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 recently shared a how-to recipe for creating a Next Ask Amount formula field on the Contact record in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack. Next, we tossed in twelve different versions of that formula to give you options. Now we take this same concept and extend the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack by creating a Next Recurring Ask Amount field to convert one-time donors into sustaining supporters.

For a deeper dive into strategy, Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack tactics, and details on operationalizing your personalized ask using Pardot or the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, watch our recorded webinar, Making the Right Fundraising Ask: When, How and How Much.

In our latest blog post, we offered step-by-step instructions for creating a Next Ask Amount formula field in the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack to be used in personalizing fundraising appeals. Being big fans of choice, we're happy to offer twelve different versions of that formula from which you can choose when creating your own field.

Return on Investment, Acquisition Rate, Conversion Rate, oh my! These and so many more fundraising statistics are helpful in their own way, dear nonprofit fundraiser, but so many can tempt one into simple snapshots of the past, leading to short-sightedness in the future. How can one avoid the temptation of the myopic and rejoice in clear-eyed, future-focused fundraising success?

Lifetime Value. (Cue angel choir).

Lifetime Value (LTV) transforms all of the donations you receive and the money spent acquiring them into a single, powerful number. That number can predict the future and, more importantly, grant the foresight to inform strategy so you can change that future, and raise more money at less cost to do more good.

But how does Lifetime Value help inform, and how do you find that powerful number for your own organization?