Automation is a beautiful thing! The ability to acknowledge donors within minutes, provide information and inspire action in the middle of the night, get your e-letter out while you’re on vacation – these are all golden.

But nothing can stay in set-it-and-forget-it mode forever. Once in a while, you have pause the autopilot and see where you are.

In December, I made modest donations to two nonprofit professional theater companies whose plays I enjoyed back when we could, you know, go to plays. Here’s how they acknowledged my donations.

photo of a screenshot of two donor acknowledgement emails

The first theater uses its ticketing system to accept donations, so that system is the name that appears as sender. The first line of the email is “Your order ID is PR746137….” The words “Thank you” never appear.

The second theater uses its name and says “Thank you” right there in the subject line. The body of the email is branded with the theater’s logo, and the message leads with “thank you.”

Guess which one makes me want to give again?

Even if you’re stuck with a kludgy donation or purchase system (don’t get me started!), you still control the words that emerge from that system.

Take the process off autopilot and have a good look at it.

  • Using a new email address, go through the whole process as a donor or buyer.
  • Yes, input your credit card and click Confirm, OK, or whatever.
  • Honestly evaluate both the process and the messages you receive.
  • Improve what you can. At least you can make the words warm and welcoming. (If you can’t, call me!)

Another thing to evaluate is automated emails and social media posts. If you schedule messages in advance, make sure someone monitors the schedule. For example, any message set to go out last Wednesday afternoon or Thursday should have been pulled. All eyes were on Washington, and no one had bandwidth for unrelated messages.

The big thing that needs to come off autopilot occasionally is your website. At least once a year, go through the whole site (other than dated stuff like blogs) to make sure the content is correct and the links work.

Automation is good. But at some point, human intelligence is better. You are smarter than any robot!