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 […]
Top Two mistakes Nonprofits Make with Monthly Giving
I’m so excited. Andrew Olson just published the book, called 101 Biggest Mistakes Nonprofits Make. It’s now available and I’m honored to be in it. When it comes to monthly giving I see that nonprofits make two major mistakes that really prevent them from growing their monthly giving programs to its fullest potential. They go […]
The Average Sustainer Gift Is $35 a Month—That’s $425 a Year!
It’s tax season. Phew, I just finished mine. It’s such a bear. The good news is that this also means last year’s giving updates are coming in. It is statistics season, and, of course, I’m always on the lookout for the latest statistics when it comes to monthly giving. While there are not that many […]
The Amazing “New” Way to Bring in Younger, More Committed Donors
Face-to-Face Sustainer Asks Are Growing in the United States In the US, Face-to-Face fundraising often means personal asking, as in meeting a donor and asking for a big gift. The Face-to-Face (F2F) I’m discussing today is different (at least for the US market). It’s known as canvassing, street fundraising, or door-to-door fundraising. It’s typically focused […]
How Do You Create a ‘Survival Blanket’ for Your Nonprofit?
Snow. The cold white stuff. It’s been falling steadily for the past few hours, and there’s more to come. It reminds me of the time when my husband and the boys attended a special winter scout camp called The Klondike Derby. It was all about learning to survive in cold weather (and, of course, lots […]
Grow Your Monthly Donors in 2 Steps
As more organizations start monthly donor programs, it’s imperative to take these two steps to grow your monthly donors. And they’re much easier than you think! You’re probably already doing a lot of it, but you’ve not yet thought about it with your monthly donor hat on. The First Step to grow your monthly donor program […]
