Donor and fundraising letters
Volunteer thank-you note examples
Volunteers give the one thing that cannot be replaced with money, and they are thanked worse than donors almost everywhere. The note should name what they actually did, on which days, and it should come from somebody who was there rather than from the organisation in the abstract.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
After a single event
[FIRST NAME], thank you for [EVENT] on [DATE]. You were on [ROLE] for most of the day and it was the station everything else depended on. We raised [AMOUNT] and that does not happen without the unglamorous jobs being covered.
For a long-running volunteer
[FIRST NAME], [NUMBER] years of [ROLE] this month. I wanted to mark it properly rather than let it pass, because the people who turn up every week are the ones most likely to be taken for granted. Thank you.
For someone who has stepped back
Send it. The volunteer who leaves well often comes back, and almost nobody writes to them.
[FIRST NAME], I heard you have finished up on [ROLE]. [NUMBER] years is a long run and you leave it in better shape than you found it. Thank you, and do drop in.
To a committee or board member
Unpaid governance is the least-thanked volunteering there is, and the people doing it usually hear from the organisation only when something has gone wrong.
[FIRST NAME], thank you for another year on the committee. The [DECISION] in [MONTH] was the right call and it was not the comfortable one, which is exactly what the role is for.
To a group, where individual notes are not realistic
Write to the coordinator by name and ask them to pass it on. A note addressed to nobody is read by nobody.
[FIRST NAME], could you pass this on to the [GROUP] team.
Thank you, all of you, for [EVENT]. [NUMBER] hours between you and not one job left undone. We know what that costs on a weekend.
[NAME], [ROLE]
Getting it right
- What to mention. The specific shift, event or role. Something that happened that they were part of. The name of a person, not a department.
- What to leave out. "Our volunteers are the backbone of this organisation", which is the volunteering equivalent of "your generous donation". A request to sign up for the next thing in the same note.
- How long. 30 to 70 words.
- How personal. Personal and specific. Volunteers can tell instantly whether the person signing knows what they did.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [EVENT], [DATE], [ROLE], [NUMBER], [AMOUNT].
Role data in volunteer systems is often years out of date. A note thanking someone for a job they stopped doing in 2022 is worse than a generic one, so check the role field against the most recent roster rather than the profile.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
A large event leaves two or three hundred volunteers to thank in the week when everybody who would write the notes is recovering from running it.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap and hand-addresses the envelopes.
Just finished an event with a long volunteer list? See a written card
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.