Episode #289
Is it hard to get your board members to say “Thank You” to donors?
Research shows that when board members thank donors, giving goes up. So if your fundraising increases, why is it hard sometimes to get board members to thank donors?
In this week’s video, Marc A. Pitman shares a couple of reasons why board members may not be so open to thanking donors. And then Marc walks you through a simple and fun way to get board members excited and motivated to thank donors.
If you have any stories or advice around getting board members to thank donors, please share it with everyone else. Leave a comment under the video. Thanks.
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If you have any stories or advice around getting board members to thank donors, please share it with everyone else. Leave a comment. Thanks. 🙂
Marc, great talk on thanking donors. Liked it. Scott Morton
Great, simple, yet impactful message today. I need to get better at those small thank yous, as you pointed out they are just as important and large thank yous. This was the perfect nug I needed today. Thank YOU!
I think you have hit on something very important here. As the founder (and Artistic/Education/Executive Director) of a Children’s Theatre, I have been trying to cultivate the feeling that the board is an integral part of the work we do. Therefore, I haven’t wanted to send them thanks you’s recently because then we might be back to the mindset of “this is MY organization and you are just helping out”. But there has been such a reluctance on their part to simply call each donor and say thank you that maybe something along these lines is going on. I am going to try this today!
Thank you!
Marc: brilliant, personal, and so timely and do-able. Thank you! And, kudos Beth Ann!
Thanks Chris and Marc for this video! It’s a great reminder to be specific with our gratitude, and to remember that the “thankers” should be thanked too!
Awesome Marc – I think you could take this one step further and then present your board members with a similar list of donors that need thanked and assign them the notes based on their own personalities. So if Steph is the quiet thinker, give her a donor with that same quality because her words will resonate with that type of donor. Your humor guy can send a thank you to the quirky donors in your organization and so on…just a thought!
Thanks for the great video and love the idea on how to thank the Board – will definitely use that. It took a bit of work but our Board has really embraced doing thank yous. We have them share some of their experiences at the Board meetings and that encourages others to take on the task as well. One Board member recently shared that he was having a bad week and he sent me this after “Has been a stressful few weeks for me and this certainly warmed my heart again. Spoke to some great people.” He was re-energized hearing how passionate these supporters are and felt honoured to be part of it. From my experience, usually the hesitation in the beginning is not feeling equipped or knowing what to write/say – if they have the info they need to do the thank you, it can be a really rewarding experience that Board members will line up to do.
Good point! If our board members don’t know what an effective thank you feels like, it would be hard for them to be comfortable writing one for someone else. We used a similar approach for our outgoing board member gifts last year for the first time. Our CEO came up with that list of qualities to make a word cloud for each outgoing member and then matted and framed it for them. Simple, inexpensive and yet very personal. “Thank you” was the most prominent phrase for each person, and was also repeated several times in the cloud. You can see a photo on Facebook: https://goo.gl/Ym6bH8
Great advice, Mark! And I love the practical and ‘doable’ way you present it. Keep up the great work!