Study says don't bother with donor thank-you calls

Yikes! Calling donors to thank them has no impact on subsequent giving?

That's what a recent very large study found (abstract here), as reported by Change Fundraising at Thank You Calls Are Pointless. Wait ... What?

Seriously, that's what the study found. It involved hundreds of thousands of calls.

Does this tell us that thanking donors is a big waste of time and money?

That's not what I've experienced. In my experience, making thank you calls to donors has had a meaningful positive impact on subsequent giving. Many other experienced fundraisers will tell you the same.

But few of us (probably none of us) have ever done a study anywhere near this big. Are we all wet?

Maybe not. There are a couple of things important to pay attention to in this study, as Change Fundraising points out:

1. The calls were made 3-7 months after the initial donation. This alone is enough reason to be very skeptical of the study. In my experience, thanking that's that delayed is pretty much the same as not thanking.
2. The call script isn't very good ("Wetter than a sack of drunk otters," says Simon.) Quality does matter. Any time you do a poor job of something, you're likely to get poor results, no matter how smart that activity is.

Bottomline for me: Thanking donors is probably a smart thing to do for most of us, most of the time. A study like this is a useful reminder to be skeptical about received wisdom. Sometimes it's wrong! But I don't it is in this case.

from Future Fundraising Now https://ift.tt/2y4xAwo