Donor Recognition: The Real Key to Retention

The future of recognition
While there is so much fundraisers can already do with the technology and data available to them to recognize donors, the future holds even more promise for more personal communications. Merkle, for instance, has started to test capturing what Sayre calls micro data at the donor level to provide to its nonprofit clients for use in acknowledgments. For example, many nonprofits include a business reply envelope with postage paid in their direct-mail appeals. It’s typical for some donors to apply a stamp anyway as a way to give extra money to the nonprofit, since it then gets a refund on the postage. So Merkle has started tracking anytime it detects a donor has applied a stamp, setting a specific code, which allows its clients to immediately incorporate that into the acknowledgment, thanking the donor for providing his or her own postage.