Almost every year-end fundraising plan includes some version of the same idea: before you ask in December, send donors a warm, no-ask thank-you around Thanksgiving. It feels right. It’s cheap. Nobody on the board objects to it.
The problem is that “feels right” and “changes donor behavior” are two different things, and we have some unusually good evidence that gratitude alone may not move donors as much as fundraisers assume.
That doesn’t mean you should skip your Thanksgiving message to donors. It means the message has to do a specific job. Here’s what that job is, what to put in the message, who should get it, and how to find out whether it’s working for your organization.
What the thank-you call research found
In 2023, researchers Anya Samek and Chuck Longfield published a large field experiment in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics titled “Do Thank-You Calls Increase Charitable Giving?” They worked with dozens of public television stations and a national nonprofit, randomly assigning roughly 500,000 new donors to either receive a thank-you phone call or not. The calls followed common industry practice: no ask, just thanks and a word about the gift’s impact.
Before the results came in, the researchers asked fundraising professionals to forecast the effect. They expected the calls to substantially improve retention. The study found what the authors described as a precisely estimated null effect. Donors who got a call gave again at about the same rate as donors who didn’t.
That’s one study, and it tested phone calls to new donors, not a Thanksgiving email or card to your whole file. I wouldn’t stretch it into a rule that thanking donors doesn’t matter. But it should make us more humble about the assumption that a pleasant, generic expression of gratitude will make December appeals perform better on its own.
Samek’s practical suggestion, as reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, was simple: hold back about 10 percent of donors from the calls and see whether their later giving differs. That’s good advice for your Thanksgiving message too. We’ll come back to it.
Gratitude is the tone. Evidence is the content.
Here’s the way I’d think about it. A donor who gave to you last year made a decision. In December, you’re going to ask them to make that decision again. The most useful thing you can do in November is give them a reason to believe the first decision was a good one.
A typical Thanksgiving email says something like, “This season, we’re grateful for friends like you who make our work possible.” That sentence could come from a dentist’s office. It’s polite. It’s also forgettable, because it tells the donor nothing they didn’t already assume.
Compare that with a message that reports one specific thing that happened because people gave. Imagine a literacy program with 900 donors. Its November note could say: “In September, 14 second graders who started the year reading below grade level moved up a full level. Your gift paid for the tutor hours that made that possible. We’re thankful, and we wanted you to hear it before the holidays.” Same warmth. Very different donor experience.
The first message thanks the donor. The second one shows them their gift did something. When the December appeal arrives, that second donor has a concrete memory to connect it to.
What to put in a Thanksgiving message to donors
You don’t need a long letter. A short email, a postcard, or a one-page note can all work. What matters is that it includes a few specific elements:
One result, stated plainly. Pick a single outcome from this year, with a number if you have one. Fourteen kids, 300 meals, 41 nights of shelter. Resist the urge to list everything you did. A donor will remember one thing.
A clear line connecting the donor to the result. “Your gift helped make this happen” is fine. If you can segment by what the donor originally supported, even better.
A person or a moment. A short quote from a client (with permission), a staff member’s observation, or a one-paragraph scene. Keep it real. Don’t invent composites and present them as actual people.
No ask, and no soft ask either. Don’t add a “donate” button to the footer “just in case.” If you’ve told donors this is a thank-you, keep it one. A donor who wants to give will find your website. A donor who senses a bait and switch will remember that in December.
If your receipts and acknowledgments are already doing this kind of reporting, you’re ahead of most organizations. If not, it’s worth looking at why your gift receipt may be the most-read letter you send. The same principle applies there.
Timing matters more this year than you might think
In 2026, Thanksgiving falls on November 26, and GivingTuesday is December 1. That’s five days. If your Thanksgiving message lands on Wednesday or Thursday, it will sit in the inbox right next to a wave of GivingTuesday asks, possibly including your own.
I’d send it the week before Thanksgiving, roughly November 16 to 20. That gives the message room to be read as a thank-you rather than as the opening move of a campaign. It also gives you a few days to see who opened or replied before your year-end sequence starts.
If you’re mailing a card, work backward from that window and account for mail delivery times in a busy season.
Who should get it, and who shouldn’t
Not every name in your database needs the same treatment.
Send it to: donors who gave in the last 12 to 24 months, especially last year’s year-end donors who haven’t given yet this year. That second group is often where your December revenue comes from, and they’re the ones a reminder of impact may help most. If you haven’t already, take a look at why your year-end appeal starts with last December’s donors.
Make it personal for: your top donors. For them, an email isn’t enough. A handwritten note or a short call from the executive director or a board member, with something specific to say, is a better use of the moment.
Think twice about: donors who gave in the last few weeks. They may have just received a receipt and thank-you. A second thank-you is usually fine, but make sure it reports something new instead of repeating the acknowledgment they already got.
Test it with a holdout, and be honest about what the result means
This is the step most organizations skip. If you want to know whether your Thanksgiving message helps, hold out a random group of donors who don’t get it, then compare how both groups respond to your year-end appeal.
Here’s where small shops need to be careful. Imagine your file has 2,400 eligible donors. A 10 percent holdout is 240 people. Suppose 9 percent of the donors who got the message give in December, and 8 percent of the holdout group does. That looks like a win.
It isn’t proof. With only 240 donors in the holdout, a one-point gap is well within what you’d expect from chance alone. You’d need a much bigger difference, or several years of results, before you could say the message is doing the work.
That’s not a reason to avoid testing. It’s a reason to keep the test running year after year and to treat one season’s result as a clue, not a verdict. If you need a refresher on the basics, here are four steps to fundraising testing.
Where to start this week
Don’t write the message first. Find the result first. Ask your program staff one question: “What’s one thing that happened this year that a donor would be glad to know they helped pay for?” If they can give you a number and a name (or a moment) by next week, you have your Thanksgiving message.
Then pull your list, set aside a random holdout, and put the send date on the calendar for the week of November 16.
If you’re still building the rest of your year-end plan around it, Finish Strong: The 90-Day Year-End Fundraising Plan is a workbook that walks you through planning and running a year-end campaign on a 13-week calendar. The worksheets stack into a complete year-end plan, with AI prompts along the way. Even at this point in the season, it can help you organize the weeks you have left.
