
Picture Source: http://z6.co.uk/sr7qg8
You know what its like when you get a hand written thank you card, it makes you feel special. Don’t we want to make our donors feel special?
So is it worth taking the time to hand write your thank you notes?
Its possibly not realistic to hand-write all your thank you notes, but maybe you could take the time to write one a day? Ask all your staff to write one a day.
I think by doing this something else will happen in your organisation. You will start to look at all your appreciation communications. As you hand write a note you will look for ways to relate the donation to the donor, to talk about impact, to really personalise it. Thats not something we do with mail merge. We tend to categorise donations into campaign pigeon holes and so the person that responded to mailing X gets thanks letter X and the person that donated because of event Y gets thank you letter Y.
By taking the time to hand write some notes, not only will you make those donors feel great (do it randomly too, dont just pick the big cheques), you will start to think about how you can apply this right across your organisation.
So while the idea of hand writing all your thank you notes may be a bit idealogical, you should look at how you can apply your hand written note thinking to all your thank you letters (should they be letters by the way?)