Monthly Giving

Donors are starting to find it harder to donate because of their financial situations. Prices have gone up, everywhere, especially caused by the general inflation, higher energy and gas bills, and higher cost of food.

We fundraisers tend to overthink things. I’m not totally sure why, but fact is that we do. Maybe because we think that if it sounds too simple, it just can’t be true. That’s why I wanted to share a few different angles on how this year, you may wish to adopt a new year’s resolution for a simpler approach.

For a number of years, I have been a member of the Association of Direct Response Fundraising Counsel (ADRFCO), which surveyed its members recently to identify their fundraising forecasts for 2022. Here are just the highlights from the most recent ADRFCO survey.

What is the impact of the birthday call? One of my clients is a religious organization with an impressive number of monthly donors. It consistently asks its donors and monthly donors for their birth month and year.

As recurring gifts have no end date, so this is not like your typical pledge where you get big amounts over a limited period.

Over the years, I’ve worked with nonprofits of all sizes — small, midsize, large — when it comes to monthly donors. A few of those smaller organizations started out earlier this year with 15 monthly donors. Now, a few months later, they are at 65 by introducing just a few additional ways to generate new monthly donors.

What’s the first nonprofit you think of with a huge sustainer program? Did you guess your local public broadcasting station? Probably not. But yet, most public TV and radio stations are leading the pact when it comes to sustainer giving. They started asking for monthly gifts many years ago.

The theme of the exhibits at the Wright Brothers National Memorial visitor center focused on several wonderful motivational messages, which helped to motivate the Wright brothers. But those are also oh so true when it comes to monthly giving...

For the past decade, digital monthly giving was going to increase by more than digital one-time giving. It was inevitable. Every year, people became more comfortable with monthly subscriptions, and charities asked for monthly gifts more often. That was until last year...

I’m an avid scanner of mail samples. I’m particularly intrigued by how organizations approach the monthly gift option on their reply forms. If you’re at all interested in growing your number of monthly donors, planting the monthly giving seeds on your appeals has become a best practice...