lifetime value

Including loyalty in your beyond-RFM segmentation

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Since Sandy first donated to your organization in 1992, she’s given over 100 gifts.  Nothing exorbitant – she’s now giving $30 every three or four months – but she also has volunteered, come to three walks, signed up for emails, and taken almost every advocacy action you offer.

On the other hand, you acquired Miriam from an outside list in 2012.  She gave $25, but nothing since then.  You don’t have her email or phone number, but a last chance lapsed package piqued her interest four months ago and she gave another $25.

What do these two have in common?

They look the same on a traditional RFM analysis: they are both 4-6 month $25-49.99 multis.

And if you use only a traditional RFM analysis, you will treat them the same.

That’s silly.  If you were looking only at these paragraphs to judge, Sandy would seem to be a good candidate for monthly giving, upgrade strategies, and/or planned giving.  Miriam probably has a 50-50 chance (or worse, given industry averages of lapsed reactivated retention rates) of never giving you another gift.

It’s easy to criticize this, but harder to do this analysis writ large, when you are doing five-to-seven-figure list selects.  So how do you draw these lines?  Here are a few ideas:

Lifecycle analysis.  Way back when (November 2015 – ah, those were the days), we talked about how there isn’t just one retention rate – there are several, based on where a person is in their donor journey.

This lifecycle analysis can layer on to your segmentation analysis and on to your messaging.  Some sample categories:

  • New.  What it says on the tin.
  • 1st year.  They have given a second gift, but it’s been less than 12 months since their first gift.
  • 2nd year.  Gifts in their first two years.
  • Core: Donors who have given in each of the past three 12-month periods
  • Lapsed: A gift 13-24 months ago.
  • Deep lapsed: A gift 25+ months ago.
  • Lapsed reactivated: Someone who has given a gift in the past 12 months after a gap of at least a 12-month period

Your mileage and organization may vary – it’s more important to look at this analysis than it is to have the same precise categories.

So you may not have a separate piece for Sandy, but you might want to make sure there is language like “As one of our most loyal donors” or “You’ve stood with us for more than 20 years.” or the like in the existing piece.

As for Miriam, as a lapsed reactivated donor, you are still worried that you might lose her again.  Perhaps you want to stay close to the tactics that recruited her (or won her back or both).  She might also be worth an e-append or phone append to see if you can find a channel that further engages her.  Or maybe you want to use a less aggressive ask string – your goal for a lapsed reactivated donor is to make donating a habit again, rather than to increase their giving just yet.

Gift density.  Take a look at the number of gifts someone has made, then divide by the number of years since a person’s first gift.  This is how many gifts you will get from them in an average year (or at least what you have received).

Sandy’s number is above four.  Four is a bit of a magic number (some would say three or even two– again, having a number is more important than what the number actually is) to indicate strong likelihood of monthly giving.  When someone has a pattern of giving frequently, this ask isn’t nearly the heavy lift it is trying to get someone to go from one gift per year to twelve.

Miriam is below one.  One is a separate magic number, as below one indicates a likelihood to lapse (by definition, they’ve done it at least once)  That should trigger some of the anti-lapse efforts discussed above.

One is also a magic number in that if someone gives you exactly one gift per year (and they’ve been with you a few years), that’s the bucket they see you in.  So, if they look unlikely to upgrade and they look unlikely to increase the frequency of gifts, the only other way to increase their lifetime value (other than increasing their retention rate) is to decrease costs.  Let’s say you send an average of 14 mail pieces per year and do two telemarketing cycles.  This person probably can decrease this substantially and save costs.

Longevity.  Length of donation is something that should be honored.  Not only are milestone anniversary notes and certificates and the like a good thing to do from a moral and ethos perspective, but they will also make sure that your most loyal donors know that you know they are important to you.

Channel responsiveness.  Change your tactics to suit the terrain.

All of these are even more important when looking at borderline segments.  Should you mail the 13-18 $15-$19.99 multis?  Maybe just those that have been with you five years or more?  Or with previous high gift densities?  Or just mail responsive?

But there’s more to it than even that; tomorrow, we’ll talking about using other interactions with your organization to define and customize.

Including loyalty in your beyond-RFM segmentation

Round 3 of the more donors versus better donors debate: intangibles

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For our viewers joining the program already in progress, for the past two days, Betty (arguing in favor of better donors over more donors) and Mo (arguing in favor of more donors over better donors) have been debating.  Today, the final round of the debate: intangibles.

