3 ways you can use your database to create warmer fundraising letters

“Donors share personal things in letters when they send donations. For instance they might say that they recently lost a loved one. I want to be able to use my software to respond to that person, to create ‘high touch’ communications, and even to become friend,” says Joe Emert of Life Radio Ministries.

Joe makes it part of his mission to interact with donors as people. He also knows that a good relationship to a donor can have a positive impact on giving. “I don’t just do things to help me get another donation and yet I know that if I meet the needs of a donor not just on the radio but also by responding appropriately to an inquiry or something that is said in a letter, that creates a better relationship.

"I want to be more than a Christian broadcaster. I also want to be someone who cares about the person who is writing this letter. They are people to me and I want them to know that,” says Joe.

He uses FundRaiser Professional to help him create a personal relationship with his donors. “The most important way FundRaiser has helped us be successful is just being able to give our communications a more human touch,”

1. Send out letters that reflect your donors' true interests

Your donors give to you for a particular reason. The more accurately you can respond to that specific reason, the more relevant your letter is going to feel. Most importantly, when donors receive letters that show you know why they are interested in your organization they feel heard. Showing that you hear your donors is one of the single most powerful ways to build a srong relationship.

Features in your software that make segmentation easy are particularly important to do that. Joe Emert depends on them. “FundRaiser helps me to easily set up groups and to create segments of our donors who have things in common. Then I can send out special letters or invitations based on their interests. That is so easy in the Grouping process.

“By learning how to understand how grouping ‘thinks’, how I can pull my data together, I’ve been able to be in better touch with my donors based on categories they fit. It helps me be more personal with my donors. When you have as many donors as we have in the system, there are limits to what you can remember. FundRaiser helps me remember things about them, so that the relationship can still have a personal feeling to it,” says Joe.

“The secret is to properly code people according to their interests. As with any technology, it’s still garbage in, garbage out. We are learning to better code things so that we can pull things out properly,” advises Joe.

2.    Respond quickly to letters you receive

One of the biggest challenges that any organization faces is responding quickly to people who contact your organization and not letting important communications fall between the cracks. For that reason, it's important to have a regular routine for processing your incoming letters, one that flows well.

“FundRaiser makes processing daily mail so easy,” says Joe. “When we answer mail, we can stay completely within FundRaiser. We don’t export out to Word. I know you can also export out to Word with FundRaiser, but it works for us to do the word processing within the program and eliminate that need to merge out to another program.

3.    Respond to personal notes

Your donors have personal reasons for giving to your organization. When they tell you about those reasons, you have a wonderful opportunity to build your donor relationship. By responding in a fundraising letter with your own personal comment you continue a real conversation. This will feel good to both of you. On the other hand, if they don’t hear back from you, it will be a missed moment for both of you.

One way that you can do this is through a feature that makes adding a personal note to a donor letter easy. Joe makes sure that he responds to specific comments in letters through a simple feature in the word processing portion of FundRaiser. This feature lets you record a note that will automatically merge into your donor thank you letter.

“I can do this easily while entering gifts. I may be going through a batch of 100 donations where a few of them have included a personal comment or question. When I see that, I go into the Notes tab and enter in a ‘letter note’. That automatically merges in as a P.S. when I print out my thank you letters.”

“I love the fact that if the donor asks something in a letter or makes a comment, I can easily comment back. That way, they know that I have read the letter and am paying attention.”

Learn more about how FundRaiser can help you create warmer fundraising letters

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