Category: Repeat

Answers to 5 Key Questions About Monthly Giving

Erica Waasdorp  |  Repeat
5 key questions and answers.

The following is a hand-picked guest post from Erica Waasdorp. Enjoy, and you can read more about Erica below.

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As I’m sure you can imagine, fundraisers ask me questions about monthly giving all of the time. That’s why I wanted to answer a few of those key questions.

1. What’s the Best Time of Year to Ask for Monthly Gifts?

There is no bad time to ask for monthly gifts, but if you want to plan for prime times, they’re September/October and February/March.

I love calling September “sustainer month.” It’s an ideal time to focus on monthly giving. The kids are back in school. People have returned from vacations. You’re not yet in the heavy giving season. What is a better way to engage donors than by asking them to consider a monthly gift right now? Consider a small sustainer drive, integrating all your messaging, aimed at monthly gifts.

Then do the same in February/March. You may have recent one-time donors you can invite to consider converting to give monthly.

Having said this, if you want to grow your monthly donor program, you must ask your small donors as often as possible. It’s so easy to build in extra monthly-giving buttons, so you’re constantly planting the seeds about recurring giving. Just look at your annual communications plan and add some monthly giving campaigns and then make sure you do them. What do you have to lose?

2. What’s the Next Big Trend When It Comes to Monthly Giving?

Instead of worrying about the next big trend, I think it’s more important that each nonprofit looks at giving more opportunities for donors to consider a monthly gift. The good news is that I’m starting to see more of that.

  • Electronic bank transfer. Nonprofits are offering an electronic bank transfer, aka automated clearinghouse (ACH), which is good news as that will help prevent expiring and declining credit cards. Some organizations have also started preselecting the ACH on their forms.
  • Texting. More nonprofits can add texting to the mix and that’s a great way to support a campaign.
  • Connected TV (CTV). The larger nonprofits are successful in using CTV. It’s much more expensive than mail, email and phone though.

The more important trend, though, is what you are seeing in your own nonprofit. What have you done to generate new monthly donors? Then consider adding a few more emails and seeing where you can add monthly gifts to your direct mail pieces.

Oh, by the way, remember to repurpose your content. If you had an email that worked well for one-time gifts two years ago, can you use it again to ask for a monthly gift this time?

3. Can Donors Give Monthly from their Donor-Advised Fund (DAF)?

Yes, donors can use their DAF to make recurring grants. They typically have $50 a month minimum. Donors can choose other frequencies, and unfortunately, they can set an end date. It’s important to always follow directions on how the donor wants to be recognized, but other than that, you can steward them like you would other monthly donors.

If you can, code them in your donor database as recurring DAF donors.

Just like with online banking donors who set up recurring gifts without telling you, you may be able to find these recurring donors by looking at trends in your donor database.

4. Are Workplace Giving Donors Recurring Donors as Well?

Just like with DAF monthly donors, these recurring donors come in through a different “system,” if you will, so it’s not feeding into the same bucket. You’ll need to tally them differently. I’m going to assume that you’re able to code them as such to pull separate reports. You may need to give them a separate attribute or group so you can segment them as needed.

For example, you can most likely pull a report from your donor database for your monthly donors and see how many there are, as well as their monthly and annualized value. Then run a report for your DAF recurring donors and your workplace givers and calculate the same. That will be your total of recurring donors for overall trend purposes.

The key question though with these types of monthly donors is how do you steward them. If someone makes a gift from their paycheck, absolutely consider them a monthly donor and let them know how special they are. If someone makes a recurring gift from their DAF, absolutely, recognize them as special. This leads to the next question.

5. Is There a Difference in Stewarding One-Time versus Monthly Donors?

In the old days, we tried to leave monthly donors alone. Now, not so much. The minute someone starts making that first monthly gift, code them in your donor database and email program so that you can do something special.

Take some time and map out what you’re sending to one-time donors during the year. Look at what other departments, like major gifts, are doing?

What can you borrow or implement? What can you customize for monthly donors with just a short intro message change? What can you add that makes the donor feel special? Perhaps a phone call, a text message or a handwritten thank-you card. What would make your nonprofit stand out? What would make the donor feel most engaged?

For example, if you have a print newsletter, send it. If you have email news updates, send them. All of those are totally great.

