Personal, planned touch points with donors throughout the year are one of the most important parts of your job as a gift officer, regardless of if you’re managing a major gift caseload of 150 donors or a mid-level caseload of 500-700 donors.
And while you shouldn’t rely only on email for your communication, the reality is that for much of your caseload, emails will be a regular part of your annual touch point plan.
As my colleagues have shared throughout this blog series, each of your touch points needs an objective for it to be successful and it needs to make the donor feel like you’re an identifiable and trustworthy personal connection for the organization they’re supporting.
Because it's that personal connection that will make your emails stand out.
Write Like a Person
Your donor is already hearing from different parts of your organization throughout the year. They get the monthly newsletter written by your program team. They receive the annual appeal signed by the executive director. They see the social media posts put out by the comms team.
Those pieces are written to speak to a large audience. They use a professional voice and may use jargon, or “non-profit speak.” Your touch points are different—or, at least, they should be.
When you write a touch point, you have an audience of one.
Even if that touch point is similar to something you sent another donor last week, it should still feel like it was written just for them—warm and friendly. Depending on what tier the donor is in, it should include a personal note, so the donor knows you took the time to connect directly with them.
Remember, the sender is you, not the development office. Use “I” instead of “we”. Write in short, simple sentences. And try to avoid the list of threes. ("We’re saving the animals, helping the environment, and sending kids to school.”)
Your donor probably knows your voice because you have talked to them on the phone or in person. You want them to be able to picture you when they are reading your note. They can’t do that when your email sounds like it could have been sent by anyone at your organization.
I know this can feel uncomfortable at first. We’re so used to writing professionally, but this isn’t a white paper or a grant report. This is about a person-to-person connection.
When You Don’t Know the Donor Well (Yet)
You may not know every donor on your caseload deeply, especially in mid‑level or newer major gift caseloads, but that doesn’t mean your tone should default to that faceless professional voice.
Here’s a practical trick I recommend to my clients: read your email out loud before you send it.
If you stumble over phrasing, it’s a sign the sentence is too long or too formal. If it sounds like a college paper, it’s probably not right for a donor touch point.
Imagine you’re writing to your sibling or a close friend if you haven’t had a conversation with the donor yet. If it feels too formal for them, it’s also not right for this touch point.
If It’s Hard to Read, It Won’t Be Read
Think about when you’re reading your personal emails. You’re probably multi-tasking, or half-thinking about what to make for dinner. You’re probably on your phone. Your donor is probably the same.
That means that your touch point — an invitation to an event, a note sharing the impact of their gift, a solicitation — needs to be easy to read and understand.
A good benchmark for donor communication is aiming for a reading level of about 6–8th grade. That doesn’t mean you’re “dumbing things down.” It means you’re writing clearly.
Writing for clarity means:
If your message requires effort to get through, your donor will stop reading.
You can easily check the readability of your touch point using the Editor / Document Stats feature in Microsoft Word. This will give you the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level. Remember that you’re aiming for a 6–8th grade reading level. When I ask clients to check their touch points against this, the first time they often get an 11-12th grade score.
If you want to get more information on how these are calculated, you can read more here.
A quick word of caution: In my experience, AI tools are inconsistent when it comes to measuring readability or writing at a specific level. I’ve seen the same text get wildly different grade-level scores on different platforms. I’ve also dropped AI-generated text into Word only to get a different readability score than the prompt requested.
Finally, send the email to yourself and open it on your phone. That paragraph that seems like a reasonable length on your desktop may look like a block of text when you open it on your phone. It will also show you how much scrolling you’re asking your donor to do.
Connecting the Dots
At the end of the day, your job is to be your donor’s personal connection to an organization they care deeply about.
Your touch points should remind the donor that there’s a real person on the other side of the message—someone who knows them, values the relationship, and is ready to connect in a meaningful way.
This blog is part of a series about touch points:
Part 1: Why Do You Need Touch Points?