A retired schoolteacher gives to her town’s community foundation every December. It isn’t a large gift. She’s done it for eleven years. Each January, she receives the same printed receipt letter, signed by a name she doesn’t recognize, thanking her for her “generous support of our mission.”
Now imagine a different year. In late January, her phone rings. It’s a volunteer from the foundation’s board, a man who runs the hardware store downtown. He tells her that her gift went into the fund that pays for school-supply grants, and that this year’s grants reached classrooms at the elementary school where she taught for thirty years. He doesn’t ask for anything. The call lasts four minutes.
In March, she gets a short email with a photo of one of those classrooms, shared with the school’s permission. In May, she receives a handwritten card from a teacher. In the fall, the foundation’s annual report arrives, and her name is listed among the donors, as she’d agreed. That December, she gives again. It’s easy to picture her bringing a friend along next time.
None of those touches was expensive. Each one used a different channel. Together, they told one story: your gift mattered, and we noticed you. That’s what a multi-channel gratitude plan is for.
This piece follows an invented community foundation in a small American city as it builds that plan in a strategy session. The foundation, its people, and the details are illustrative, not a client story. The approach applies to any nonprofit, and to many service businesses, that want thanks to feel personal at the scale they actually operate.
Most organizations thank people. The problem is that thanks happens in pieces. The development director sends receipts. The executive director writes notes when she can. A board member calls a few donors he knows. Someone posts a thank-you on social media after the year-end campaign. The newsletter lists donors once a year.
Each of those is a good act. But nobody can say who has been thanked, how, or by whom. Some donors are thanked three times in a week; others not at all. A volunteer who gave a hundred hours gets the same form email as someone who attended one event. A local business that sponsored the spring luncheon never hears what its money did.
That’s not a gratitude problem. It’s a planning problem. And it’s exactly the kind of problem a strategy session is built to solve.
A strategy session isn’t a proposal meeting. In a proposal meeting, an agency presents ideas and a client chooses among them. In a strategy session, the organization and the agency work through the decisions together, and the session doesn’t end until the decisions are made.
For a gratitude plan, the session has to produce four things to be worth the time:
It also has to produce a clear statement of what the organization will not do. That part is easy to skip and important not to.
The session started with a list of the foundation’s relationships, because “donors” is too broad to plan for.
A community foundation is a particular kind of organization. As the Council on Foundations describes them, community foundations are grantmaking public charities dedicated to improving the lives of people in a defined local geographic area, bringing together the financial resources of individuals, families, and businesses to support effective nonprofits in their communities. The Council also notes that the national standards community foundations can meet cover areas including donor relations and communications.
That description shaped the list. The invented foundation in this piece thanks:
Each group has a different relationship with the foundation, and gratitude that works for one can feel wrong for another. A fund holder who established a scholarship in her late husband’s name wants to hear about the students. A business sponsor wants to know what its sponsorship made possible and, often, wants public acknowledgment. An annual donor may prefer quiet thanks and no public listing at all.
One trap the session had to name early: confusing awareness with a path. The foundation’s communications had focused on getting its name out, through sponsorship banners, social posts, and a booth at the summer festival. Those efforts made people aware of the foundation. They didn’t tell anyone what to do next, or what would happen after they did it.
A donor path is the sequence a person actually experiences: they hear about the foundation, they give for the first time, they’re thanked, they learn what their gift did, they’re invited to something, they give again, and perhaps one day they establish a fund or join a committee. Gratitude is the part of that path most organizations leave to chance, and it’s the part that decides whether a first gift becomes a second.
Seen that way, a thank-you plan isn’t a courtesy layered on top of fundraising. It’s the middle of the path. The session drew the path on a whiteboard and marked each point where a thank-you belonged, which made it obvious where the gaps were: first-time donors received a receipt and then nothing for eleven months.
There’s a reason donors respond to specific thanks. Giving itself tends to feel good. In a study published in Science, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin, and Michael Norton found that spending money on other people was associated with greater happiness than spending it on oneself, and that participants randomly assigned to spend money on others reported greater happiness than those assigned to spend it on themselves.
A good thank-you helps a donor see what their gift did, which reinforces the experience that made them want to give. A generic thank-you does the opposite: it treats the gift as a transaction that’s been processed.
The foundation’s session worked through each channel it could use, what it does well, and who it’s for.
A handwritten note is the clearest signal that a person took time. The foundation reserves them for moments that deserve them: a first gift, a fund holder’s anniversary, a volunteer’s milestone, a sponsor’s first year. The note names something specific and asks for nothing.
Capacity is the limit. The session asked how many notes the executive director, development director, and board could realistically write each month, and set the plan at that number, not at an aspirational one.
A short call from a board member or volunteer, with no request attached, is one of the most memorable forms of thanks. The foundation organized a “thank-you call” evening each January and again in summer: board members gather, each with a short list of donors and a few sentences about what gifts did that year. Calls are short. If no one answers, the caller leaves a brief message and doesn’t call again.
The session set rules: no asks on thank-you calls, no discussion of future gifts, and callers note each call so no one is called twice.
Email is good for timely, specific updates: a photo from a grant-funded program, a short story about what a fund made possible, a note at the close of a campaign. The foundation keeps these short and sends them when there’s something real to say, not on a schedule for its own sake.
The email list respects people’s choices. Donors who’ve asked for paper only get paper. Donors who’ve asked not to be contacted except for receipts are left alone.