If your donors are used to receiving mail, and they haven’t told you to stop sending mail, send them your key appeals. Add in a short message of gratitude and make it clear you’re asking for an extra gift. But remove any reference to a monthly-gift ask from those appeals because they’re already giving monthly.

Automate what you can. Then use opportunities that come up to do things that are surprising but are of interest to monthly donors who are invested and interested in what goes on. If you can send a text message, great. Do that. If you can send a video from the field, great. Do that.

Just remember that donors want to know their gifts matter. That’s the key driver for all of your stewardship messaging. Make your monthly donors feel special.

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Steven says: This is a guest post from Erica Waasdorp, the renown (and wonderful!) author of Monthly Giving Made Easy. If you want to start a monthly giving program, or make yours better, start with Erica. Sign up for her newsletter (plus free resources) here.

This post was originally published by NonProfitPRO on September 20, 2023.

Maintain Wonder While Being Skeptical

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Sense of wonder.

There’s a great quote from Carl Sagan that, while not ostensibly about fundraising, is absolutely about fundraising:

“At the heart of science is a balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”

I post that quote today for multiple fun reasons…

I laughed when I read it because there’s a lot of “deep nonsense” in the fundraising world. 

The phrase “deep nonsense” is exceptional writing.  It’s catchy, contradictory, and true all at the same time.

I’ve always admired Carl Sagan.  He and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are mentors of a sort to me.

And speaking of mentors, the next few blog posts are going to be from some of my “fundraising mentors.”

There will be some names you recognize, and hopefully some names that you don’t.  Each post coming your way is great (I’ve vetted every single one).  Hopefully you’ll be introduced to some new people who will become part of your tribe of fundraising mentors.

As a reader of this blog, I’m betting you have some of that “wonder” at this amazing thing called Fundraising that we get to do.  And you have some of the skepticism that “winnows the deep truths from the deep nonsense.”

I hope the next posts will help you identify some new ideas and mentors to help you do even more good than you’re already doing!

Your Brand

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Brand.

For your individual donors, your nonprofit’s brand is far more than your visual identity and voice.

Your brand is also:

  • Whether your fundraising is accessible, or takes thought and education to understand
  • Whether it’s easy to give you a gift online, or not
  • Whether you “report back” to donors that their gift made a difference, or you brag about how big a difference your organization makes (“We helped 4,317 people last year!”)
  • Whether you thank donors promptly, or not

For individual donors, your brand is the total experience a donor has while donating to your nonprofit.

For most small nonprofits, the “next step” to strengthening your brand with individual donors has nothing to do with your visual identity, and everything to do with your donors’ experience.

It Can Be Hard to Change Your Ideas about Fundraising

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Self-reflection.

I wrote a couple days ago about how smaller nonprofits must often create fundraising messages that they don’t prefer for their fundraising to be more successful.

Today, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that changing your ideas about fundraising can be emotionally difficult. 

For a Founder, or for someone who is passionate about their fundraising, it can be a very real struggle to try a fundraising message or strategy that doesn’t personally resonate. 

Let me share my own experience with this, in hopes that it’s helpful. 

Here’s the thing to know about me: I strongly prefer not to make mistakes.  In fact, I hate mistakes.  I fear being wrong.  I fear being judged.

My fear around avoidable mistakes has positive consequences – for instance, it made me a fantastic student.

But it also has negative consequences.  For instance, I’m occasionally a pain in the neck to work with.

So it was challenging for me when I learned that the easiest way for smaller nonprofits to raise more money is to send out more fundraising.

Wait, I thought, wouldn’t the best way be to make each piece of fundraising more perfect?  We’ll eliminate all the mistakes, get everything up to best-practices… wouldn’t that bring all the money in?

Nope.  I saw again and again that the nonprofits that grew their individual donor fundraising the fastest were seeing that “showing up regularly in donors’ lives” is more important than “showing up perfectly in donors’ lives.”

It didn’t seem possible that “sending more fundraising” could work.  It didn’t seem possible that the occasional typo or “wrong thing showing through the envelope window” could work.

But if I’m honest, the real conflict was with my personal preferences and fears.  I was thinking, If we have to move faster we’re going to make mistakes.  I don’t want to focus on the total number of pieces, I want each piece to be an un-critique-able jewel box of fundraising brilliance.  <<pounds podium>>  I’m a copywriter and a storyteller, dammit, not some cheap content machine! 

