Individual skill
donor-communications
Builds a small nonprofit's individual-donor communication system - segmenting donors into major, recurring, first-time, and lapsed with different treatment for each, thanking within 48 hours of every gift, structuring impact stories around one beneficiary with the donor as hero, writing appeal letters, and holding a 3:1 impact-to-ask calendar ratio. Use when a nonprofit leader says "our donors are lapsing", "write our year-end appeal", "how often should we email donors", "write a thank-you letter for a major gift", or "we only contact donors when we ask for money". Do NOT use for winning back lapsed donors with a full re-engagement sequence - use win-back-campaign for the sequencing mechanics - and do NOT use for foundation funder communications - use grant-loi-writer instead.
skills/donor-communications/SKILL.md
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# Donor Communications
Most small nonprofits contact individual donors only when they want money, and then wonder why second gifts never come - when the sector-wide reality is that fewer than half of first-time donors ever give again, and the cheapest revenue any nonprofit has is a retained donor. This skill builds the communication system that keeps donors giving: segmentation, fast gratitude, impact stories, disciplined appeals, and a calendar that earns the right to ask.
Work the example organization throughout: Bright Futures Tutoring, a youth-education nonprofit with a $420,000 annual budget, 3 staff, serving 250 students. Individual donors provide roughly $120,000 of the budget alongside the grant pipeline (see grant-prospect-researcher). Its outcome numbers are the canonical ones from the pack's logic model: 72 percent of students gained a grade level in reading last year - the same figure impact-report-builder publishes.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Segment the donor file
Four segments, four treatments. Sort every donor into exactly one:
- Major: the top of the file - for an organization Bright Futures' size, gifts of $1,000+ or the top 10 percent of donors. Treatment: personal. Handwritten or personally signed thanks, a phone call from the ED for gifts at this level, one-to-one updates, invited to see the program in person.
- Recurring: monthly or committed annual givers. Treatment: protect the relationship - never resolicit them in general appeals as if their gift were invisible; send an annual "your $25/month did this" cumulative-impact note.