What If Monthly Giving Became Contagious?

I’m sitting on a plane, thinking about the coronavirus and a movie I watched a while back called “Contagion.” Scary. Totally realistic now!

We’ve become world travelers. We’re on planes, trains, boats, buses, Uber and Lyft rides, etc., all the time.

For this most recent trip, I packed some masks and gloves, and I am wiping down everything possible, hoping to stay healthy. (Whenever I travel, I swear by Airborne, sanitary wipes and hand sanitizer. I haven’t gotten sick yet. Knock on wood.)

I wish the monthly giving “virus” were spreading as fast as in that movie. We’d be much better off.

It’s spreading, but certainly slower than I’d like to see it. One of the best motivators to growing is to give regular updates. How are your efforts going? How are your tick boxes on the reply form and the extra buttons in your emails doing? How many new monthly donors popped up in the past month, and what’s their annual value?

The good news is you don’t need any gloves or masks to protect yourself. You just need to have a system in place to process the gifts. You just need to have the commitment in place to want to “spread” monthly giving around as far as you possibly can. And then you need to be committed to sharing the results and continue stressing the importance of monthly donors for the support of your mission.

You don’t have to quarantine monthly donors and keep them away from other activities, but you do want to keep them separate in your email program and give them some extra attention in your written communication efforts.

Be careful traveling, and let’s see how we can spread the monthly donor virus unlike any other.