70 Nonprofit Trends for 2015

Rachel Armbruster, CEO, Armbruster Consulting Group
3. There has been a renewed focus on retention efforts that cut across all areas of development. Chapters especially are looking to national offices to provide best practices, strategies and tools.

Jay Love, co-founder and CEO, Bloomerang
4. The early months of the new year are a great time to revise your acknowledgment letters, especially if you haven’t updated them in quite a while. Consider also creating multiple acknowledgment templates that fit different segments of your database. For example, you wouldn’t want to send the same “thank you” letter to two donors who give wildly different amounts or who gave through different channels (an event vs online). Be personal! Treat all of your donors like the unique flowers that they are.

Kivi Leroux Miller, president, Nonprofit Marketing Guide
5. Donor retention is finally a priority. For the first time in five years, donor retention has jumped ahead of donor acquisition as a major communications goal. It seems as though everyone has been talking about the importance of donor retention for years now, but we did not see that reflected in the priority communications goals for nonprofits — until this year.

GIVING CHANNELS/OPTIONS
Richard Perry, founding partner, and Jeff Schreifels, senior partner, Veritus Group
1. An increase in online giving. As younger, more tech-savvy boomers age and have more disposable income, more of them will be giving online. We will also start to see more organizations using online communication to report back to donors the impact of their gifts in more creative ways.

Erica Waasdorp, president, A Direct Solution
2. My hope and expectations for 2015 will be that virtually every organization, small and large, has a monthly giving program in place and is really focused on growing it. I foresee a further growth of recurring giving growing through text/mobile giving opportunities. Organizations and donors will finally see that they can support an organization at any level.