Monthly Giving Webinar Questions Answered, Part II
In January, three fundraising professionals came together in a FundRaising Success webinar titled “Everything You Need to Know About Obtaining and Retaining Monthly Donors.” Though our pros were able to answer a number of the questions posed by the more than 100 attendees, they couldn’t get to all of them. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be highlighting our experts’ answers to some of the questions that didn’t get answered during the webinar.
This week, we’ll hear from Brian Cowart, senior director of mail acquisition and donor retention at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, who is responding mainly to questions about St. Jude’s monthly giving program, called Partners In Hope.
Click here to read answers provided last week by Linda King, sustaining membership coordinator/Leadership Circle coordinator at the Iowa Public Television Foundation. If you’d like to access the entire webinar online, Click here for access and pricing information.
— Margaret Battistelli, Editor-in-Chief, FundRaising Success
Q: Do you ever use telemarketing to acquire monthly donors or have you tried in the past?
Brian Cowart: I have not ever used telemarketing to acquire monthly or single-gift donors. It is something that I would like to test at some point in the future. If telemarketing acquisition was going to work, I think the primary offer would have to focus on securing credit card or [electronic funds transfer] monthly gifts in order to offset the high cost of donor acquisition.
Q: Did you telemarket current donors or acquisition lists for your Partners In Hope [monthly giving] program?
BC: We called our current donors.
Q: What percentage of your donor file is a part of your PIH program?
BC: Approximately 10 percent of our active donors are PIH monthly donors.
Q: How many additional mailings/appeals is appropriate for a committed monthly donor?
BC: In my experience, you can add two or three additional appeal mailings without it having a negative impact on response to the monthly pledge mailings. I’d recommend you test to find the right balance.
Q: For the [long-form, direct-response] St. Jude TV show, what percentage of your respondents come via the Web site versus via the phone?
BC: We acquire three times more new monthly donors from our TV show as compared to telemarketing. However, the percentage of new donors we are acquiring from the phone has been increasing each year since our initial testing started in 2005.
Q: Does your organization use face-to-face services? If so, which type do you recommend?
BC: We are currently using face-to-face in mall locations. We have not yet tested face-to-face street or door-to-door canvassing, so I cannot say which I’d recommend. However, we have found some success with our face-to-face mall acquisition efforts. While the per-donor acquisition cost on the front end is higher compared to other donor-acquisition methods, because the donors we are acquiring from our mall campaigns are all credit card donors we are still able to achieve long-term revenue from these donors that is equivalent to our other monthly giving donor-acquisition methods and higher than our acquisition-list efforts. In addition, we are able to acquire much younger donors.
Q: Are you concerned that we are locking people in at lower gift amounts and then losing the ability to upgrade them?
BC: Our monthly donor conversion efforts are targeted to donors at specific previous contribution levels to ensure that we are primarily upgrading, not downgrading, the annual giving of donors who decided to become monthly givers. We have found that a large percentage of monthly donors are willing to upgrade their giving if you ask. We have found that telemarketing is the most effective way to upgrade the giving of monthly donors.
Q: Is it customary to send monthly or annual acknowledgements? Do you include an option to upgrade in acknowledgements?
BC: We do not send acknowledgements for gifts made on monthly pledges. However, our monthly pledge mailings are very affirming — they stress how thankful we are for their support and we provide the amount of their previous month’s gift. As a result, our monthly pledge mailings serve sort of a dual purpose — acknowledgement and pledge fulfillment piece. We do send separate acknowledgments for gifts made in response to the additional appeal mailings we send a couple of times each year. We currently only upgrade the pledge amount of monthly donors via the phone, but we are planning to begin to offer this a couple of times per year in their monthly pledge mailings.
Q: Do you have any statistics on retention rates of monthly giving donors? Is there an average lifecycle for a monthly giving donor?
BC: We retain approximately 75 percent of our monthly donors each year.
