PCF wants to thank the several hundred donors who made donations to PCF’s 2025 Fall Giving Catalog and Giving Tuesday. You made a huge difference for many local organizations. As chaos ramps up around all of us, helping provide basic support to a wide variety of local organizations gives our community some stability. Between these two events, more than $65K was raised, and those donations are already going out to local organizations.
As a donor, and as a member of PCF’s board, I want to encourage nonprofits to acknowledge donors and their donations in ways that are appropriate, timely and thoughtful.
When it comes to thank you notes to anonymous donors, we ask participating organizations to send their notes to us, and we forward them on. This gives us a way to track thank you’s.
Typical results:
No notes—Many organizations do not send thank you notes.
One note for all, instead of one note for each—Organizations send one note when there were 5 or more anonymous donors. Who receives that lone note?
No-name organization—The notes have no organization name associated with the envelope, or the content. There’s no way to know who to send it on to! [Not making this up, folks! It happens every year.]
Too late—The notes come many months later.
Prompt thank you notes matter. The only note worse than one that comes too late is one that never comes at all.
The organization that doesn’t identify itself misses out on an opportunity to make a positive connection to a donor.
Taking the time to write a personal thank you means you have increased the odds of a personal connection to the donor. Connections matter, in all communities and organizations.
We encourage organizations to be timely, accurate and thoughtful with their thank you notes.
And again, to all our donors to this year’s giving catalog, thank you!