Now and Then: Monthly Giving Patterns Across Four Decades

Over the past few weeks, I have been going through some old documents, articles and research I’ve gathered over my 41 years in direct marketing and fundraising. Taking a different spin on my usual blogs, I thought it would be interesting to look at monthly giving patterns and see if anything has changed.

Many of the people who wrote articles in industry newspapers and magazines have now retired.

Monthly Giving Patterns: A Trip Down Memory Lane

What I thought was fascinating is that some things have changed, sometimes by a lot! But some things are still very similar to the early 2000s.

For example, I came across an article by Rick Christ. At the time, he was a consultant and advisor for NP Advisors (Marketing AdVents, November 2002). He explained how easy it was to add a donate button to your home page! Can you imagine a nonprofit website ever existed without those buttons? Now, the trend is to add a second button —  “Give monthly” — to generate new recurring donors.

By the way, Marketing Advents, the magazine from the Direct Marketing Association of Washington, is still created, printed and mailed to this very day. I read it religiously as it always contains some great practical fundraising tips.

Example of a pin feed. | Credit: Erica Waasdorp

The Pin Feed

Do you remember the pin feed? When I worked at my first nonprofit organization, direct mail letters were still personalized and run on huge pin-feed printers.

We even used to get our reports on pin-feed paper. We had to manually peel through these reports to look at trends, and we had to manually create spreadsheets to compare results.

Dashboards, like Tableau, Power BI or other reporting tools, had yet to be invented. Can you imagine?

The Evolution of Monthly Giving

I have personally been writing and presenting about monthly giving since 2000, so I loved the great article from Melanie West in the DMA Nonprofit Federation Magazine in February 2003 entitled "Launching and Sustaining a Monthly Giving Program."

While the DMA Nonprofit Federation and its magazine no longer exist, many fundamentals of monthly giving are still the same. Back then, Melanie was already showing the long-term impact of retaining monthly donors and the number of gifts on an annual basis.

Also, the stages in growing a monthly giving program still follow the same pattern:

• Establishing the audience
• Solicitation (online didn’t exist back then)
• Implementation
• Upgrading
• Reinstatement (we now call it “recapture” or “retention”)
• Fundraising measurement

Sadly, I still do not see many nonprofits investing in monthly giving upgrades or measuring as well as they could. While most direct response agencies have come alongside nonprofits and support monthly giving campaigns, my experience is that there is still a lot of evaluation based purely on one-time giving revenue. This makes investment or better yet a true focus on monthly giving really difficult.

I’m hopeful though that we can make this leap in the next few years because as fewer donors are giving, it’s even more important to keep the donors you have. Monthly giving may be just the ticket!

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.