I’m poking fun at myself here, but my feelings of discomfort were real.

And you’ll smile at why my thinking on this issue eventually changed; I saw the strategy of “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” succeed so many times for so many organizations that eventually I realized I would be making a mistake if I didn’t change my thinking.  And you know I don’t like to make mistakes.  Sheesh.

Anyway.  I still don’t prefer the “showing up regularly is more important than showing up perfectly” approach to mass donor fundraising.  But I embrace it because it so obviously helps small nonprofits raise more money and increase donor retention rates.  And because making the world a better place is more important than my own personal preferences and fears.

So… acknowledging that we all have preferences and fears… and acknowledging that doing things in a non-preferred way can be difficult… is there anything about your organization’s fundraising that should be changed in order to raise more money and fund more work, even if you don’t prefer the change?

Direct response and major gift fundraising should follow the same rhythm

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Follow the rhythm.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials from scratch, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

As I learned about direct response fundraising best practices, I also started to learn about major donor fundraising. And the similarities between successful direct response fundraising and successful major gift fundraising stood out to me.

I understood that all our organization’s fundraising helped our mission. But I never quite understood that both kinds of fundraising were about building relationships, just in different ways.

Our major gift fundraisers spent their days reaching out to donors. They had meetings to share a need and ask for a gift. They had meetings to report back on a donor’s gift or share an update about a project. And they wrote lots of thank you notes and made countless thank you calls. The major gift fundraisers at my organization were doing these things to build a one-to-one relationship with the donor.

With our direct response fundraising we were following a similar rhythm, but on a one-to-many scale.

We shared a need and asked donors to give through appeal letters and e-appeals. We sent out newsletters to report back to donors on what their giving made possible. And we sent out thank you letters and handwritten thank you notes when donors made a gift.

Understanding this similarity helped me view my role differently. I wasn’t just a person behind a desk, assisting with fundraising by writing copy and designing the mail and email. I was a Fundraiser myself, building relationships with people who wanted to do powerful things but weren’t in a personal/major donor relationship with us.

And that shift made all the difference.

Avoid Looking Too Sleek or Professional

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Sleek professional.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials from scratch, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise – it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

Before we learned fundraising best practices, we spent a fair amount of time trying to make our fundraising look sleek and professional.

I remember sending a donor a thank you note and taking the time to print out a label on the printer to make it look more professional.

Little did I realize… a hand scribbled address would have been the better choice.

We were a medium-sized nonprofit and we had the mistaken assumption that we had to have a certain polished “look” to be taken seriously by our donors. For us, this meant highly designed pieces, glossy paper, and yes… many, many printed labels.

Then we learned how powerful it was to be real – to show our donors that there was a human behind each communication. Being authentic and making a connection became more important than looking sleek and professional.

We began to look for opportunities to show donors that a human had touched the communication they were reading.

Things like a scrawled “thank you” on the carrier envelope of a newsletter or a plastic coated paperclip clipping together pieces of a newsletter pack (brilliant idea from John Lepp of Agents of Good!). These tactics showed that a person was behind the mailing, not a brand or a marketing campaign.

Over time, it felt like we were building a friendship with our donors through direct response fundraising, rather than just trying to get a donation.

As with the other best practices we learned along the way, being real and less polished with our donors made our job easier. It felt more like “us.”

Being real and less polished with our donors caused them to trust us more!  And their donations increased because it was clear that a person was asking them to give, not just a brand or an organization.


Read the whole series:

Design So Donors Can Read, and They Will Thank You by Giving More

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Fineprint.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise — it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

One part of our journey as an organization was learning how to design fundraising materials that donors could actually read.

I remember one day a colleague a few years older than me called me up to say, “Can you please make the font bigger? Donors are having a hard time reading the print.”

I took a quick look at the piece she was talking about, shrugged, and said – “It’s fine!”

At that point I was still in my thirties, and it WAS fine… for me.

When I started to learn more about designing for readability, I wished I could have that moment back so I could respond differently.

Making things readable for donors is fundamental for them being able to respond with a gift. If they can’t easily read it, they won’t give.

My organization started to pay more attention to readability, and we adjusted three main things:

  • We made the font bigger — minimum of 14pt for everything
  • We stopped using reverse text (white print on a dark background)
  • We used black font for body copy and dark, saturated colors for headlines

These design choices were fairly simple to implement, but we had to be smarter about our copy choices because the formerly-used option to just “make the font smaller” was no longer on the table when we had too much copy.