Mo: The implications of focusing on fewer donors scares me.  My thinking is that you will draw the line at five dollar donors and cut quantity and donor volume accordingly.  Then, when you have fewer people on file and higher per piece costs, you’ll have to move that line up to ten dollars.  And so on down a death spiral.

Betty: As we’ve established, the amount that I’ll save by not having to have expensive means of communication to donors that aren’t going to pay back helps our bottom line.  If anything, focusing on higher-value donors is a way of getting out of a death spiral by cutting out the people who helped us get there.

And we know that number of donors on file is a false metric.  It ignores that some people are worth inherently more to the organization than others.

My concern is that there’s only so much time and attention you can give to a direct marketing program.  Too much of it goes to the Sisyphean task of trying to get $5 donors to become profitable.  Why not focus on what matters?

Mo: Because bulk matters too.  When we go to lobby for legislation, officials ask how many members we have.  They notice if we are a force.

And upgrading got us where we are.  Look at your current high-value donors.  They were $5 donors 20 years ago.  It was cultivation and upgrade strategies that made us what we are.

Betty: That’s fine and dandy back when acquisition could turn a profit.  But every year, acquisition becomes a little harder and a little more expensive.  This isn’t kindergarten where everyone has to have a turn.  We are accountable to all of the donors that we have that we use their donations wisely.  If we aren’t getting net money from a person, we owe it to all of our donors to let them go.

Mo: Why not just customize your donor stream for them where you can make a profit?

Betty: You should if you can, but you can’t always.  And keeping them in the mail stream does something else: it starts making your pieces that win in tests the ones that are tailored toward a lower common denominator.  That’s the death spiral you should worry about: the temptation to cut costs by doing things like not personalizing pieces that don’t matter as much to the most marginal segments of your file.

Verdict: I’d like to know what you think at nick@directtodonor.com.  Personally, I buy some of Betty’s arguments here.  There always is a threshold at which you need to cut some donors off.  Rationally, then, it seems like there should be a threshold at which you should try not to acquire them.  What that threshold is will vary from organization to organization.

So tomorrow, we’ll talk about the implications of if and where you choose to draw the line.

Round 3 of the more donors versus better donors debate: intangibles

Acquiring new advocates in (and for) direct marketing

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There are several services now set up to bring advocates into your organization on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Care2, Change.org, and CQ Roll Call are the main ones that have come across my desk.

In full disclosure, I have not yet tried these services. I hope that anyone who has can tell about their experience in the comments (or contact me at nick@directtodonor.com; I’d love to set up a guest blog opportunity to help correct my vast areas of ignorance).

But I do know what would be required for me to participate in these types of campaigns:

  • Maximizing free/content marketing efforts
  • Optimized advocacy forms and efforts
  • Strong knowledge of the value of each advocate and a strong projection of the value of these externally acquired advocates versus internally acquired ones.

I’ll go through each of these in turn, as these would be valuable whether or not you decide to invest in cost-per-acquisition campaigns.

Maximizing free/content marketing efforts

First, get your Google Grant.  I know, I’ve said it before, but some of you still don’t have one.  So get it.  Consider it free traffic to your advocacy efforts.

Speaking of, after donation forms, advocacy activities are the best thing you can direct search traffic to, as they convert very well.  It’s usually a safe bet that the person searching for “email congress seal clubbing” wants to email their elected officials about seal clubbing.  And if they click through on your ad, they are probably on the con side.

(A note: as of this writing, there are no nonprofit ads for the term “seal clubbing,” but Humane Society and PETA are on the first page of search results.  Opportunity?)

And, as we mentioned last week, now you know something about your constituent’s interest as you work to, one change at a time, probe their interests and convert them to a donor.

That’s on the search engine side, but the more important part is to make advocacy a part of your communications. The more you talk about activities and activations in your blog, enewsletter, social media, and Web site, the more people will interact with it.  Here are some potential topics:

  • Highlight news stories about your issue.
  • And don’t just retweet that article about your issue; add the note that that’s why we have to pass HB1489 (or whatever) with a link for people to take action.
  • Blog a first-person account from one of your volunteers who lobbied legislators and how rewarding it was.
  • Talk about your lobby day (state or national) and invite your constituents to be a part of a virtual lobby day online.
  • Honor legislators who have been champions of your cause.
  • Tell success stories of passed legislation (since you should be doing these for your online and offline petition signers anyway).
  • Post a legislative agenda for the year and report back on it with the legislature(s) is/are closed.

