Almost every day I receive an acknowledgment letter that misses the mark. We’ll call it a no thanks.
But the one I received recently really offers a lesson in what not to do.
Thank you fail
It’s plainly generic, to begin with. Though my name and address appear on the letter, the salutation reads “Dear Friend”. I can’t think of any good reason for this. And the letter was dated three weeks after we sent our gift. That’s too long.
But the worst part was that this was a memorial gift, a tribute to a close friend’s mother who had just passed away. My friend’s family chose this charity to receive memorial gifts. The funeral home provided a form with space to include the name and address of the family member we would like to be notified of our gift. As the person who often handles the mail, I knew to fill the form out completely.
The second sentence of the letter reads:
“Because we did not have the information that would allow us to send a notification of your kind gesture, we have enclosed a special tribute card so that you may do so.”
Say what?
They did have the information. If they lost it, then they ought to have called or written to me to ask for the information. I don’t want to be the one telling my friend about the gift. That feels too much like a bid for thanks. It’s uncomfortable.
The “special tribute card” is simply a generic, branded notecard with information about the organization. The envelope didn’t even have a stamp on it! NO THANKS.
I hope this isn’t their usual way of handling tribute gifts. Maybe it saves them the trouble of writing two letters – one to the donor, and one to the loved ones of the person being memorialized.
Whatever their reason, it really upset me. I made a gift to the organization but was being asked to do half their work for them.
Worse was knowing that my friend’s family entrusted this organization as the recipient of memorial gifts. That trust deserves better treatment.
This is a huge, national organization. There’s no excuse for bad donor care like this.
For me, an organization that probably does very good work missed a chance to cement a relationship. They made my gift feel insignificant. A “Dear Friend” “gesture”.
Not sure I’ll feel good about making another gift to them any time soon.
Note:
Failing to find any development office contact on their website, I called the 800 number at the bottom of the letter. After waiting on hold for ten minutes, I spoke with a very nice call center person and passed along my comments. I also learned that according to their records, notification of the gift was sent to the family. (That’s good, but why tell me it wasn’t?)
I doubt I’ll hear anything more on this, but I’ll update this if I do.
Thank you so much for sharing this experience. Your passion for seeing things done right will help lots of nonprofits. Hopefully many will review their automatic gift acknowledgement letters and systems!
Thanks, Marc. It’s really not all that difficult to do it right. That’s the part that really gets to me.
Get the data right to begin with, put in a few more merge fields, and write a more meaningful letter. It can still be done on a large scale.
Mary, that’s terrible. Tribute gifts are so important to many organizations, and it’s a shame when they go wrong. I wrote about a similar experience a year ago: http://jcainc.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/im-not-your-member/
Thanks, Donna. off to check that out now!
I can do better than that. When we selected a charity for our wedding gifts, they did not keep track of who gave in our honor, so we were not able to write thank-you notes! It was horrible and embarrassing. They notified us of one gift. I emailed and asked them to go through their records to find out if there were more. THey found two more. You can’t tell me that out of 200 invitees, only three gave a gift??? It was awful because I know people thought we didn’t have the courtesy to write thank-yous. Ugh, I cringe just thinking about it.
That IS awful! Really awful! So preventable, so inexcusable.
Thanks for the post Mary. I just wanted to pick up your point about using the ‘Dear Friend’ salutation. I’m in the UK, so things may be a dit different, but I use ‘Dear Friend’ in 2 sorts of cases (or for two reasons). One is that we have a fair few Quaker supporters, and ‘Friend’ is their customary term for other Quakers, so I tend to use ‘Dear Friends’ for example when I’m writing to a Quaker meeting, because I know that’s appropriate for them. But I also use it where I don’t have enough name data to make a proper salutation – eg. the donor has only ever sent a cheque and never a form, so the only name details I have for them are initials and surname as they appear on their cheques – e.g. A. B. Smith. When I write to this person I would use ‘Dear Friend’ because I think it’s the warmest way to address them when you can’t assign a title (because I don’t know the person’s gender). Would you feel that this is an absolute no-no? I’m curious to know what others do in terms of salutations when you don’t have much detail to go on. Thanks!
I’ve used Friend too, when I don’t have a name – or enough of a name. And of course you’d use it when writing to Quakers! Then it stops being generic and starts being appropriate.
In this case I was annoyed because less than an inch away were my name and my husband’s… They obviously had the information and so had no excuse for not adding that field to their letter.
I think the most important thing is for us to prioritize making our donors feel good – by communicating in a warm and personal way – not worrying first about how easily we can get a form letter out the door.
There are so many changes happening in the world of donor management, but this is just kind of sad and the mistakes are pretty basic. I was caught off guard by the PS, which sounded slightly opportunistic and a little desperate. “Hey, thanks for giving! Please give more!” There is a delicate balance in donor appreciation, and this particular example appears to be all about ease of the process for the agency, NOT the donor.
I wonder if more nonprofits recently have diverted into desperation mode because of the economy? It seems like I’m seeing more and more questionable appeals – via mail and email – that are counter to current trends. For example, we know that people don’t respond well to oversolicitation, yet I was INUNDATED with appeals at the end of 2012. And the tone of the appeals was decidedly frantic. We know people would like to choose how agencies communicate with them – and what information they communicate – yet many don’t offer any options.
Great post – clearly it made me think, which is ALWAYS appreciated. Found you via the awesome Heidi Massey, by the way.
She is pretty awesome, isn’t she?
Thanks, Mickey. And I agree – it really seems designed to make things easier for them, not more meaningful for the donor. And that represents such a lost opportunity! Especially because making it much more donor-centric would not take much more effort.
I think desperation is definitely a factor right now. And I understand that. I can’t tell you how many times I review my little dashboard as the year gets near its end! But as you say, when we let that get in the way of treating donors respectfully we’re only shooting ourselves in the foot.
Thanks so much for reading – and for your comments!
Mary, I just caught this post, so I’m late to the party. Thank you for sharing your personal experience. I hope it will help some charities do a better job. I’m sorry for your friend’s loss, and I hope your post will help their favorite charity do better, too. I only wish you had shared the name of offending organization. You extended a kindness to them that they clearly do not deserve. Revealing the charity’s name would also warn prospective donors about the treatment they might expect.
Thanks, Michael. I didn’t want to make it about shaming them – though maybe you’re right and I should have.
But I suspect things like this happen – maybe especially – at larger organizations when they’re structured to make it easier on THEM, instead of better for their donors.
I got a sort of form “sorry for your bad experience” note a month or so later. But again, anything but a very personal response – and one that took total responsibility for blowing it – would be enough.
I was especially surprised that they offered no way to contact the development director!