I had the pleasure of speaking on an excellent panel last week with NonProfit Pro on the topic of donor retention, so instead of our regularly scheduled week, let’s look at retaining our donors.

As direct marketers, we often have every bit of data about an appeal or campaign at our fingertips.  We can track average gift and response rate, test versus control packages, open rates, click-throughs, conversions, and so on.

The thing that is often forgotten is that each number represents people.  Everyone who gets a piece of mail, email, phone call, or text (or fax blast, carrier pigeon, telegram, etc.) votes on it by their action or lack thereof.

Lost in the numbers of an appeal or campaign performance are the metrics that matter in the long-term: are our strategies helping you love those who support you more and/or helping your supporters love you more?

Yes, it sounds a bit hippie-ish, as if I’m going to get the drum circle out any moment.  And part of it is – these are the people who make our work possible.

But even if we must look at this from under our green eye shades through our decidedly non-rose-colored glasses, it makes both sense and cents to make donor retention a top priority.

Our direct marketing programs are like a bucket with a hole in the bottom of it.  If you want the water level to rise, you can only do one of two things – poor more water into the bucket, or decrease the size of the hole.  Given this analogy, you might wonder why you would bother to pour water into a bucket with a big hole in it.

The image of a leaky pail of water that is legally required
to accompany all retention commentary.

And you would be right – retaining the donors we have is of greater importance than acquiring new ones.  While you certainly can’t stop acquiring to focus on retention (less you get down to one very very very loyal donor), keeping with donors with your organization is vital for several reasons:

• It’s cheaper. There are very figures for this.  Some say it’s twice as expensive to acquire a donor as to retain one.  Others say it’s 12 times as expensive.  Someone out there right now is working on a study that definitely concludes that it is a hillion jillion times more expensive.  Bottom line, it’s cheaper to retain a donor than to acquire one, by a factor of X, where X is big enough to be important.
• It’s easier. Picture addressing your acquisition package, email, or phone call to someone that you know already knows what your organization is, what you do, and kinda likes it.  Cuts a few sentences, maybe paragraphs, out of it, no?
• Retained donors are of greater value than new donors. We’ll talk retention rates tomorrow, in that people who have only given one gift are far less likely to stay with your organization.  They also tend to give more gifts and more per gift.
• Retained donors are of greater value, part 2. Major donors rarely come from the ranks of people who made one gift to your organization; that’s something that comes from a longer-term association with you.  Additionally, more than half of bequest givers have given to an organization 15 times or more.

So this week, we’ll talk about donor retention: how to measure it, why people stop giving, how to get that elusive second gift, and how to reactivate a lapsed donor.  Like many of these topics, each one of these could be its own book (and some are), so if there are areas of particular interest to you, let me know by email or in the comments and I will work to dedicate a week to the topic.