Write a Personal Donor Birthday Card in 7 Seconds

Dear Samantha,

Congratulations on turning 58 years young! 

I wanted to wish you a happy birthday on behalf of myself, Sandra, and all of us at The Riverdale Hospital Foundation! 

I hope this birthday is extra meaningful for you with the knowledge that you’ve had such a huge impact on our neonatal care program. 

Hoping to see you at our hoops for heart fundraiser in June! 

Sincerely,

Jerry

P.S. Please give my best to Craig and Emily! 

Imagine composing a birthday card that personal, in 7 seconds or so, and having it arrive, handwritten and in a hand-addressed envelope, at your donor’s door a day or two before their birthday.

Now imagine composing a birthday card to every donor, every bit as personal and detailed, in the same 7 seconds.

7 seconds because that’s the average amount of time that it takes a nonprofit CRM to export a data file. Once you’ve created a template for what you want to say, that’s data export is all that’s required to make every card to every donor just as personal.

So the nice, intimate, personal handwritten birthday card above is the output of a template that looks something like this.

Dear [First Name],

Congratulations on turning [Upcoming Age] years young!

I wanted to wish you a happy birthday on behalf of myself, [Relationship Manager Two], and all of us at The Riverdale Hospital Foundation!

I hope this birthday is extra meaningful for you with the knowledge that you’ve had such a huge impact on our [Project name].

Hoping to see you at our [next event] in [event month]!

Sincerely,

[Relationship Manager One]

P.S. Please give my best to [Spouse and Children Names]!

Every one of the [bolded and bracketed] fields above can correspond to a field in your CRM or database, and used to populate a letter to make it deeply personal.

You can even randomize the lines in the generic parts of the birthday greeting.

One recipient can receive “I hope this birthday is extra meaningful for you with the knowledge that…” while another can randomly be assigned “I hope you’re as happy on your birthday as you’ve made some of the patients that you touched with your gift to…”

Finally, you can export a column in your data that indicates when their birthday is, and set your card to be mailed a certain number of days before that day.

With a tiny bit of upfront elbow grease, and 7 seconds or so of tapping your fingers while your CRM spits of a data set once in a while, you can ensure that you’re giving your donors warm, fuzzy, handwritten feelings each and every birthday.

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