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📍What we're talking about this issue: 
What the science of gratitude reveals about your nonprofit's thanking

Photo: Thankology by Lisa Sargent
Designed by the amazing Sandie Collette

Dear defender of good,

Forgive the slightly longer intro today. There’s a point, promise.

A bizarre technical glitch last week caused my new book, Thankology, to be made available for sale without my even knowing it. 

It turned out to be – relief! – the final draft. 

Over an action-packed 24 hours, the amazing folks at Civil Sector Press and I decided the book didn’t want to wait any longer to start helping you do better at thanking your donors. 

So without a launch, without fanfare, we let it stay published. To be honest, it feels just right...

... Because without fanfare, without a formal launch, gratitude done right should be out there in the world, doing the important work of thanking your donors. 

... Because as you’re about to discover in today's exclusive excerpt from the stealth-launched Thankology :), gratitude means so, so, SO much more than you know. 

And the science of gratitude has a lot to reveal about why nonprofits need to get a LOT better at thanking... in more places, and more often. 

(ps. Across 160+ pages, Thankology has a LOT to say about that: the how, how-to, when, and where of better thanking, with loads of checklists, data, and real-world examples. If you’re interested, check out AmazonUS, AmazonUK, and Civil Sector Press. Roger Craver has a meaty review on The Agitator too. AUS/NZ, apologies: we're working on it for you!)

Now here’s that exclusive, live-annotated, ultra-nerdy Thankology excerpt for you, from “Chapter 14: The gratitude experiments”...

The Gratitude Experiments: 
Why naysayers are dead wrong about the power of thanking

An exclusive, live-annotated excerpt from Thankology... by me, author and fundraising copywriter Lisa Sargent and your friendly Loyalty Letter publisher ✍️ 

October 2024

In June 2018, then University of Chicago researchers Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley conducted three experiments during which they asked participants to write gratitude letters (live-annotation from me: thank you letters), then predict how their letters would make the intended recipients feel.

What they discovered was remarkable indeed:

1. Senders overestimated how awkward they would make the recipients feel.

2. Senders underestimated how much the letter of gratitude would mean to recipients.

Live-annotation from me: what does this mean to you, Loyalty Letter subscribers? When you’re trying to build your case for better thanking, and someone tries to wave your work away with, “It’s just a thank-you letter”... you can now prove differently. 

The key element for recipients?

Warmth of the letter. 

(Live annotation from me: dry-as-dust form thank-yous need not apply.)

The results led the researchers to a conclusion they summed up so beautifully, I include it verbatim here:

“Expressing gratitude is a powerful act of civility benefitting

both expressers and recipients.”

— Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley

Kumar and Epley aren’t the only researchers to show the notable effects of properly expressing thanks.

In two gratitude experiments, conducted by Francesca Gino, now a professor at Harvard Business School, and Wharton School’s Adam Grant, a simple thank‑you letter heightened the recipients’ sense of self-worth. (See The Harvard Gazette and "A Little Thanks Goes A Long Way") 

By more than double.

And Gino and Grant’s study suggests that the effects of not saying thank you are closely linked to a person’s willingness to offer future support.

How much more willing? 

You guessed it: More than double.

Gino even went so far as to say that the extent of what she came to call “the Gratitude Effect” was the most surprising part of her research.

Live-annotation from me: So what happens when naysayers tell you that you don’t really even need to thank donors at all? Well, you can set them straight...

When it comes to not thanking donors, Dr. Adrian Sargeant’s timeless research report, "Managing Donor Defection: Why Should Donors Stop Giving?", exposes similar trouble.

His work showed that when donors were asked their reasons for no longer supporting an organization, 13.2% came right out and said it was because they hadn’t been thanked.

Dive deeper into Professor Sargeant’s findings, and you’ll see more trouble:

• 36.2% said they felt other causes were more deserving
• 9.2% couldn’t recall supporting the organization
• 8.1% said they hadn’t been informed how their donations were used
• 5.6% said the organization no longer needed their support.

It’s not a big jump to see that in addition to the 13.2% who specifically said they left because they were never thanked, the other reasons I’ve just listed above are at least in some way tied to a lack of proper acknowledgment. 

Which means it is entirely plausible that poor or nonexistent thanking kills the joy of giving in as many as seven out of every ten donors who defect.

Need more?

In their superb, free on sign-up ebook, “Learning to Say Thank You: The Role of Donor Acknowledgments,” Drs. Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant, Kathryn Carpenter, and Harriet Day offer proof and testing aplenty on the might of the thank‑you.

For example, Jen and her team found evidence that thank‑yous:

Increased average gift: “In a database where the average number of past overall gifts made by donors is three, a thank‑you letter reaffirming the difference that their donations made increased average gifts by 60% without reducing the response rate in comparison to a control group of donors who did not receive this thank‑you.”
 

Increased goodwill: “We estimated that if these thank‑yous are done in a consistent and lively manner, organizations have the potential to increase the good feeling in their database by a minimum of 20% over five years.”
 

Increased average gift, redux: In one of the tests where a thank‑you preceded a renewal letter by about four weeks, donors who were thanked gave $45.32 more on average than the non-thanked cohort.

As a thankologist, it’s important for you to know that the source of all this gratitude goodness is not something elusive.

Live annotation from Lisa: this chapter of Thankology then goes on to show – on a neuroscience level – how gratitude literally, actually, really-and-truly lights up your donor’s brain, complete with diagrams...

The rest now, is all from me, for you reading The Loyalty Letter today...

What’s more, the book shows how gratitude releases powerful neurotransmitters that move people to act for the greater good... something called prosocial behavior.

And that my wonderful Loyalty Letter subscriber, is the heart of why I wrote Thankology for world-changers like you.

Because you can access the stuff of love and purpose and humanity every time you write your thank-you letters (loads of action examples on that in the book)... your donor newsletters (Thankology has a chapter on that)... your annual report (that too)... or even milestone moments your donors might not even know exist yet (you got it: that too, plus more).

Because here’s the thing. This world needs more gratitude. I was about to say more than you know. But... now, officially, you know. 

And when you’re ready, Thankology is out there in the world, waiting for YOU: The little book about gratitude that couldn’t wait to help you start thanking. 

I so hope you enjoyed this exclusive (live-annotated!) free book excerpt. 
 

If you do buy Thankology, please let me know if it’s helpful for you. (Or leave a review! I’d love that.)

Thanks for taking a chance and subscribing to The Loyalty Letter. 

Your trust, your time, and your heart for the craft of fundraising mean everything to me. I’m so glad you’re here.

With lots of gratitude from me, the world’s most surprised author,

PS. Are you someone who likes LOTS of details before buying? I do too, so here are some respected nonprofit folks who’ve read the book, and offer a breakdown on what they found helpful in Thankology... see back-cover testimonials on Amazon, Roger Craver’s review on The Agitator, Tom Ahern for Hilborn eNews, and Giles Pegram on LinkedIn to name a few. See you in two weeks!

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