Retention

Rachel Muir shares five resolutions for fundraisers: 1. Get clarity on where you can turn the greatest fundraising profit — retaining your current donors. 2. Evaluate your portfolio of donors. 3. Set a revenue goal and cultivation plan for every donor on your caseload. 4. Thank meaningfully, early and often. 5. Manage up.

Now is your opportunity to begin turning year-end donors into your long-term partners in good. To do so, you need a solid plan to welcome these donors, keep them informed and build relationships with them throughout the year. The first step is to keep the magic alive with a well-planned donor gratitude strategy. Here are some things to keep in mind: Thank your donors as soon as possible. A receipt is not a thank-you. One thank-you isn't enough. Don't forget other donation sources. Make sure your thank-you is sincere and memorable.

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.