Send timely acknowledgements to thank donors for their generosity.
Acknowledgements are personalized thank-yous that help donors feel good about supporting your organization. A well-run acknowledgement program can help you build relationships, retain donors, inspire engagement, and grow your fundraising.
This article explains how to send acknowledgements, which you can send in addition to payment receipts. For information about how to send receipts, read About Online Payment Confirmation Receipts.
What To Acknowledge
We recommend that you acknowledge every donation. When you acknowledge donors, they’re more likely to make another donation at a higher level of giving.
In Bloomerang, you can:
Acknowledge every donation from individual donors with a customized journey.
Acknowledge major individual donations with additional outreach through other channels. For example, send an acknowledgement email and then personally call major donors.
Engage differently when donations are made toward a specific campaign, fund, or appeal.
Types of Acknowledgements
To acknowledge a donation, start by sending an email, letter, or both.
For email acknowledgements, use one of these methods:
Journey Automation (recommended) — To automate email acknowledgements and create custom donor journeys. Journey Automation applies to individual donors, but not organizations.
Scheduled emails — To acknowledge donations from organizations, or to acknowledge a schedule rather than a payment on the schedule.
Individual email — To manually send an email acknowledgement to one donor. You can do this when you enter or edit a payment in Bloomerang.
For letter acknowledgements, use one of these methods:
Letter batch — To generate a batch of letters.
Individual letter — To manually generate a letter acknowledgement for one donor. You can do this when you enter or edit a payment in Bloomerang.
After you send an email or letter acknowledgement, consider also acknowledging donors through other channels. This additional outreach can result in better donor retention and larger next donations. For example:
Send a mobile video acknowledgement to immediately send personalized thank-you messages to donors.
Automate Email Acknowledgements
Use Journey Automation to automate email acknowledgements for each type of donation payment. Automations are how you create custom donor journeys, which can include timed emails and automatic task assignments for additional outreach.
After making a payment, soft credit, or in-kind donation, donors automatically enter an automation for that type of donation and move through the automation steps you created.
To create an automation for each donation payment type, read Quickstart: Automate Donation Acknowledgements. If you currently send email acknowledgements using a method other than Journey Automation, plan how automations will replace those methods so you don’t send duplicate acknowledgement emails for the same payment.
Best Practices for Acknowledgements
When you create acknowledgement emails and letters, follow these best practices:
Create distinctly different content for acknowledgements and receipts so donors understand they aren't being charged twice.
In acknowledgements, focus on impact and relationship building. Don't include date and amount information, which belongs in receipts.
When you create acknowledgement emails and letters, select the Acknowledgement purpose, which automatically marks the transaction as acknowledged.