Retention

When it comes to saving money, make sure you are giving as much thought to where you should save as you do to where you should spend.

After the busy nonprofit year-end giving season comes the often overlooked nonprofit thank-you season. Remember to give thanks for donations early and often. Showing constant, authentic appreciation for your donors (new and old) is crucial for retaining supporters. Need to breathe some new life into your donor gratitude plan? Here are 10 thank-you ideas to inspire you in the new year.

I can’t help but feel that there is an incredible group of loyal and passionate donors out there who are overlooked and forgotten in almost every instance — the donors who aren’t recruited at all … I’m talking about the people who seek you out and give without solicitation.

These are the donors who are simply passionate about a cause and will look for a charity that can help them fulfill their own personal missions, creating the world they hope for.

You don’t need a single new donor to raise more money. Given that the cost to acquire a new donor is often $1, or more, for every $1 raised, finding a new donor does not even help most organizations with short-term mission fulfillment. So, how can you raise significantly more money for mission fulfillment without acquiring new donors? Here are just six ideas: 1. Ask for more. 2. Send a second-gift appeal. 3. Recruit monthly donors. 4. Get a challenge grant. 5. Retain donors. 6. Ask for planned gifts.

Bad news for entry-level fundraisers. When you send out a prospecting letter, and new donors respond — most of them will never give you a second gift. Why does this happen? Probably because a lot of new donors respond on a sudden impulse. Then later, if that impulse is not triggered again, they are not interested. Their lives have moved on.

So how do you attack this situation? You begin with — yes — a thank-you letter.

The big clue to our retention problem can be found in the word we use to describe the very start of the process: "recruitment." How can we possibly focus on what donors want if all we want is to "recruit" them? The rigidity of the word shuts out any possibility of connecting on anything other than a transactional basis. Do we really think that’s what our donors want?

Are your donors satisfied? Satisfaction with the development office is one of the major drivers of donor loyalty. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t talk about this. Even worse, most organizations don’t bother to find out.

Yes, I know: There’s too much other work to do. Organizations don’t have the resources to explore donor satisfaction. Blah blah blah.

But if you want loyal donors, how can you ignore the satisfaction thing?

Last week I blogged about the Stop Acquiring New Donors Meme, the most boneheaded fundraising meme of our time. The meme, arising from the general drop in donor retention rates, says you should stop acquiring new donors until you fix your retention. Which is like saying you should stop breathing until you end air pollution.

But retention is a real issue, and you really need to improve it.

Here are four common fundraising practices that hurt donor retention. If you are doing any of these things, change it now. You can improve your retention.

As the year draws to a close, focus more on renewing current and lapsed donors than on acquiring new ones.

It was a well-known speaker in the fundraising industry. The speaker's assertion: Donor retention has gotten so bad, we should just stop acquiring new donors and focus all our energy on retention. I wouldn't really bother bringing it up if it were just one boneheaded idea from one industry expert who hasn't done the homework. But I keep encountering this "Stop Acquiring New Donors Meme." People are saying that all over the place. I wonder how many fundraisers have actually taken this horrific bit of advice.