Will Your Nonprofit’s Donors Decide to Leave You? Emphatically yes,

… if you do nothing proactive to make them want to stay.

You’re working hard to bring in as many donations as possible this year. And you’re being successful. Yay you!

But, wait.

There’s an “uh oh” looming around the corner.

Today we’re going to take a look at why many of your donors may decide to leave. And what you can do to keep them.

The Problem: Failing to Plan for Retention

If you don’t start planning — right this minute! — to keep this year’s supporters around, much of your good work will be for naught. Let’s begin at the beginning.

Donor retention rates are flat out abysmal. 

For over a decade the “Fundraising Effectiveness Project” has revealed alarmingly declining retention rates for donors at almost every level.

• Less than 20% of new donors renew.
• Less than 45% of all donors renew.
• Less than 60% of repeat donors renew
• Once you lose a donor, there’s only a 5.5% chance you’ll get them back.

Waiting until donors lapse to make an effort to revive them is too little too late.

Why not nip the problem in the bud?

We know repeat donors are the easiest to keep around and have the highest lifetime donor value. In fact, the aforementioned study found:

• Each time a donor repeats, their likelihood to give again increases.
• Retention for donors giving 7+ times was 88% — and they were the only ones to increase in terms of total dollars donated.
• The 7+ donor group, combined with donors contributing 3-6 times per year, accounted for only 16.3% of donors yet comprised 40.3% of all donations.

If we’ve known this for this long, why aren’t things improving?

Reasons why donors leave.

If you don’t understand these reasons, you won’t be able to take control of your donor retention numbers so as to boost lifetime value.  So, let’s look at this closely for a moment.

1. Every year you keep your donor with you contributes to lifetime value.
2. The shorter their stay with you, the lower this value.

Pretty obvious, right? Yet most nonprofits do a poor job – right from the get go — maximizing lifetime donor value.

Problems often begin immediately after a donor makes their first gift!

The problem is gift recipients too seldom think of a donation as the beginning of a beautiful transformative relationship. Rather, they look at it as a simple monetary transaction.

It’s not too hard to imagine this perspective doesn’t make donors feel good for very long. In fact, if you’re losing a lot of donors, it’s likely because you’re not making supporters feel their donations make a significant difference. And this translates personally.

Donors report feeling they don’t matter.That is really terrible, right? In fact, you can probably relate. Have you ever made a donation someplace where you weren’t thanked? Where the organization never reported back to you on the impact of your gift? Where the only time you ever heard from these folks was when they wanted something from you?

Many of the primary reasons donors leave are related to poor communication – both in terms of quality and amount – and the reasons are similar to why friendships frizzle and evaporate. You get busy; forget to call or write, fail to show gratitude… even stop thinking about each other. See what the research reveals in this infographic from Bloomerang.

When donors don’t get what they need from you, it doesn’t inspire repeat giving.

Reasons why donors stay.

I often say if you want gifts, you must first give them. Imagine you’re trying to build a relationship with a friend. If all you do is take, take, take, that’s a surefire recipe for disaster. If you don’t meet your friend or donor’s needs by doing a little giving, you’re going to lose them.

Period.

And you know it’s easier to keep good friends than to make new ones, right?  The same is true with donors.

Check out the infographic below to learn what multiple surveys reveal about what would motivate donors to stick around.

It doesn’t take a degree in rocket science to see what you can easily do differently!

How to Build Donor Loyalty

Begin with a written wooing strategy.

Giving feels good. It gives people an instant a shot of dopamine that produces a ‘warm glow, (documented by MRI research). Alas, the glow doesn’t last. So – if you want donors to stick with you — you’ve got to dedicate yourself to doing the woo. You see, from the donor’s perspective it’s not just about the money. In fact, it’s mostly not about the money. It’s about doing something that makes them feel part of something larger than themselves. Something that makes them feel good.

Sadly, giving is seldom its own reward. People may tell you it is, but the research shows otherwise.

• People need acknowledgement.
• Beyond that, they need gratitude.
• And if you want them to stick with you and grow their investment over time, they need a little love.

This means putting a “love and loyalty” plan in writing to show donors you (1) know them; (2) love them, and (3) want to connect with them more deeply. When you give them meaningful opportunities to do things that fan the flames of that “feel good” they had when they made their gift, they will reward you!

Donors just need a little positive reinforcement.

People must, must, must hear from you immediately after they give.

And when I say ‘hear,’ I mean you’ve got to connect with donors in a manner they find:

• personal,
• relevant, and
• genuinely grateful..

How do I know this?

Almost 10 years ago I was gob smacked by an Abila Donor Engagement Study finding 21% of donors said they were never thanked for their gift!

What?!?! How is this even possible? Even clueless nonprofits know they have to say thank you, right? Didn’t our mothers and Miss Manners teach us this?

<< Here’s the real deal: My hunch is some of these 21% – a full fifth of all donors — technically were thanked, but what they received was so perfunctory, boring and/or something that sounded like another fundraising letter (i.e., “Thank you and (but) the need is still so great… we hope to serve X thousand clients this year… we have X hundred on a waiting list… yada, yada, yada”) that they tossed it without even reading it. >>

If the thank you isn’t personal, relevant to the reason they made the gift, and grateful (i.e., not just a canned letter or transactional financial receipt), donors won’t even notice it.