Hopefully, these will increase interests in your petitions or emails to legislators.

Optimize advocacy forms and efforts.  I probably should have mentioned earlier that you need a platform for emailing legislators that allows you to own the constituent, not whatever petition service you are working.  These can range from setting up your own form on your site to ones that come with your CRM to paid solutions of all stripes.  If there’s enough interest (you can let me know by emailing me at nick@directtodonor.com), I can review these solutions in a future post.  For now, suffice it to say that the value in advocacy online is to whom the constituent belongs.  If it’s you, you can ask for future actions — advocacy and otherwise; if it’s someone else, you are helping them build their house, not yours.

Once you have these forms, it’s important that you treat your advocacy form like a donation form (if possible), where you are continually testing and refining your system.  For example, if you are doing a national petition, you may just ask for name and email address in order to maximize form completion.  I would advocate also asking for zip code; if you are going to be asking people to participate in other advocacy efforts, you will have to know in which districts they fall.  That may be it in order to get people into your organization.  Physical address may impair your form activation rates to the point that it is more profitable (side note: we need a term for profitable, but for non-profits; non-profitable sounds like the opposite of what it is) to leave that off and either ask for or append (or, more likely, both) the data afterward.

Further, there are all the usual things to test:

  • Does your petition work better at left or right?
  • Pictures on the page or spartan?
  • One-step action or multi-step?
  • How much copy to sell the petition action?
  • And so on

You definitely want this tested before trying any sort of paid campaign so you are not pouring water into a bucket without a bottom.

You also want to put similar rigor behind what communications you send advocates after their advocacy.  This would include a customized advocate welcome series, what (if any) is the first mailing they would get, what other actions you ask them to take, etc.  More on this tomorrow.

These are significant determinants of lifetime value, so you want these well in place before…

Determining the value of an advocate

For some organizations, having an advocate is its own reward.  For most, however, it’s also an activity on which you will want to break at least even.  Unfortunately, lifetime value is hard and multichannel attribution is its own week of blog posts at some point.  So here’s a quick and dirty hack for figuring out how much you should be willing to invest to get an advocate:

  1. Pull a list of everyone who came into your online database via advocacy action.
  2. Pull a list of the donations these people made online over the past year.
  3. Average the sum of the donations by the number of people in your database via advocacy action to find the one year value of an advocate.

That’s it.

I can hear purists out there screaming at me: “what about future year revenues from an advocate?”, “what about the value these constituents have in recruiting other constituents?”, “what about the gifts made in other channels?”, etc.

I agree: this is not the best way to pull an average advocate’s lifetime value.  It is, however, a quick one.  And it sets a baseline: if you know the average advocate is going to pay for themselves in 12 months, all of their other activities will be gravy.

That is, if you work this equation and it says the average advocate on your file gave you $3 last year, you know that acquiring an advocate for up to three dollars is valuable.  If your advocacy page converts at 10%, you know that you can put up CPC ads on search networks and pay up to $.30 per click.  You can experiment with online petition sites, which charge at least $1.50 per advocate (in my experience).  And you can value your online communications that bring in new advocates versus those that bring in new donors.

So this dart throw, primitive though it may be, can help you determine your communications mix and investment.  Not back for something you can do in Excel in 15 minutes.

If you would like more tips like this one, please sign up for our weekly newsletter. There you will get to pick new topics for the blog, see related content to what you get on Direct to Donor, and get a TL;DR version of the week’s news.  Thanks!

Acquiring new advocates in (and for) direct marketing

Setting your direct marketing budget goals

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So, you want to budget for your direct marketing…

Wait.  Scratch that.

So, you have been told to budget for your direct marketing.  None of us really want to set a budget.  Yes, you want to be able to project what communications and campaigns will do, the better to measure expectations for the future and learn from our successes and failures.

But the ideal direct marketing world would be one where there was not a number to hit, but rather a series of goals.  You would set up your communications and tests, learn from what was done, retool the program for the future given what you’ve learned, and get hot oil massages from attractive members of your preferred gender(s).

