As hard as it is to believe, #GivingTuesday is fewer than five months away. Smart nonprofits are already planning how they'll leverage this massive day of giving. A critical piece of that strategy is segmenting their donor lists so they can craft appropriate individualized appeals to donors and would-be fundraising ambassadors. One element of that segmentation is determining who gave to your organization during last year's end-of-year giving season. In this step-by-step recipe, we'll share one way to do this using User Defined Rollups in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack.

For more on extending the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack for Giving Tuesday appeals along with savvy fundraising strategy, watch our free webinar, Seize #GivingTuesday Success with Fundraising Wisdom and Salesforce .

Nothing can cause more confusion between your finance and fundraising departments than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requirements for donation acknowledgements. Never fear! We're here to shed a light on what often feels like a murky area.

The right thank you is essential to a nonprofit expressing exceptional gratitude and developing long-term relationships with donors. Below is a little inspiration from two organizations that get it right to help your creative juices flow for your next thank you letter or email.

We were all taught to say “thank you” when given a gift. Nonprofits are no different. Expressing timely and proper gratitude to donors when they make a gift to your organization is not only the right thing to do, it’s also key to cultivating sustaining donors and funding your mission.

The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) provides a straightforward way to say thanks with a handy Email Acknowledgement button that triggers an automated email for one or multiple donations at a time. The beauty of the button is its simplicity with its use of a single email template with merge fields of your choice and letterhead you can customize to a degree. Whether that handy button and its simplicity is right for your organization depends on a few factors we’ll discuss below.

Repeat donors are essential to successful fundraising efforts. They can also be notoriously difficult to come by, and are becoming more so. Between 2008 and 2015, donor retention across the nonprofit sector declined 8%. Overall, just 45% of donors come back and give again to an organization in the year after a gift. That number becomes even starker when looking at just first time donors who give again only 23% of the time.

What’s more, post-election realities have affected giving in ways that require nonprofits to innovate in their fundraising efforts. Lynne Wester, famed donor relations expert noted in her blog recently:

“With a finite amount of charitable giving and an ever increasing number of nonprofits, the dollars simply cannot stretch equitably to everyone. Meaning that if one nonprofit experiences a windfall, like the ACLU raising $24 million dollars in one weekend, six times its yearly totals, that this money comes from another nonprofit's bottom line.”

To compete, you must set yourself apart in a sea of nonprofits. One powerful way of doing so is by expressing exceptional gratitude.