Recession strategy: Keep close ties to donors

Most charities do a terrible job of thanking donors and staying in touch with them in meaningful ways, says Karen E. Osborne, a White Plains, N.Y., fund-raising consultant. “What most of the nonprofit world does is thank donors with a receipt, a newsletter, and then they ask for another donation,” says Ms. Osborne. That approach, she says, doesn’t work well even in the best of times, but is especially dangerous in a recession.

Ms. Osborne says a particularly emotional thank-you she received from a charity was a key reason she decided to keep supporting that organization, even at a time when she felt she needed to be more careful about her giving.

After she had been invited to tour the Easter Seals affiliate in Little Rock, Ark., Ms. Osborne and her husband gave the charity money so it could teach children with severe speech disabilities to use computerized equipment to help them talk.

The couple made similar gifts for two more years in a row, always sending checks near year’s end. In the fourth year, Ms. Osborne recalls, “we came to the conclusion that we had to cut some of our giving, so I said maybe we would cut back” on Easter Seals.

But three weeks before Ms. Osborne and her husband sat down to write their annual checks to charities, Ms. Osborne says, she got a call from a boy in the Easter Seals speech program who, because of his therapy, was able to speak to Ms. Osborne in his own voice. He wished her a happy Thanksgiving, she recalls.

“I was wowed, and I felt powerful, even though I know my gift did not pay for all of his accomplishment,” Ms. Osborne says. “In the end, we did not cut that gift. In fact, we found a way to give more than we intended.”

Karla A. Williams, the Charlotte, N.C., consultant, also urges charities to think hard about how they thank donors. “If the donor is treated personally, professionally, and kindly — no boilerplate letters but personal phone calls and letters — their confidence in being important to the organization has been affirmed,” she says. Donors don’t stop supporting a charity when they have been made to feel that their giving is truly critical to its work, she says.

“If you haven’t been doing a good job of this before, you may not be able to turn it around now in this economy,” warns Ms. Williams. “Donors are very observant.”

— Holly Hall and Paula Wasley