How Not to Thank a Donor During a Disaster - By Joanne Fritz

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 t
Mar 17, 2011 9:50 AM ET
Campaign: 3BL Blogs

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

continue reading NonProfit Charitable Org