During the online donation process, Thank You pages pose a unique opportunity to hold the attention of your donor – usually as their credit card payment processes or as they wait for confirmation of their donation. This gives organisations and nonprofits a chance to create a lasting impact on their donors and to establish an ongoing relationship that can see one off donations turn into recurring contributions.

How does including a Thank You video make this happen?

There are three main factors that help retain donors and encourage them to give recurring gifts. Those are:
1. A sense of gratitude
2. Confirmation that their gift is being used for its intended purpose
3. That that purpose is making an impact

Videos are an excellent way to communicate these three messages succinctly and in a way that emotionally connects with your donors. They do so by allowing your organisation to show it’s impact rather than to simply tell donors about it. By showing, you are able to put a face to your cause and to tell a story. Storytelling is a vital tool available to nonprofits and video is the best tool for emotionally resonant storytelling. Impact stories are of immense value to nonprofits, communicating stewardship and helping to build long term donor relationships.

Plus when you tell a good story people are likely to want to share it. Content is king in the current online community. By creating shareable content you provide your donors with a mechanism to feel good about their gift, as well as an avenue for access into their social networks where your organisation may be made known to various friends and family members – all potential future donors.

One of the top reasons that donors don’t give repeat donations is because they feel like their earlier gift wasn’t valued or acknowledged enough. Videos give you the opportunity to share your sincere thanks, without using a pre-formulated block of text that feels cold, impersonal and irrelevant. Videos help keep your thank you pages from feeling generic and help tailor the page to specific campaigns.

Thank You pages are important in the donation process as they offer a timely, prompt confirmation for donors that you have received their gift, that the urgency of that gift is completely needed and will be used appropriately, that you’re trustworthy and that they can donate again soon. Videos help tell this story quickly and simply.

A few extra tips about how to use videos well:

Leave out the figures and statistics

Organisations often feel the need to include all the numbers that prove the impact they’re making, but videos aren’t the place to do this. Use videos to focus on storytelling and instead save the compelling facts and figures to be included in follow-up thank you receipts or emails as this information is better expressed as text, or in images and infographics.

Keep track of their length

One of the main benefits of video is their simplicity, but that gets lost if your video is too long. Try to keep them between 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Any longer and your video and viewers will begin to lose focus.

Talk about your donors, not yourself

Thank You messages are about building up your donors and establishing relationships, not bragging about yourself. Thank You videos should be framed around talking about donors and their impact, rather than the organisations.

Be clear about what you’re saying Thank You for

You’re trying to avoid being generic, so to ensure your videos avoid becoming just that be clear about what exactly it is you’re thankful for – explain the impact.

 

We hope this shares some valuable insight on the benefits of using videos in your Thank You messages during the Giving Process!