Our donors responded in a way that let us know we were on the right track.

I even had a board member’s wife tell me, “Finally you printed something big enough that I could read it!”

Making these few design tweaks improved the readability of our fundraising pieces and helped increase giving without raising our costs. That’s a win!


Read the whole series:

How a Strong Fundraising Offer Changes Everything

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Can you help?

I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit where I had minimal involvement with fundraising.

But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to start writing their direct response fundraising, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise. This experience challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked. But we started raising a LOT more money.  Let me share my journey…

The first thing that made an impact was developing strong fundraising offers for our direct mail appeals.

This meant we started being clearer about what the donor’s gift would do or promising what would happen when they made a gift, like “your gift of $50 will provide a food basket for a child while they are on school break.”

For years, we had been sending out appeals asking people to give but we weren’t that specific about what their gift would do. We asked people to give to help children in a certain country get an education. Or give to help support a church planter.

It sort of worked. The donors who were close to the organization and the mission would respond. But people who didn’t know the organization as well just didn’t seem to respond to our direct mail appeals.

“If they understood how important this is, they would give,” was a common phrase.

But how to get donors to understand?

When I started to learn more about fundraising offers, I brought back some new ideas, and we started approaching our appeals differently.

We started digging into the line items of budgets.

We started asking our program team detailed questions about how many people were participating in different programs, and every last detail they could give us.

This research meant we could put a dollar amount to doing a specific thing. And we could ask the donor to give to do that thing.

Instead of “give to help children in (country name)” we now had “give $35 to provide a backpack full of school supplies for one child in (country name).”

Instead of “give to support a church planter” we now had “give $5 so a church planter can reach one person.”

And suddenly our appeals started to raise more money.

The main change was that we were showing donors the difference they could make for one person with a specific gift.

I remember the first appeal we sent out with one of our newly developed offers. It was year-end — not a time of year you want to fumble things. I was… worried.

I remember saying to my boss, “What if this doesn’t work?”

“You know… it’s possible it won’t work,” he said. “But let’s still try it.”

Having a boss who was open to trying things differently was a gift. (I know bosses don’t always respond like that!)

But what it came down to was this… we could keep doing things the way we had always done them and get similar results. Or we could take a calculated risk based on best practice recommendations from an expert and raise more money for our mission.

And when things are only “sort-of” working, taking a calculated risk based on expert recommendations is a smart thing to do.

My organization went from raising around $10,000 from our direct mail fundraising appeals to raising $30,000, 40,000, and even $50,000 from our direct mail fundraising appeals.

Change can be scary, especially when you’ve been doing something the same way for years. But if you can work through the fear with your team, Better Fundraising can happen for your organization as well (see what I did there?).

The Habit

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Habits

There’s a habit your organization can develop that will result in raising more money and keeping more of your donors each year.

It’s the habit of regularly using the mail and email to stay in relationship with your donors.

Here’s why the habit of regularly sending mail and email to your donors is so powerful…

The habit of regularly Asking your donors to do meaningful, powerful things with a gift through your organization results in more gifts. Donors in motion tend to stay in motion. Donors at rest tend to stay at rest.

The habit of regularly Reporting to your donors shows and tells them that their gifts make a difference. Donors who know their previous gift made a meaningful difference are more likely to give to you again than donors who don’t.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors always works better than “going dark” for weeks or months at a time.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors via letters and emails is more effective than Social.

The habit of regularly contacting your donors always works better than sending nothing.

Getting in the habit of regularly sending out mail and email, paying attention to the results, always works better than any other approach.

It’s a habit you must develop

First, you must get past the idea that mailing your donors more than a couple times a year will somehow result in the mythical “donor fatigue.” If you need help with that, look here. Or here.

Then you have to realize that each piece you send out is not precious. Each piece you send out is an overwhelmingly positive incident that raises money, keeps you in touch with your donors, and is a learning opportunity.

Then you just have to practice. You need repetition. Sending out mail and email is like any other skill; you get better with practice.

Show me an organization that has developed a habit of regularly mailing and emailing its donors and I’ll show you an organization that has deeper relationships with its donors and keeps more of its donors every year.

This post was originally published on January 7, 2021.