Breaking Down Donor Loyalty in 9 Tweets

(Editor's Note: 101fundraising is a cool new blog where fundraisers around the world can share their thoughts about, well, fundraising. It's cool not only because of the diversity of the voices represented, but also because most of the posts are pretty involved and features new, original content. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should. In the meantime, here's a recent blog post from the site.)

When I started to use Twitter last year, I made a few rules for myself. One of them being that I didn’t want to tweet about personal stuff. So I decided to tweet only about fundraising. To boost my followers I thought I’d summarize the best Tiny book in the series: "Essentials of Donor Loyalty" from professor Adrian Sargeant.

And I got a lot of new followers. So the tweets, which were quotes from the book, had to be interesting. In the end I tweeted the tiniest summary of the book ever done … in 71 tweets. This little book is an easy and quick read, and it will give you the best return on your investment ever. To be honest, it’s a must-read for everyone involved with fundraising! (Buy the book!) I wanted to do a top five, but my heart broke with every tweet I had to delete, because each contains a valuable lesson. So here are my top nine donor-loyalty tweets!

According to Sargeant, “building donor loyalty is the single biggest challenge facing the sector today.” And, “By failing to address the issue of attrition we waste potentially enormous sums of money.”

Each of the points made by Sargeant has been substantiated through 20 years of prior research. Even more interesting: “Almost all loyalty suggestions offered could be implemented at almost zero incremental cost!"

He says “there is no longer any reason to accept the appallingly high levels of attrition in our sector."