Show Your Monthly Donors How Grateful You Are

By Erica Waasdorp

As you’re getting ready for Thanksgiving and your year-end campaigns, I hope you’ll make one resolution: include your monthly donors in your thank-you messaging.

What does that mean? It means creating a tiny variation of your Thanksgiving email, saying, “Thank you for your monthly gifts. You make a difference!”

It means including your monthly donors in your thank-a-thon before the end of the year. It even means including your monthly donors in your special-match messages, #GivingTuesday messages, etc. And always in a tiny variation that tells them: I know you. I know you’ve already committed to making a monthly gift. And we appreciate that. But I wanted to give you this special opportunity.

If you’re sending out holiday cards, by all means, include your monthly donors. After all, they don’t just give $5, $10 or $24 a month, they give at mid-level if you annualize their donations.

I’m not asking you to make your life more complicated. Take a look at what you may already be doing for your high-end donors and just add in your monthly donors there.

Because every donor likes to be appreciated.

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to you, fundraiser, as well. You rock! You make a difference every day, every month, every year. So enjoy some time off later this week, and enjoy your family and loved ones because next week will start your busiest time.

But you know you do it because you want to make a difference to your clients, people, patients, animals, anybody you and your organization serve. And what you’re doing is working, simply by chipping away at it, day after day.

Finally, as you may know, I’m Dutch, so Thanksgiving was not a holiday I grew up with. I’m all for relaxed approaches to holidays, so if you’d like to know my secret for an easy Thanksgiving, it’s called the Turkey Kit. Virtually every supermarket offers it, and the turkey only needs another two hours or so. You can sleep in! It’s absolutely the most stress-free approach to serving a wonderful meal to your guests. But whatever you do, enjoy it and be grateful—that’s what it’s all about.

Thank you again! And happy Thanksgiving!

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Monthly Giving

Erica Waasdorp Author's page

Erica Waasdorp is one of the leading experts on monthly giving. She is the president of A Direct Solution, a company serving nonprofit organizations with fundraising and direct marketing needs, with a focus on monthly giving and appeals. She authored "Monthly Giving: The Sleeping Giant" and "Monthly Giving Made Easy." She regularly blogs and presents on fundraising, appeals and monthly giving — in person and through webinars. She is happy to answer any questions you may have about this great way of improving retention rates for your donors.

Erica has over 30 years of experience in nonprofits and direct response. She helped the nonprofits she works with raise millions of dollars through monthly giving programs. She is also very actively supports organizations with annual fund planning and execution, ranging from copywriting, creative, lists, print and mail execution.

When she’s not working or writing, Erica can be found on the golf course (she’s a straight shooter) or quietly reading a book. And if there’s an event with a live band, she and her husband, Patrick, can be found on the dance floor. She also loves watching British drama on PBS. Erica and Patrick have two step sons and a cat, Mientje.