A Simple Thank You

This concept is the result of a Better Giving Studio 3-day collaborative sprint focusing on Small Dollar Donors. Kelty Niles of RaisedBy.Us championed this idea. You can read the brief the teams worked from for more context.

Why BGS is Excited

• Supports donor thank you’s in a flexible way, accounting for customization by both the donor and recipient nonprofit regardless of donation size.
• Focuses on the workplace channel where it is especially difficult for nonprofits to get donor info.
• Simple, platform-level ideas like this help to develop sector-wide best practices for even the smallest nonprofits.
• By automating a  key part of the donor journey, this concept helps reduce barrier to entry for smaller nonprofits

The Opportunity

Donors who receive a thank you message within 48 hours of making their donation are 4 times more likely to give again. And most nonprofits aim to thank donors within 2-3 days. But for a number of reasons, this isn’t always possible when donations come via corporate giving platforms. The platform’s disbursement schedule may dictate that collected donations are sent to the nonprofits in batches on a weekly or monthly drumbeat. There can be separate processes needed to manage donations from corporate giving platforms, and nonprofits may not have the bandwidth to manage a separate thank you. A Simple Thank You will automate this crucial step in the corporate giving process.

The Concept

When a nonprofit opts into a corporate giving platform, they get the option to also use A Simple Thank You. The platform will automatically generate a Thank You message when an employee makes a donation to that nonprofit. The nonprofit doesn’t have to do anything more than check the box that they want to participate, and the platform does the rest.

The API supports customization of the thank you message based on donor and donation data that it collects and safely stores during the donation process. The format of the message is modular, so nonprofits can choose to include content like seasonal updates or impact stories, company-specific updates, and third party integrations like quality ratings. 

Donors indicate their preferred communication method — email, slack, text, or snail mail — and frequency of follow-up communication. 

Small nonprofits in particular may not have the resources to set up direct giving on their platform, send timely replies to donors, or store their giving data safely and efficiently. A Simple Thank You makes it more attractive to join workplace giving platforms to support their fundraising efforts.

What Do You Think?

Are you working on something similar? Have feedback to give us or insights that we should know about related to this exploratory concept? Did you test out this idea, and how did it go? We’d love to hear from you! Please write us a note at [email protected]