Back in the real world, though, it is imperative that our causes know what they can count on from the direct marketing program and, ideally, from the bridges you have created to events, major gifts, planned giving, monthly giving, and corporate outreach.  Someday, I will blog about multichannel attribution, just as soon as I feel like I’ve figured it out myself.  Or, to speed things up, if you think you have a handle on it, email me at nick@directtodonor.com and I would love to give you a guest blogging opportunity.

These budgets let us know what staff we can bring on, projects we can take out, people we can help.  It’s imperative that we set them and that we stick to them.

I would argue there are three relevant things for which to budget:

  1. Net revenue. Think of your direct marketing program like a black box for a moment.

    black_box-aeroplane

    No, not that type of black box.  Hopefully.  Our black box is magical.  You can put in $100,000 and get $200,000 out.  You can put in $1.8 million and get $3 million out.  And, most importantly, you can put in X and get out Y, because our magic box is algebraic.

    Your organization needs to know what Y minus X is – how much does the magic box add to the money that is put into it.  Or, but another way, this is how much extra are you contributing to the mission through your activities.

  2. Program health. Your number and quality of donors determine how good your black box is going to be in future years.  There is a point at which this conflicts with #1.  A good program will take a maximized net revenue and reinvest some of that to help sustain and grow the program in the future.  Simplistically, this means acquiring donors.  Beyond that, it also includes the tests that fail so you have the benefits of the ones that succeed, cultivation communications that may not bring in immediate revenues but set donors up for better things down the road, and other tactics that sacrifice net for lifetime value (e.g., acquisition of monthly donors).
  1. Crosschannel health. This is more difficult to measure, but it will be to your benefit to start trying.  That is, how much if what you are doing helps out with other efforts.  A good example is with planned giving efforts.  An ideal target audience for planned giving appeals are 70-plus year old “tippers,” who give to your organization often, but not much, and who have substantial assets that may not be known by your organization or even conventional wealth screening indicators (living in modest homes and neighborhood, little to no stock activities, certainly no M&A or Wall Street stuff, and few political donations).  This is also a borderline audience for most direct marketing activities – they require more expensive (mail and phone) solicitation, they are unlikely to convert to monthly giving), and models will show them to have low lifetime value.  But what value do they have in the long-run?  A focus only on net revenue and traditional RFM-based file health metrics will ignore folks like this.

Purists will note that there are several things that are traditionally part of a budget that I don’t include here.  But that’s tomorrow’s post – the things that people think matter, but don’t.

Setting your direct marketing budget goals

A direct marketing bridge to… major gifts

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Direct marketing specialists and major gift specialists seem to be opposites in style and approach.  One is impersonal, mass-market, with knowledge of the aggregate not the specific – the marketing equivalent of the Air Force; the other is all about personal relationships, forged one on one, with intimate knowledge of that one person you are pitching – the equivalent of boots on the ground Army or Marines.  This can often cause them to be rivals in the same ways the service branches are; they can also work together to accomplish a mission together like the service branches.

As a direct marketer, developing a small budget to a major gifts program is part defensive.  I once worked with a major gift officer who would mark a donor as no mail, no phone, and no email the moment they got on her radar screen.  Not only did this deprive us of the only real source of revenue we had from these donors, but it also deprive the donor of the information that was tethering them to the mission and tugging at their heart strings.  And when she left, we had no way of differentiating real unsubscribes from these unsubscribes of pseudo-convenience.

This is going to happen if you can’t create a positive experience for potential major donors in your direct marketing program.  Yet it can happen and it can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the nonprofit.  There are only two reasons to stop communications with your potential major donors in this way: 1) if they ask you to or 2) you have a relationship with that donor to the point that there is a substitute communications strategy and ask framework in place.

So your role in direct marketing is to build the relationship with the donor over time.  This doesn’t necessarily mean a slower cadence; rather, it means different types of pieces, including a donor newsletter telling them about their accomplishments – the true impact of their giving.  It can also include higher-touch, higher-value communications – handwritten notes or cards, invitations to special events or briefings, or the like.  These can enter the communication stream gradually as your relationship builds.

Direct marketing is also a great vehicle – in fact, a primary vehicle – for identifying those donors who may be receptive to a major donor ask.  While some amount of wealth is certainly a necessary condition for a person to be able to make a major donation, the more important thing to the organization is the tie to the organization.  People often forget this.  If I had a nickel for every time a nonprofit brainstorming potential targets thought of hitting up Bill Gates or his foundation because of a friend of a friend, I would be blogging about what yachts are the most fun to waterski behind.

bill_gates_july_2014

If this man is your major donor strategy,
you do not have a major donor strategy.

