How Not to Thank a Donor During a Disaster

I am speechless!

As you may already know, I decided to see what charities were doing in response to online donations given to help Japan. So I donated a small amount online to several charities, specifically for relief efforts in Japan.

The result? Only one provided a thank you email that was specific to the relief efforts in Japan. The others were all generic: thank you very much and here's your receipt.

Frankly, I think that if you are going to go to the trouble to set up a special web page to encourage and accept donations to aid a specific disaster, you could take the time to prepare a special thank you specific to that cause.

Besides that, I found one donation page that never loaded after my information was entered, thus aborting my donation; another website required me to go through a registeration process before sending me to the donation page; and one site where I couldn't find a page dedicated to Japan relief even though the home page said I could do so.

Here are some best practices from a recent ebook from Convio, Be Prepared When Your Mission Calls. 

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Joanne Fritz has worked in the nonprofit world for most of her 30-year career beginning with teaching at the secondary, college, and university levels. Fritz has served on numerous nonprofit boards and was chosen to participate in leadership programs in two cities. She writes for Nonprofit Charitable Org on About.com