The way you communicate with donors must make them feel good.

The only way donors can tell how much you appreciate them, and their gift, is if you tell them.

So, please, please, please… tell donors what you know!

When you share intel with people, they feel like members of your family. Included. Important.

Appreciate the donor as a person; don’t simply thank them for giving money.

In fact, the same Abila Donor Loyalty Study referenced above found approximately 71% of donors felt more engaged with a nonprofit when they received content that was personalized.

The donor acknowledgement, to work its magic, must be prompt, personal, relevant and ‘stand out.’

The way you say thank you is the most important part of your overall donor love and loyalty communication strategy.

If you do what I call ‘checklist stewardship,’ you’re merely focusing on your own processes and not on donor needs (i.e., “A thank you went out” vs. “I called Claire personally to let her know how much her first-time gift meant.”).

• Prompt means within 48 hours. This reassures your donor the gift was received and you’re an efficient organization. It establishes trust – the foundation of all lasting relationships. If you wait too long to say thank you, the donor ends up feeling the exact opposite of how you want them to feel. Neglected. Uncertain. Distrustful.
• Personal means you show you know this donor. The thank you must acknowledge the donor by name, refer back to the campaign to which they responded, and recognize the amount and purpose of their gift. If they asked for something (e.g., to remain anonymous; to have a gift made in honor of a loved one; to have their deceased spouse’s name removed from your list) the thank you must mention this. If you asked for something special (e.g., an upgrade; a response to a matching gift challenge; a commitment to give monthly; a commitment to share the appeal with their networks), the thank you must reflect this.
• Relevant means you remind donors their gift will accomplish what they intended. This means harking back to the purpose of the appeal, and reflecting this back to the donor. Don’t say “thank you for standing with us.” That’s not why they gave. Say “because you care, mothers will have a safe home for their children.”
• Stand out means it must cut through the clutter and be perceived as a pure, genuine expression of gratitude. [See Nonprofit Donor Thank You’s: What are You Doing to Stand Out?]

People must hear from you again, before you make another ask.

It’s your job to make sure donors know how much they matter. Tell them what their giving accomplished. Flatter them for being generous, caring, visionary, compassionate, understanding or whatever else you can dream up.

Both flattery and impact reporting work!

If you don’t do this effectively, you’re a thief! That may sound harsh, but you’re actually robbing donors of their deserved ‘feel good’ if you don’t put real attention, time and resources into communicating impact to your supporters. The mere fact you “do good work” won’t cut it. Sorry. Donors just aren’t quite sure whether the gift they made was enough to have any kind of impact.

Donors aren’t mind readers.

Thank continuously; once is not enough.

If you at all doubt this, test it for yourself. Take a subset of this year’s donors and do something special for them.  For example:

• You could call one out of five new donors immediately to say thank you. See if those who received the call renew at a higher rate, or give larger second gifts, than those who did not receive the call. If so, you can roll this strategy out to a larger group.

• You could send every other donor who gives online a mailed letter in addition to their email receipt. Again, see if those who received the additional thank you renew at a higher rate, or give larger second gifts, than those who did not receive a letter. If so, you can roll this strategy out to a larger group.

• You could send half of donors who give via mail at or above a particular dollar amount a personal hand-written note on their letter.

• You could send half of donors who give above $1,000 a second thank you from someone directly involved with the program for which they earmarked their gift (e.g., a program director or a beneficiary).

If you don’t want to bother with tests and tracking, I doubt you’ll find a downside to enacting any of these suggested strategies. Here’s what other studies tell us:

• Donors called by a board member within 24 hours of their gift being received gave an average of 39% more than those not called.
• Donors receiving a thank you call were an average of 51% more likely to pledge again the following year.
• Donors who only received a voicemail were more likely to give the following year than those who received no call.
• Even calls made months after gift receipt made a difference.

Do You Do Enough to Make Donors Feel They Matter?

Commit to putting a better plan in place. Today!

There’s plenty of research showing this will pay off, big time, by increasing donor retention and the lifetime value of your donors.

The best way to begin improving donor retention is with an easy-to-execute commitment – and a written plan – to say thank you more effectively. Then layer in as much additional gratitude as you can via subsequent messaging and reporting.

• Thank you via a different channel
• Thank you from a different person.
• Thank you in a donor newsletter
• Thank you in a blog post
• Thank you in a donor impact report
• Thank you in an event program
• Thank you in a social media post
• Thank you in an advertisement
• Thank you via planned acts of kindness all year long!

If you think you could do a more effective job, don’t procrastinate.

Learn How to Give Donors More of What They Need

Get the Donor Retention and Gratitude Playbook with 6 separate companion guides (at a bargain if you buy the bundle)!  Or you can purchase them individually. Taken together, they are a complete Donor Retention ‘Bible’ — everything you need to raise more money by keeping your current donors and increasing their average gift! It’s filled with hands-on, practical information garnered from my 30+ years working in the nonprofit trenches plus another decade or so as a coach/consultant. This stuff works!

People love this Playbook, and I promise you’ll be happy. And, like all Clairification products, this comes with a 30-day, no-questions-asked, 100% refund guarantee. You can’t lose.