This past week I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar for Pamela Grow’s Simple Development System members. I’m very grateful to Pam as she introduced me to webinars a little over a year ago!
Since then, I’ve joined the subject matter expert team of Charity How To and I am having a lot of fun teaching organizations how they can get started and grow a monthly giving program with very limited resources.
A couple of key pieces of information that I’d like to share from this webinar:
1. Research shows that online monthly giving has grown by 25% over the past year and monthly giving was 16% of all online revenue in 2013!!
2. Sustain has become a very important word and monthly giving is a great way to support your annual fund.
3. You can certainly get started by building a monthly giving program by starting online. Many donor base systems and online payment systems allow for recurring donations. And Paypal could become your best friend.
4. If you don’t ask for a monthly gift, you’re certainly not going to get!
5. Monthly giving is really no different from any other fundraising. The same principles apply.
6. Ask low, you’ll get a higher response rate. Don’t be too greedy at first. You CAN always upgrade monthly donors and you can even do so within the first year after joining!
7. You can PREVENT credit cards from expiring. There are some great new tools out there, called account updater and account recycling. Here is a quick Account Updater Resource that mentions several vendors who offer this. If you know of others, please let me know.
8. I know this is a controversial one, but it’s important to try to convert a donor to become a monthly donor as soon as possible.
9. Nobody likes telemarketing but the donors do!! It’s a very important and cost effective tool to generate new monthly donors and the response rates are terrific! You’ll have to work with proven nonprofit telemarketing agencies and there is some ‘red tape’ and registration involved but if you’re serious about your program AND you have the number of donors (I recommend at least 10,000 donors), it’s so worth it.
10. This is probably the most important (and in some organizations the hardest one), you’ll have to make sure that everybody considers the LONG TERM. An investment in monthly giving, be it time or money is an investment in the long term even though most campaigns will start breaking even and growing in the first year.
11. Find the right people and tools to help you with the implementation, but don’t be afraid of tipping your toe into the Monthly Giving pool and it’ll turn into an ocean of sustaining donors and $$!
Something to think about…
