As a follow up to the recent free webinar ‘7 Reasons why you should start a monthly donor program NOW’, we’re happy to share the answers to some of the questions we didn’t have a chance to answer during the webinar. These are very short answers of course. But feel free to contact me at erica@adirectsolution.com if you have any additional questions or join her in one of the upcoming advanced monthly donor webinars. Question: Do You Recommend...

I am an avid coffee drinker — five cups a day at a minimum and one decaf at night. We have a big coffeemaker with a timer, so our coffee is ready when we wake up in the morning. It’s one of those old fashioned multi-cup machines. The slow drip-by-drip process makes it so worthwhile, and it creates the amount of coffee I like. That coffee maker and a recent Seth Godin blog made me think how the drip-by-drip approach is so utterly true when it...

A few months ago, I taught the “Recurring Revolution” training for members of The Fundraisingology Lab, by Moceanic. It was a lot of fun. Several members responded to a question about how best to keep their monthly donors. One of those members was Natalie Lanoville from Jewish Family Services  in Vancouver, Canada. I was impressed with her response. I talked with her some more so I can share some of her great experiences and approach. Natalie...

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m always looking for ways to help you convince your boss or board that it’s time to put a bit of time into generating more monthly donors. Time is really all it takes now, because the tools are already there. You just have to make the monthly gift option easy to find and start directing your donors to go there. You may also know that I always recommend annualizing the value of monthly gifts....

Good news! Monthly giving is one of the few groups of small donors that is (still) growing. Not surprisingly, because organizations have started focusing on it over the past few years. That’s why now job postings for monthly donor or sustainer managers, and monthly donor retention specialist positions are starting to pop up, but they’re hard to fill. Sadly, there are not that many training opportunities for this type of job yet. As someone...

Of course in your organization, nothing ever goes wrong with your monthly donors. But what would you do if something did? Would you hide? Would you stick your head in the sand and let someone else handle it? Or would you consider your donors and confess? The reality is that most of your donors will understand that things go wrong at times. They’re human beings after all. The key is to act right away, fix the problem and prevent it from...

People ask me this question a lot: “My monthly donors only make up 3 percent (or fill in another percentage) of my donors. Is that good? What’s the percentage I should strive for?” The answer is: “It depends!” Let’s look at a few different scenarios: If you have 100,000 donors who have made a gift in the past year and 3 percent of them are sustainers, it’s not bad. That’s 3,000 donors giving you between $24 and $35 a month—or between $864,000...

As you may know, I travel a fair amount.  And when I do, I typically travel light and bring my bag on the plane. But when I fly somewhere to present a workshop, I need my “props,” extra handouts, etc.  So, I check my bag and hope the bag gets to the destination the same time I do. And I must admit, especially with weather delays, I’m waiting nervously at baggage claim, hoping and praying my bag made it! I know that the airlines have been doing...

… You’d think that every organization by now would be convinced that there are donors who are interested in supporting your organization by joining a sustainer program. … You’d think the tremendous feeling of excitement that these wonderful sustainers generate would permeate your organization.  Well, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, it’s the “financial folks,” “the bean counters” who are holding things up. They...

You’ve heard me say this before: ”Assign a driver!”—if you’re serious about growing your nonprofit sustainer program.  Just one driver who pulls it all together and who makes sure the car keeps running and is being maintained to keep on running for a very long time.  So, when I mentioned this at a recent conference, an attendee asked me: ”What are the top characteristics someone needs to manage a sustainer program?”  That’s such a great...

One of the key annual fundraising strategies I recommend you add (or rev up) this year is monthly giving. It’s one of the best ways I know to move the needle in improving your mid-level giving program, and to also serve as a pipeline to acquire new donors, upgrade current donors, and influence major and legacy giving. To help you persuade your “powers that be” this is a direction in which you should definitely be headed, I’ve invited Erica...

I was born and raised in the Netherlands where electronic bank payments, or direct withdrawals, were a way of life. Believe it or not, even credit cards there were required to be paid off every month, automatically, from your bank account. Things have changed there, but also here in the U.S. Now, the question, “can monthly giving via direct withdrawal work here?” has a much more powerful “yes” answer than ever before. While it’s still not quite...

These days, there’s so much interest in new channels and the latest next “new shiny thing,” but did you know that there’s one medium you use everyday that has evolved tremendously over the past few years? That medium (the one that you’re holding in your hand right now or the one that’s very nearby!) is the ultimate key to retaining your donors: it’s your phone! In a session at the 50th Annual NCDC Conference and Exposition, Juddee Millito and...

I still come across many organizations that are actively trying to grow their monthly giving program, but they’re not sure who’s “running the show.” Nobody feels responsible. People wait until someone comes up with the next idea. Some think they only need to be focused on one aspect of monthly giving. Nobody is taking control of the whole process. Until those self-driving cars become a reality, just like with a car, you must have a driver. And...

This problem doesn’t just occur with monthly donors, but with all donors. That last step, finishing the donation is the key. But often, the donor clicks through. They’re ready to make a gift, but for some mysterious reason, they leave. They never finish the donation. What can you do? Should you just let that donor go? I say, not necessarily so. I say, use that opportunity to get feedback from your donor to help you improve future donor giving....

