AmericanTowns.com Blog

What’s the Best Way to Say Thanks to Your Donors?

Donors give to non-profit organization because they want to make a difference.  The best way to show your gratitude for their generosity is not with certificates or plaques, but with tangible proof that their donations have helped the cause.  Personal stories describing specific successes are the best gifts a donor can receive and AmericanTowns is a great way to get those stories to your supporters.  It’s so easy to post a story to tell your donors how someone’s life was changed by a program they helped make possible.  You can post photos of the children your diabetes walk helped or the affordable homes you’ve built for less fortunate families.  Use our new Video Vault area to post the video of the animal shelter you helped fund or the mothers at your new domestic abuse shelter your donors helped furnish.

Keep showing your donors the wonderful results of their generosity and not only will they feel great about the donations they’ve given, they may just be with you for life.

How Sterling House Uses AmericanTowns to Score Big

We love hearing how community centers in our towns really “get” our site, take full advantage of it and how the kids, parents and the centers themselves benefit tremendously.  When Harold Baird of the Sterling House Community Center’s basketball league in Stratford, Connecticut told us how he found AmericanTonws and ended up using it extensively we knew the details could help others.  Hope you enjoy his story.

Jim Maglione

“Actually I discovered AmericanTowns by accident a little over four years ago.  I was trying to track down an event in Stratford, Ct, and the search engine led me to AmericanTowns.  I was impressed by the information available on the site and I decided to bookmark it on my computer.

There was an invitation to create a home page on the AmericanTowns site for any community organization.  Sterling House Community Center had its own website, but back then it was not maintained as well as it is today.  Since I was, and still am, actively involved in the house's athletic programs and wanted to make them well known in the community, I thought having a page on AmericanTowns would be the answer for spreading the word about games played, those to come, and the statistics from the league.

Even today, we link our high school basketball program to AmericanTowns because they do a far better job than we could.
 
Quite frankly, although area newspapers have been cooperative about carrying our information, their deadlines are so early that the information is stale by the time it is printed.  Using AmericanTowns allows us to remain current to the delight of our players, coaches, and fans.

We continue to reference the AmericanTowns website address in anything that we hand our coaches and players.  We encourage them to visit the site frequently for anything they need to know about the league.  To show the use of the AmericanTowns website, I had a player comment how much he enjoyed seeing his personal statistics posted in a timely manner on AmericanTowns.

I would encourage anyone looking at the power of the internet in today's world to look no further than the AmericanTowns to find out what's going on in his or her community.
 
Hal Baird
Sterling House Community Center (Stamford, CT)
High School basketball statistician

Welcome to AmericanTowns

Here at AmericanTowns we always appreciate a good blog, so we thought we’d forge ahead into the blogosphere ourselves.  Each week, we will highlight our favorite new things that will help you take full advantage of all AmericanTowns has to offer.  We’ll share the stories of  AmericanTowns users who are having incredible success in towns across the country.  We’ll reveal our latest technological innovations you can benefit from and share some simple ways non-profits can make their organizations more efficient, from fundraising strategies to tax issues, donor relations and more!

As always, we’d love to hear from you as well.  If you have an AmericanTowns success story to tell or even an offline "best practice" that has helped your organization, send it along. We’ll spread the word about your organization and help other communities learn from your success.

With any luck we’ll be able to make your life a little easier.  Something we work on every day here at AmericanTowns.

Jim Maglione
Co-President, Community