What you are looking for is:

  • Giving history – long, repeated, multiple gifts per year, and increasing gift amounts
  • Participation – telling a story, coming to an event, volunteering
  • A clear passion for at least one aspect of your mission either from his/her giving history or participation

The one exception to this is people who make unusually high (whatever this is for your organization – probably between $100 and $1000) first gifts.  This is probably a person who has been interested in your cause for a while or has an important reason to start giving now – they may be ripe for personal interactions as much as your loyal long-term donors.

Looking at this compact list, you can see that you can not only help solicit major donor prospects, you can help create them.  This is by incorporating upgrade strategies into your communications.  If you have well-defined recognition for different levels of giving (and you should), you can make those aspirational, especially for those on the cusp of reaching them, by making the ask for the next highest level of recognition.  Those recognition levels should also be a prominent part of your mail, phone, and online communications, as well as your acknowledgments for these donors.

Finally, remember to thank extremely well.  If you are at lost as to how, check out 50 ways to thank your donors.  Some are usual, some are a bit nutty, but they may spark some ideas to giving your major donors and potential major donors the love they deserve.

A direct marketing bridge to… major gifts

Reactivating lapsed donors

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Getting lapsed donors to reactivate is second only to getting the second gift in terms of its importance on keeping your program from bleeding donors.

I often give Blackbaud a hard time, but the point in their report that you much treat lapsed donors differently is vitally important. The cost to (re)acquire is usually lower than the cost to acquire a new donors, and they almost always have better retention rates (remember how I said to track lapsed reactivation retention separately? This is why) and higher average gifts than a newly acquired donors. In fact, because of this, you should be willing to spend more to reacquire donors than to acquire them anew.

But at the same time, you can throw money away in lapsed reactivation just as easily as you can in acquisition. It’s little use to try to get someone back who, well,

He's just not that into you
Or she.

In an ideal world, you would be using modeling to find out which of your donors are most likely to reactivate. But in that ideal world, there would be no need for nonprofits, so it’s pretty clear we don’t live there. Yet.

So what can you do quickly, easily, and most importantly cheaply? Here are a few ideas:

Catch donors before they lapse. Look in your file for two things – people who don’t give as much as they used to and people who don’t give as often as they used to. You can view these folks as “relative lapsed.” They are telling you that they don’t value you as much as they used to relative to other charities or other things going on in their lives.

Identify lapsed donors who are giving to other organizations. An ideal way to do this is by joining list cooperatives, as recommended in the acquisition post. This will lead to the modeling discussed earlier. Another way of doing this is in your merge/purge process. As you rent outside lists, you run those against your file to make sure you aren’t paying for people who already have as donors. If you mark these donors who match outside lists, you will have a good indication of who are donating to other organizations (and, hence, are still alive and philanthropic generally). These lapsed donors will generally perform better than the average lapsed donors.

Identify people who just aren’t responding. Unfortunately, you can’t tell who is or isn’t opening an envelope and people may not answer a phone call for a few reasons not having to do with lapsing. However, you can tell who is and isn’t opening your emails. If you can run a report for people who haven’t opened an email in the past, say, six months, first of all, don’t email those people as much. This is a topic for a separate post, but just because you can email everyone at no marginal cost doesn’t mean you should email everyone. Suppressing these supporters for most emails will help your delivery and open rates and also help you specialize your tactics. The more salient lesson for lapsed donors is if someone isn’t opening your emails, yet their email address is still good, chances are they aren’t in love with your organization anymore and less likely to renew.

You also may want to see how many times you have mailed someone and see after how many times people in your file generally have their response rate fall off. If very few in your organization give after being solicited 24 times without a response, you may want to make this a part of your lapsed suppression criteria.

Go to the familiar. If a piece worked for someone before, send it or something like it to them again to try to reacquire them (whether an acquisition or a donor piece). This is why I recommend mailing deeper into lapsed categories for people who have given to that piece in the past. Similarly, finding messaging similar to what someone has responded to in the past makes someone more likely to respond.

Vary your messaging. This seems like it might contradict the previous one (and it does). But after so many times, messaging can also lose its effectiveness, so you might try a new tactic someone hasn’t seen before to attract them back.