You’ve probably heard about the latest trend in donors, called rage donors. In a way, these have been around for years, but they used to be called “disaster donors.” Donors were often called “episodic” donors. Donors who only give at the moment of disaster, at the moment of “rage,” when something is really “hot” in the media, and people feel totally compelled to do something about it. And if there’s an organization, a group of individuals or...

At a workshop last week, I asked the question: “Are you giving monthly to your own organization?” I was expecting everybody’s hand to go up. But boy, was I unpleasantly surprised! Out of the 52 people in the room, only eight people raised their hand. Fortunately, a few days later at another presentation, it was almost the whole room. So, my first recommendation if you’re looking to grow your number of monthly donors is to join your own program...

There it was: a text and an email message from my credit card company. Someone was trying to use my card in a different state! I had traveled there the week before and stopped at one of those travel plazas to fill up my car. Maybe that’s where it happened. How on earth somebody got ahold of my card information from my wallet and worse—was able to use it—is beyond me. Something must have set off this alert because the credit card was not...

Donors are fascinating people; and monthly donors, at times, even more so. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that one of my recommendations is to invite your monthly donors to events. Some may wish to attend, and, even if they don’t come, it will make them feel special. But at times, you give a donor a finger, and they’ll want your whole hand. Here’s an example based upon a recent question during one of my monthly donor...

It’s graduation time! It makes me think back of our boys graduating from college, who are now college alumni. Our youngest son went to Cape Cod Community College for the first two years and then graduated from Belmont University in Nashville. It’s a great campus, a terrific school and a great city to live in and visit. While he’s been on his own for a few years, he’s moving around a fair bit, and we receive his Belmont mail here at the house....

As you may know, Penelope Burk does some tremendous research on donors thinking and behavior. From her 2017 report, I was particularly pleased to see the tremendous move from donors with the focus on monthly giving, especially for younger donors. I reported on this before. As a follow up, Penelope recently wrote a blog about what donors are thinking, especially pertaining to disaster giving. Disaster donors are slightly different from other...

I never think of myself as a pack rat; but when it comes to fundraising, that’s exactly what I had become. So this past week, I took some time to go through old magazines and boxes of direct mail and, in particular, monthly giving samples. Sustainer trends and research; extra appeals and sustainer upgrades; thank you letters; stewardship newsletters; sustainer reminders; conversion packages. I still have a few more to scan in, but if you’re...

The other day, one of my clients mentioned that she has been giving $10 a month to an organization for three years. She signed up on the street, and that was that—no phone call, no thank-you letter, no email, no newsletter, no anything. Well, after this had been going on for three years, she called them up and said: “Enough is enough. While $10 a month is not a big amount, it’s all I can afford right now. I’m going to cancel because, clearly,...

I may have mentioned before that there really are not that many trend statistics tracking monthly giving revenue. For individual organizations, there are some wonderful analytics companies to look at trends and compare against their other clients, but that information is not publicly available. The only available stats I know of are: For small organizations (raising $2 million or less): the “Individual Donor Benchmarking Study,” but...

I’m currently working on the analysis for a big national organization’s sustainer direct mail campaigns. One of the things we needed to settle on first was what they thought was important in measuring their monthly donor success. As you know, monthly gifts are typically small. So, if you only look at the first monthly gifts and possible one-time donations that came in from those donors who are not yet ready to give monthly, you’re not doing...

Many organizations are in the process of budgeting for their next fiscal year. Here’s a guest blog from Chrissy Reynolds who wrote a great post on how important it is for both organizations AND donors to budget their donations. That fits nicely with monthly giving, don’t you think? Donations to the non-profit sector for charitable causes grew by an estimated 3.6% in 2017 and is expected to increase to 3.8% this year. Many charities, foundations...

Here’s a guest blog where it’s all about the business focus for nonprofits. Somethings that’s very important when it comes to monthly giving. Once organizations see the power of those small donors, they’ll be more likely to focus on it more. As you know, nonprofit organizations are playing the positive role in the betterment of communities. Non-profit organizations are similar to for-profit organizations because they also need money to achieve...

You may know I’m a huge promoter of monthly giving. Why? Because it’s a great way to engage your small annual fund donors and increase your donor retention rates. And as a recent statistic showed, sustainer giving is indeed growing, especially online. Last year, 20% of online giving came from monthly donors (aka sustainers, recurring donors; source – Blackbaud 2017 Luminate Benchmarks). Needless to say, the interest in monthly giving has...

You may now know that I’m a Dutch immigrant. I just celebrated my 25th anniversary being in this beautiful country! I still remember Apr. 10, 1993, when I flew from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Boston Logan via Bangor, Maine, where we had to stop to refuel because Logan was closed by fog. It was a tremendous feeling when I was able to walk in with my immigration papers. (I became a U.S. citizen in 2008, by the way.) Credit: Erica Waasdorp So, it...

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines Commitment as follows: a promise to do or give something. A promise to be loyal to someone or something. The attitude of someone who works very hard to do or support something. Wow, that’s something isn’t it? Monthly donor commitment isn’t necessarily easy. It’s hard work. There are two different kinds of commitment in monthly giving: organization and donor. The organization must be committed to the...