A family I know is going through that terrible process of having to put their mother into assisted care.  She has Alzheimer’s and it’s so sad.  This is a woman who had a heart as big as all outdoors, gave to everyone she met and had an infectious laugh that lifted the whole room.  And now, more-often-than-not, she sits in her wheelchair and cries.

Go back to that giving thing . . . in going through the process, her children needed to close out her credit cards.  You see where this is going, right?  She had monthly payments to two, large national charities.  $10/$20 a month kind of thing.

The only way the family knows this is because they found the bills as they went to close out accounts.

Guess what?  They can’t find anybody at the charities who knows what to do or can help.  So, they just canceled the credit card.  So, the charity just won’t get paid and will have no idea why this donor stopped giving.  They’ll probably try to contact the family to get a new credit card number in a few months, but the relationship is over.

There’s no phone number on the website, there’s no email address – everything just goes to the main switchboard at their national corporate office.  I offered to help and I can’t find anything on their recurring monthly donor programs.

Now, this woman filed meticulously – she kept EVERYTHING anybody ever sent her.  Especially these charities.  She would proudly show off the new calendar every year and lay out the quarterly magazine on the coffee table.

But they can’t even find a thank you letter, an acknowledgement, nothing that indicates any level of personal engagement.  She would have saved it, pack rat that she was.

I GET IT.  Hell, I live it.  There’s a lot going on and having enough time to do everything is tough.  But, there’s the problem with recurring giving.  It is too, too easy to get the monthly gift and then just let it roll.  They’re smaller gifts, they run automatically and both the donor and the charity lose sight of them.

Wait.  No.  The donor doesn’t.

We – fundraisers – have to believe that a donor who makes a $10 monthly gift is every bit as invested as a donor who makes a $10,000 one-time donation.

These charities needed to believe that this beautiful woman was PROUD of supporting their missions.  She was.

What could they have done?

• Sent a thank you letter acknowledging the gift and re-stating the plan – $10 a month until you tell us to stop
• Every quarter sent a hand-written thank you note — even if it was mass-produced and simulated handwriting, it would have been SOMETHING
• Sent a personal letter from whomever is responsible for the recurring giving program, “If you need anything, call me or email me.”
• Regular updates on how her money was spent
• Have a special page on the website for these recurring donors – or a private website/URL only they can access
• Sent a welcome packet with all the above information in it
• Acknowledged and been grateful that there was a person on the other end of that $10/$20 per month

In this day and age, all the above are easy and relatively cost-effective to do . . . even by direct mail houses and vendors.

Recurring giving is absolutely the right way to go.  It is deserving of all the hype and focus and consultation it receives.  Every charity should have a recurring giving program.

But they should also have a recurring thanking program to support it.