Some donors prefer texts, especially younger donors and volunteers. The foundation uses texting only for people who have clearly agreed to receive texts from it, and only for brief, useful messages: an event reminder, a thank-you after a volunteer shift. Rules on consent for texts are specific; the foundation checked them before starting. This is general information, not legal advice.
The annual report, a printed impact letter, and the year-end receipt letter all still matter, especially to older donors. The foundation rewrote its receipt letter so it’s signed by a real person, names the fund the gift supported when the donor chose one, and includes one sentence about what that fund did this year.
Donor listings, social media thank-yous, and recognition at events can be meaningful for some people and unwelcome for others. The foundation asks every donor how they’d like to be listed, including the option of anonymity, and honors that choice everywhere. For grantees and the people they serve, nothing is shared publicly without permission, and stories are told with dignity: people as neighbors, not as objects of charity.
An open house or a small donor gathering gives people a chance to meet grantees and each other. The foundation holds one each spring, and the invitation is the thank-you; there’s no program asking for gifts.
A multi-channel plan should mean more people can be reached in a way that works for them. That includes people with disabilities.
The W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative explains in its introduction to web accessibility that when websites and web tools are properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them, but that many are still built with barriers that make them difficult or impossible for some people to use. The same thinking applies across channels: emails with descriptive text for images, videos with captions, print in a readable type size, and phone calls for donors who prefer a voice to a screen.
The session added one line to the plan: every thank-you channel should have an accessible version, and every donor’s preference should be recorded.
Using more channels doesn’t automatically make thanks better. The session flagged a few mistakes to avoid:
The same message everywhere. Copying one thank-you into an email, a post, a text, and a letter makes the donor feel processed four times. Each channel should carry a different part of the story.
Thanking on the organization’s schedule. A thank-you that arrives two months after a gift, because the newsletter goes out quarterly, has lost most of its warmth. The first thanks should follow the gift quickly; the story of what it did can come later.
Forgetting who’s already been thanked. Without a shared record, a donor can get a call from a board member, a card from the director, and an email from staff in the same week, while someone else gets nothing. One list, kept current, prevents both.
Making the channel the point. A beautiful video thank-you is wasted on a donor who doesn’t watch videos. Start with the person, then choose the channel.
By the end of the session, the foundation had made its decisions.
Priority. This year’s priority is annual donors who’ve given for five or more years and have never received a personal touch beyond a receipt. Second priority: fund holders, who should hear about their fund’s impact at least twice a year.
Capacity. The team and board can deliver a set number of handwritten notes a month, two calling evenings a year, one impact email each quarter, and one spring gathering. The plan fits that capacity. Nothing is planned that depends on a staff member working nights.
Channel choice. Each relationship group has a primary channel and a secondary one. Long-time annual donors: a call, then a printed impact letter. Fund holders: a handwritten note and a personal report on their fund. Business sponsors: a short report on what their sponsorship made possible and public acknowledgment, if wanted. Volunteers: a thank-you text or email after each shift, and a note at the end of the year. Grantees: a call from a board member, not to ask for reports, but to say thank you for the work.
Measure. The foundation will track a few things it can actually observe: how many people in each priority group received a personal touch this year, how many donors renewed, how many changed their listing preference, and what donors say, unprompted, when they call or write. It won’t treat any single number as proof, and it won’t promise its board a specific increase.
The session ended with a short list of things the foundation decided not to do:
After the session, the foundation received a written package it could hand to a new staff member or board member without re-explaining it. The package contained:
The package is deliberately plain. It isn’t a slide deck to admire. It’s a working document, meant to be printed, marked up, and taped to the wall of the development office, and it’s reviewed at the start of each quarter to see whether the capacity limits still hold.
That’s what makes a strategy session worth the time: a plan that survives the next busy season because everyone can see it, follow it, and explain it.
Compare the foundation with the hardware store whose owner made that phone call. If the store built its own gratitude plan, the decisions would look different.
The store’s relationships are with regular customers, contractors who buy supplies every week, and the neighbors who chose it over the big-box store on the highway. Its priority might be the contractors, who keep the store open year-round. Its capacity is a small staff that’s busy behind the counter. Its channels are mostly in person: remembering names, setting aside an order, a handwritten note in a contractor’s monthly invoice, a thank-you sign in the window after a good year. Its measure is whether regulars keep coming back.
What the two organizations share is the method: name the relationships, set a priority, respect the team’s capacity, choose channels deliberately, decide what you won’t do, and measure what you can observe. What they don’t share is the content. A foundation thanks people for giving to a mission. A store thanks people for their business. Confusing the two, by making a store’s thank-you sound like a fundraising letter, or a foundation’s sound like a loyalty program, makes both feel false.
If you’re planning a gratitude strategy, bring:
The phone call to the retired schoolteacher took four minutes. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because a plan said long-time annual donors were this year’s priority, a calling evening was on the calendar, a board member had a short list with a few sentences about what gifts had done, and a rule said not to ask for anything.
That’s what multi-channel gratitude looks like when it works: different channels, one story, delivered at a pace the people doing it can keep.
If you’d like help building a gratitude plan that fits your organization’s relationships and capacity, start a conversation with WeKinnect. Bring your list of the people you want to thank, and we’ll work through the decisions together.
Photo by Daniel Funes Fuentes on Unsplash
Written By
Darlene Gagnon is the founder of WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she works with entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. She focuses especially on restaurants, arts, and travel and tourism. Darlene writes on Branding, Positioning, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Storytelling, and Entrepreneurship. WeKinnect serves entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry, and Darlene brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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