Thanks command does not work

Question

I am using

\documentclass[a0,portrait]{a0poster}

and in the following part I would like to give name1 and name2 the same Affiliation and name3 another Affiliation.

\begin{minipage}[b]{0.75\linewidth}
\veryHuge \color{NavyBlue} \textbf{title} \color{Black}\\[2cm] % Title
\huge \textbf{name1\thanks{aa}, name2\thanks{aa}, name3\thanks{bb}
}\\[0.1cm] % Author(s)
\huge Department of xxx, University of xxx\\[0.4cm] % University/organization
\end{minipage}

Unfortunately, there only appears the superscript numbers 1, 2 and 3, respectively, over the names but not what I wrote in the paratheses in the thanks-commands.

What can I do?