Know who is worth getting back. Remember that lifetime value calculation? You will want to make sure that you aren’t investing to get people who will not pay back their investment in the long term. If someone donates $5 per year and it costs $5 to get that donation, then no amount of investment should be expended to get that person back.

So those are some retention basics in terms of technique. But the biggest thing is to treat your donors like humans – addressing your appeals to their desires and treating them politely and like an individual.

Thanks for reading and let me know if there are other topics you’d like covered.

Reactivating lapsed donors

How to measure retention

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Often, you will see people ask “what’s your retention rate” and get answers like 50% or 60% or whatever.  But there are different types of retention that add up to that overall retention rate.

Yesterday, I said that your direct marketing program was like a bucket with a hole in it.  We’re going to change this a bit today to say that your program is like a pipeline with a bunch of holes in it.  This is the lifecycle of your donor.  To define some terms:

  • Prospective donors are people who haven’t given yet, but might.
  • New donors are donors who are giving their first gift to your organization. I said we’d be defining terms.  I didn’t say they’d be hideously complex.
  • Converted donors/second gift donors/first-year donors are all terms for people who have gotten over the hump and given to your organization within the next year
  • Multi-year donors are people who have given reliably over multiple years
  • Lapsed donors are donors who haven’t given in a while. In a lifecycle analysis, this is frequently put at a time horizon (e.g., given the past year or past two years), but in reality it’s often militated by a broader analysis.  For example, if someone donates $5, you will stop trying to retain them much sooner than someone who donates $100).
  • Deep lapsed donors are lapsed donors, only really lapsed. Again, when this is is defined by your organization.
  • Lapsed reactivated/reinstated are people who were lapsed and have since given a gift. This is an important category often overlooked, in that these reactivated donors can’t be treated like people who just gave their second gift, but neither are the part of that key multi-year donor group.

Blackbaud indicates that the average retention rate is about 50% — that is, of your file, half will give you a gift in the next 12 months.

But as you can see, that’s oversimplified.  First-time donors are less likely to retain with a retention rate about 27%; multi-year retention is 58%, according to Blackbaud’s white paper on the topic.

But they only look at these two categories for retention.  It’s best to look at your retention rate in four buckets:

  • New
  • First-year
  • Lapsed reinstated
  • Multiyear

This is why retention rate as an overall metric camouflages what is happening in your file.  You may have a higher overall retention rate than you did a couple of years ago, but lower retention rates in all of these categories, similarly because you have more multiyear and fewer new donors than you did in years past.

If you prefer, lapsed could be included in here; I don’t because I think of lapsed retention as reactivation – there has to be an effort to reacquire donors, rather than talking to those whose attention you have already.

The other reason it’s important to look at each of these groups separately is that they require different strategies for retention.  With new donors, you have been a first date.  You have learned a tiny bit about them and they about you.  Also, to stretch the dating analogy, your relationship at first is new and exciting.  You can explore things early on like sustainer asks and that person might be in the afterglow of giving and your outstanding onboarding process (more on this later this week) and willing to entertain that notion.  Testing different messages and learning instruments like surveys are par for the course.

Conversely, for your multiyear donors, you should know what they like and don’t like.  Do they give only in the fall and when their gift is matched?  Do they love advocacy appeals?  Is your calendar hanging in their house and are all of their mailing labels yours (i.e., premium donors)?  Not only can you know these, you are expected to know and play back to them – see Ellinger’s Peak of Ideal Customization for details.

One additional retention metric to be aware of is an output from retention rate: lifetime value.  Here’s the formula for lifetime value:

clv-equation
Because everyone loves calculus

Wait!  Please don’t leave!

This is the overly complicated version.  You can ignore discount rate because the cost of money is so low. What you really want are “what is the net value of a person’s donations to an organization going to be?”  The key inputs to this are:

  • What are they giving?
  • What does it cost to get them to give that, initially and ongoing?
  • What is the likelihood that they will give gift 2 from now (and three and four and five) – that is, what is their retention rate? That’s the calculus portion of this – you sum each donation that someone will give, discounting it by the likelihood that they will give it

Retention rates, like compound interest, are magical, rippling through your program for good or ill for years to come.  Tomorrow, we’ll look at the inverse of the retention rate – why people stop giving.

How to measure retention