Monthly Giving

A monthly donor calling up to cancel is a dreaded call for any organization. It’s something nobody wants to hear. But it’s important to respond in the right way...

By now, you know the tremendous power monthly donors have. You know how it can help improve your donor retention to much higher levels. We typically see monthly donor retention rates between 87 percent and 95 percent—that’s double that of one-time donors...

Monthly giving is seeing double-digit increases in year-over-year growth, and for good reason. Nonprofits depend on a continuously scalable base of donors and revenue to fund their important missions and services. Among the many options in an organization’s fundraising portfolio, monthly giving offers a more reliable, steady income stream that is resilient to economic ups and downs...

A year or so ago, I joined 20 organizations with a monthly gift. And (sneaky me), I gave them a card that was going to expire a month later. I then tracked what organizations did in terms of “thank you” letters and actions to try to get me back...

A few weeks ago, NonProfit Pro shared an interesting NACHA case study on the long-term retention of those donors who give automatically through their bank account, also called EFT, Direct Debit, Direct Payment via ACH or automatic bank withdrawal...

Some of the most successful (and perhaps even leading) nonprofits that are converting members to monthly donors (often called sustainers or sustaining partners) are public television and public radio stations, all over the country...

I just finished Seth Godin’s book, “Poke the Box.” As always, it’s terrific, short and to the point. It really got me thinking: Seth tells us to have the initiative to start. Turn fear into action because the consequence of doing nothing is much scarier and is going to raise a lot less money!...

If you’re an organization that has had monthly donors for a while, you’ll know that some of your monthly donors can and will stay with you for decades! Of course that in part depends on their age when joining. Typically, I’m seeing that those donors continue to give monthly for 5 years to 7 years...

Two decades ago, Human Rights Campaign introduced “Partners,” our new monthly giving program. But we did so much more than that—in large part, unknowingly. We didn’t just create a program. We embarked on a journey to create an organizational culture. A culture of sustained giving...

In one of the webinars I present on monthly giving, one of the polls is: “How often do you ask someone to become a monthly donor?” The answer in some 50 percent of cases is not at all. Twenty percent say once a year and others more often than that—maybe twice or three times...