Never put an end date on your monthly giving donation form!
As you know, I’ve become an avid blogger and presenter on anything monthly giving.
To prepare for this, I’ve been speaking with a lot of donor base companies and researching a lot of online donation form options to see what they’re doing for monthly giving.
As more and more organizations are jumping on the recurring donor bandwagon, it’s important to make it as easy as possible to set this up for organizations.
The good news is that there are now many great wonderful developments in that area, especially by donor base providers and online payment providers. In some cases, you can just work with them without having to commit to a full system.
More and more donation forms now have the monthly giving option embedded or it can be set up easily enough.
The bad news is that sometimes these systems have an end date embedded in it. This can look something like this:
NEVER EVER put an end date on your monthly giving page!
I repeat: DO NOT EVER put an end date on your monthly giving page.
Here’s why: if you ask the donor to come up with an end date, they may set that end date for the end of the year. They’re not going to set it for the 5 to 7 years from now monthly donors typically stay with you (and in many cases even longer).
So, what happens: you bring monthly donors in and you lose them just as quickly. You can’t blame it on the donor. They don’t really know what you mean by this end date, but if you force them to put something in there, they will. And you’re not going to like the date they put there. And you can’t blame it on the organization necessarily either. If the donation form has it on there, well, then you use it, right?
So, do your monthly giving program a favor and take off the end date! Do it right away or as quickly as you possibly can.
And then, go back to your monthly donors who dropped out because their end date came due and ask them to join your program again. You should be able to bring back a lot of them because they really did not mean to stop.
I am working with an organization now who had this end date on and kept wondering why their program wasn’t growing faster. They brought them in and then lost them just as fast at the end of the year.
Now we’ve taken the end date off, we’re going back to their lapsed monthly donors and they can really start growing the program!
And of course, if donors really want to cancel their monthly donation for whatever reason, make sure they can easily find your phone number so they can.
The hardest part is getting the donor to sign up for the monthly donor program. They really want to keep on giving on a regular basis as they care about your organization, so don’t lose them just because of this one little thing on your donation page.
Take off the end date and see how your program can really take off and grow!
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