Did you know that when you make a donation to charity, your brain acts in a similar way to when you’re eating chocolate?
This reward or pleasure response in your brain is activated after you make a donation. It is what we call the “warm glow” that you get after you’ve done something good.
These feelings will naturally decline over time, so the moment right after someone makes a donation is the most opportune time to bond them to your organization.
It’s the most opportune time to make them feel even more special and potentially engage them to do something else – such as share their donation or recommend your organization to a friend.
It can be hard though to add a special, personal touch to every donation – especially if your organization is processing hundreds a day.
After someone makes a donation, you should also be trying to automate some tasks, such as data integration and receipts, so that you have more time to focus on donor relationships.
Here are our top 5 things to do after someone makes a donation, to capitalize on the moment and help reduce wasted effort on administration. Please note that these are not in order of steps as all of them are important.
1) Send Them To A Fantastic Thank You Page
This is the simplest one, but often one that organizations forget in their fundraising plans.
You should be creating an amazing thank you page that truly thanks your donor. Sing their praises on this page! Make them feel like the most important person in the world – because they are.
The thank you page should make the donor feel valued, no matter how small their donation was. It’s sure to be something that every donor sees, so I think it’s more important than the thank you email.
Take the time to plan out what is going to be on this page. Once you initially set up your thank you page, you shouldn’t need to do much more from there.
A couple of things you could add include are:
- A thank you video from your beneficiaries, founder or CEO
- Social links to share their donation on social media
- Upgrades to other programs such as monthly giving or peer-to-peer fundraising
See our other tips on ways you can optimize your thank you page.
With CauseVox donation pages you can set up your own thank you page where you can incorporate these tips to ensure that you provide a great donor experience.
Here is a clear and simple thank you page from charity:water with additional engagement opportunities.
2) Ask Them To Share With Friends
As the donor is feeling very warm and special, now is the best time to get them to share their donation on social media.
Have a “share” link on your thank you page, and in your thank you email.
Include an image and short message on their share link so it’s ready to share on any platform, while also allowing the donor to create their own messaging.
If they don’t share, make sure there are links for them to follow you on social media so that you can continue to communicate with them on social later.
3) Send Them A Receipt And Thank Them Again
Providing an e-receipt immediately after their donation is a good donor experience, and that should be the absolute minimum you do. Some organizations provide a printed receipt, and some go a step further to send a written thank you note or welcome pack via the mail.
Depending on your budget and resources, you may choose to do both printed and email. For ease and cost efficiency, we recommend an e-journey – sending your donors down an email welcome series.
Ideally, you will automate the email communications in this journey, using a marketing automation platform, such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. This will reduce manual efforts of tracking and sending to each individual donor, whilst still ensuring that every donor is thanked and engaged.
Here’s an example e-welcome journey that we use for new donors:
- An email receipt immediately following their donation, that they can use for tax purposes.
- A personal email the next day from your CEO or founder.
- Another email a week after their donation to give them more information about what their donation has achieved.
- A follow up next month to let give them further information about your organization and ask them to become a regular giver
Make sure you are singing your donor’s praises in each email.
Pro tip – A personal phone call for regular givers or mid-value donors is a really lovely touch, particularly as they are the more long-term, committed donors. This is something you could get a group of volunteers or staff members to do every week.
4) Track Their Donation
One of the final pieces is to track their donation. All of your tracking needs to be set up beforehand to allow this to happen – so plan ahead.
Ensure your fundraising platform automatically collects the donor information for you, so you can best understand your fundraising progress and gain insight: :
- The donor’s details such as name, email, address, and postal address (if required)
- What time and date they made their donation
- Any donor comments, tribute donation information, etc.
- Where the donor came from (i.e. a search engine, a facebook ad), tracked with an integration with Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel
Tracking your donations ensures that you are able to properly evaluate your campaign with daily and weekly donation totals, as well as an average donation amount.
Once your initial setup has been completed, all of your tracking should be automated. Doing all of this tracking manually is a huge administrative burden and takes you away from building relationships with your donors.
By using CauseVox donation pages, all of this is done for you – your reporting, receipting and donor tracking is all fully automated. You are provided with real-time fundraising insights which means you don’t have to pull any reports. Try CauseVox out for free today.
5) Import Their Details Into Your CRM
Once someone has made a donation, you want to gather all the information you gained from your tracking and reporting and import it into your donor database or CRM. This ensures that you are able to contact them for future communications and keeps all their donor history saved for you.
Knowing when they gave last and how much can help you continue developing a great relationship with your donors.. Adding any future donations to a donor’s record in your CRM will also help you identify your most engaged and profitable donors – they deserve some extra special treatment.
Organizing integrations between your fundraising platforms and your CRM can be simplified by using a tool like Zapier, which automates the whole process of importing data for you.
CauseVox has code free integrations with Salesforce, Kindful, Microsoft Dynamics, Quickbooks and more via Zapier, emoving any manual effort around importing donor details into your CRM and saving you tons of time
See how organizations like Amigos International have used CauseVox and Zapier to streamline their fundraising.
Save Time With Post-Donation Automation On CauseVox
Thanking and making your donors feel special is important – the better their experience, the more likely they are to give to you again.
While a personal touch is always best, CauseVox can help you automate 90% of the post-donation process so that you can stop wasting time on administrative tasks and focus your efforts on building relationships with your donors.
Try CauseVox donation pages today to see how you can streamline your fundraising processes and increase engagement with your donors.
