This question also came up at the recent sustainer workshop, and I know it’s something people struggle with, especially when you talk with your treasurers or finance folks. Monthly gifts are different from the major gift pledges most organizations are used to. Those pledges are typically set up for a specific purpose with an end date. And to make it even more confusing, some donor CRM systems use the word “pledges” for monthly gifts as well....

I’m still on a sustainer “high.” I just came back from a fabulous “Sustainer Day,” organized by the Direct Marketing Association of Washington. In just four fast hours, nonprofits and service providers shared trends, best practices and ways they’re working to bring in new sustainers and improve monthly donor retention. Steve Froehlich from ALSAC/St. Jude finished the day by sharing his personal experiences and challenged us to look at trends in...

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 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...

Now is the time to celebrate your monthly donor wins.  As this is the new fiscal year for many organizations, make sure to celebrate your wins in number of monthly donors over the past year. Of course, this all started with your goals. Goals will be different for different sized organizations. You have wanted to generate your first 25 monthly donors. You may have wanted to break through the first 100. Maybe your goal was to get to the next...

As you may know by now, when it comes to monthly giving, I’m all about making things easy and simple for both monthly donors and the organizations. So when I start working with an organization on growing their number of monthly donors, we first look at the online donation forms to see what’s already in place. And that’s sometimes where the big pause comes… I call it the “stopper,” “the donation preventer” or the...

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...

During a recent webinar, someone asked me a question. His finance people told him: “For $5 a month, it’s really not worth the effort. The finance charges are killing us.” This is another one of these monthly donor myths I’d like to debunk right away. My answer of course was this: “Yes, offering the $5 a month option to donors is totally worth it!” Here are 10 reasons why: You’re truly showing donor care.  No gift is too small. Your donor can...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve presented numerous webinars on monthly giving. I’ve also had lots of conversations with organizations asking them about their challenges with their monthly donor retention. And the No. 1 problem is expiring credit cards. When that happens it’s really important to remember the following: The donors did not call you to cancel their commitment! They want to continue giving monthly! They may have just received their...

Nonprofits never cease to amaze me. Sometimes in a good way. Sometimes in a not so good way. This is one of those sad case studies. I spoke to an organization recently, and its executive director told me they wanted to grow their monthly donor program—at least, that’s what he said at first. They have some 500 sustainers who are worth more than $500,000, so they are very high average gifts. Because they’re limiting recruitment by in-person...

If you’ve been following the weather, you may know that it’s been a rough few weeks, especially in New England. In Massachusetts, we were hit by our second Nor’easter within 10 days; and this last one was really bad. Snow was falling at one to two inches an hour, and the many downed trees caused power to be out for 99 percent of our area. Emergency shelters were open for days. Some cellphone services went down as well, so many people had no way...

Monthly giving is a huge untapped revenue source for so many nonprofits. I am still trying to wrap my head around the vast potential monthly donors offer. If you have 300 monthly donors – just how much overall revenue would these 300 lovely people be contributing to your cause each year? Let’s run the numbers: If each of those wonderful donors gave the average amount of the typical monthly gift – they would be giving $24/month. That’s really...

As you know, weve been talking about monthly donors for the past few weeks. And you may have seen my Facebook Live interviews here and here with monthly giving guru Erica Waasdorp. It’s been tremendously fun and exciting to get lots of feedback and questions from attendees. Here is another guest post from Erica – responding to many of the questions we are receiving from our attendees. It’s not too late to join the Monthly Donor Intensive with...

A few weeks ago, Michael Rosen published the post “How to Get Last Year’s Donors to Give More this Year.”  Guest blogger Joe Garecht shared some great advice for increasing giving. However, the post did not specifically address the issue of monthly giving. That led to a reader comment. Larry Little, President of Guardian Angel Basset Rescue, raised some important questions: Our revenues are in the $300k range but approximately 30% of that comes...