, but if you're not, those five love languages are words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. Those five areas are really the areas that we're looking for as we're thanking our donors and inviting them to continue to give year after year.
A study that came out from Merci Chocolates shows the fact that we actually say “thank you” over 2000 times in the course of a year. This means that most of us are saying thank you at least five times a day. But the deal is, that based on their study, over half of the people said that they were insincere when they actually said those things to us. So, when you say thank you nearly five times a day, up to three of those times that you said thank you actually didn't mean much of anything. Sometimes we say thank you, but we don't always get it across. I would love for the study to be able to actually address how many times a nonprofit or ministry leader actually said thank you because I would say that we are probably in the 10s of thousands, if not more because we're always saying thank you to our volunteers and donors. That's where I want to kind of shake those things out for our conversation today. How can we make saying thank you a little bit more sincere so that our donors really do feel like they mean something to them?
In that final chapter of my book, I specifically tell a story where a lady had donated something to an auction that we were we were doing, and she saw that I showed an interest in a ring that she had donated. I made a comment about potentially bidding on that item at the auction. Of course, I worked for the organization and was obviously not able to bid on it. She came back a few days later and gave me another ring that looked just like the other one. And she was very kind to do that. As an organization, we aren't allowed to receive gifts like that and so I actually took the item and donated it back to the organization. But later on, I saw her at an event where we had a booth set up. She approached me and was really upset with me because I hadn't sent her a handwritten thank you specifically for that item that she had given to me. Now she had received a thank you in the past, we had thanked her for her donation of the ring, she just was locked into the fact that I personally did not send her a handwritten thank you showing my appreciation. And at that moment, she gave me a what for; she got on my case, as I was trapped behind a booth space. She told me that she was going to make this a teachable moment for me. But in return, she actually made me feel really hurt because a volunteer of mine had invited this lady in and so I was more concerned about another volunteer’s feelings around this situation and that I had upset this potential donor who was a friend of hers. I immediately left the space and went and called my volunteer that I really did have a relationship with, and I told her I was so sorry that this had happened. And of course, it was a teachable moment. I'm still sharing it today and it’s a moment that I really reflect on quite a bit. But the thing is that it comes back to how people like to be shown appreciation, how they like to be thanked. As I talk about the five love languages, it's really apparent that some people really like and really need those words of affirmation, they