How to Grow Your Monthly Giving Program from Good to GREAT
If you’re looking to grow your monthly donor program to the next level, there are many things you can do and it’s easier than you think! Let me give you a quick recap of who monthly donors are. The typical monthly donor is not the big check writer. He or she is often on a […]
How to Raise More by “Upgrading” Your Monthly Giving Donors
Fundraisers sometimes tell me: “I don’t want to convert my donors to monthly giving, because then I can’t ask them to give more!” Well, that’s an absolute myth! The best real-life example of monthly giving came from a story in my son’s university magazine. A donor made a $1,000,000 gift to support campus expansion. Do […]
Drink Your Own Kool-Aid…Start Monthly Giving to Your Own Nonprofit
This past week I heard the expression “Drink Your Own Kool-Aid” several times, so I wanted to explain why it’s especially important when it comes to monthly giving. Let me start with the Wikipedia definition: “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is an expression commonly used in the United States that refers to a person who believes in […]
The # 1 Fundamental of Monthly Giving
I’m so excited… Because monthly giving is becoming more and more popular! Systems keep getting easier and easier. More organizations have seen the ‘monthly donor light!’ But yet, so many organizations are slow to come on board. With just a little bit of training, you too can start your monthly donor program and grow that […]
How to Keep Your Monthly Donors—Track. Act. Keep. Repeat.
A few years ago, I joined 20 organizations as a monthly donor with a credit card that was going to expire one month after joining. I purposely did this to see the actions nonprofits took and how long it would take them to do so. The sad reality was that only two of the organizations […]
Survey Your Monthly Donors. They’ll Love You for It!
One of those fundraising mantras I’ve heard over the years is: If you ask for advice, you’ll get money. If you ask for money, you’ll get advice. I’ve also heard that sometimes you should take responses to surveys with a grain of salt. What people say and do is different sometimes. Well that may be […]
How Netflix Subscribers Are Different From Monthly Donors
I love Netflix. It helped us do away with cable TV 10+ years ago. Now we live stream our favorite movies on our “older” TV. We still get Netflix DVDs in the mail, and we choose our favorite shows to binge-watch when we’re in that binge-watch mood. We’re in control of what we watch, and […]
Monthly Giving: Think Long Term With a Little Short Term Work!
A received a very excited call from a client: “We got several monthly donors from the tick box on the special appeal! But how do I now report this? Our finance folks want to attribute this for the calendar year only. Help?” I congratulated her and then advised her that even though there’s no end […]
4 Important Steps to Improving Monthly Donor Retention
Last week, I wrote about the coverage ratio for monthly donors and how important it is to start tracking it. If you don’t have a monthly donor retention process in place, you may find that you are not growing at all, no matter how many new monthly donors you bring in. You may just be […]
How Can You Calculate If Your Monthly Donor Program Is Growing?
People ask me this question a lot: “My monthly donors only make up 3 percent (or fill in another percentage) of my donors. Is that good? What’s the percentage I should strive for?” The answer is: “It depends!” Let’s look at a few different scenarios: If you have 100,000 donors who have made a gift […]
