5 Follow-Ups for Better Online Donor Retention

According to the recently released 2013 Charitable Giving Report by Blackbaud, this past year was a strong year for fundraising. Charitable giving grew 4.9 percent, and online giving grew 13.5 percent, accounting for 6.4 percent of total giving in 2013. Grab the full report or check out the infographic if you want to dig in to the details.

The best news of all might be the fact that every sector had year-over-year fundraising growth — something we haven’t seen for quite some time.

But despite our success, we must continue to push forward in 2014. If the nonprofit sector wants to thrive for decades to come, I suggest we turn the spotlight to donor retention.

The shocking truth is that close to 75 percent of your new donors will not return after they make their first donation to your organization. That’s not a statistic anyone could be proud of.

If a business had customer retention rates under 30 percent, it would soon be out of business because the cost of acquiring a new customer is significantly higher than that of retaining an existing customer.

But nonprofits settle for donor retention rates of 27 percent. In fact, we’ve settled for declining donor retention rates for the past 10 years, watching them fall from 33 percent to 27 percent over the past decade. Something has to change.

Experts have sounded off, and there has to be a better way. We can’t continue doing the same things year after year, expecting different results. Right?

In the spirit of improving donor retention rates in 2014, here are five no-brainer follow-up techniques to help you retain new online donors.

Deliver instant gratification
Remember that online donors live in “Internet time,” which is to say that they prefer immediate execution and delivery.

Find a way to feed that need for immediate gratification. Send an email or social-media response, whichever directly corresponds to the channel used for giving, that acknowledges the gift and shows an immediate effect.

For example, you could send an animation demonstrating how the donation actually moved your nonprofit closer to its goal or had a direct effect on fueling the cause in some other way. Make full use of multimedia, and be creative. Leave the donor feeling satisfied that his or her gift made a real difference.

Tie offline contact directly to online gifts
One of the allures of online activity is the sense of anonymity. However, one of the best ways to retain donors and increase giving is to establish personal connections with them. You need to transition the online donor from detachment and relative anonymity to a feeling of belonging and investment in the cause.

Begin the process of making offline contact and creating personal connections with online donors by sending a piece of direct mail mentioning the online gift, and reiterating the impact it had.

Multichannel gift acknowledgments drive home donors’ importance to your cause and welcome them as valued members of your community.

It’s also been shown to significantly impact the lifetime value of a donor when you can incorporate online and offline cultivation.

Make it personal
While it is relatively common to use a donor’s name in follow-up correspondence, it is not yet common practice for nonprofits to truly customize donor responses and gift requests.

Instead, many nonprofits simply drop donor names into boilerplate letters and direct-mail pieces.

But the nature of getting a donation online allows you to capture more information about the donor’s interests and motivations for giving — allowing you the ability to be more personalized in your follow-up.

Instead of simply sending a request for a second gift using a generic template, how about tailoring gift requests to the donor’s specific motivation for giving? For example, while one donor may give to a cause because she’s lost a family member to a disease, another may be an environmentalist concerned with diseases caused by pollution or natural disasters.

Personalization has shown time and time again to have a significant effect on the impact and response rates of your communications. When asking for that repeat gift, tailor your message to be as individualized as possible — write it as if you were writing a personal note to a friend.

Track time and ask on cue
Nonprofits, particularly the successful ones, track a lot of donor information. But rarely have I seen them note the timing of gifts. It’s very possible there’s a correlation between when a donation is made and when giving is possible, or more palatable, for individual donors.

If you note that a donor tends to give around the first of the month — or any set day of the month — this may correspond to paydays. If a donor just got paid, it’s psychologically and financially easier for him to give. Asking for his next donation during the times he’s historically given will likely improve your response rates.

Similarly, if a donor makes an annual gift, look to see if there is a trend in the time of year it’s made. Perhaps this correlates with the anniversary of a specific event in the donor’s life or simply when a certificate of deposit or other investment pays out annually.

Be sure to capture the date and time of each online donation so you can time your follow-up ask appropriately. Improved donor retention rates are very likely to follow.

Know donors’ birthdays
Did you know that people between the ages of 49 and 67 contribute 43 percent of the total dollars given to nonprofits in the U.S.? It’s true! Nearly half of all giving comes from one generation. Knowing if a donor fits into this group — the baby boomers — or one of the other generations can have a significant impact on your online fundraising and donor retention strategy.

Just imagine if you were able to tailor your communications to donors based on their generation — the style, the medium, the giving level and the follow-up could all be personalized so each fundraising ask has the greatest chance of success.

You’d be able to speak to your baby boomers differently than to your Gen Yers and to your Gen Xers differently than to your matures. And so on.

Make sure you ask for every donor’s date of birth on your online donation form. Then, take this information and craft follow-up and communication strategies unique to each generation.

(You can learn more about generational giving habits here.)

What about you? Do you think these online fundraising techniques could help improve donor retention rates? I’d love to hear your perspective. I’m @franswaa on Twitter, or you can shoot me an email at frank.barry@blackbaud.com

Frank Barry is director of digital marketing at Blackbaud and blogger at npENGAGE. He is also a member of the FundRaising Success Editorial Advisory Board. Reach him at frank.barry@blackbaud.com or on Twitter at @franswaa