Saying thank you and demonstrating impact

Howard Lake | 18 June 2012 | Blogs

Saying thank you is a fundamental part of fundraising, as you know, not least because it helps to demonstrate your impact.
That was brought home to me at the end of last week with a very kind message from children’s charity bibic. Their Fundraising & Communications Manager took the time to send us a wonderful message which showed just how useful our site can be to a charity like theirs. While UK Fundraising does of course serve large and small charities, you can probably imagine that we feel particular delight when we find we’ve helped a smaller charity.
So, here is the message from Jess Winchester, Fundraising & Communications Manager at news of Pell & Bales 21 campaigns for charity and applied, never thinking we’d get anywhere. But we were successful and an amazingly fantastic campaign has been put together for us to convert our one-off cash donors to regular givers!
“This is the best gift that our charity could receive for our 40th Birthday year and we never would have known the opportunity was there without UK Fundraising Weekly. It is such a valuable resource to the fundraising community and I always find something of interest that I can share with my team and our Trustees.
“Anyway, just wanted to say a huge thank you!!!”
Impact can be hard for us to measure, but learning that this is the kind of achievement we can help steer charities towards is truly valuable.
Even better, it is not us that are blowing our own trumpets (apart of course from this blog post) but one of our subscribers. I think impact is often communicated more effectively by the person or organisation who has received the benefit.
Jess, by the way, is clearly well-practised at saying thank you. Here is her thank you to Pell and Bales, which they, like me, chose to share online, describing it as one of those ‘Magic Moments‘.

How to show impact

I don’t pretend to have much expertise in demonstrating impact, but I do know the digital tools can make it much easier to gather and disseminate responses like the one we received. Ways in which we do this, and you could too, include:
* adding positive comments about your organisation made on Twitter to your Twitter account’s favourites.
* presenting positive comments using a curation tool e.g. Storify. We use that for comments on UK Fundraising, and comments on our training.
* keeping track of mentions of your charity’s name using Google Alerts and tools like Twilert.
* asking colleagues to share or note down any kind comments or examples of how you have helped other people and organisations, so that you can share them (with appropriate permission of course).
What ideas do you have for using digital tools for sharing and demonstrating impact, especially using quotes from beneficiaries or partners?

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.