In the midst of all our ranting, pontificating and advice-giving it’s easy to overlook the fundamental importance of paying attention to details.  “So mundane” …” So below my pay grade” …” So what?”

Everyone reading this knows down deep that indeed details do matter. And, if we’re going to succeed we have to make the effort to get the details right.  In the words of John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, “The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

Among the details many neglect is the simple and inexpensive task of keeping addresses of donors up to date. As I pointed out in Premature Exoneration failure to pay attention to this most basic of details costs nonprofits hundreds of millions a year.

The Importance of Details in Monthly Giving 

In the midst of this economic recession/pandemic –when donors are becoming more scarce yet far more valuable– everyone with a monthly giving program should be paying eagle-eyed attention to the details of their program.

Here –in no priority order – are some nuggets of detail that will help you build and hold on to the treasure that is a monthly donor.  

Erica Waasdorp, in her Monthly Giving How-To:  Test Your Forms column in NonProfit Pro, shows clearly why attention to what seems like the smallest detail—the completion form that comes back after a donor signs up for a monthly gift — is so very important when it comes to managing a successful monthly giving program.

“Even a small change can make a huge difference when it comes to donations and monthly gifts”, Erica advises.  “…you should always test new things…. but don’t forget to test the form for completion”, she warns.

Read her post and you’ll quickly see the importance of checking details. Here’s a summary checklist I distilled from Erica’s advisory:

• After creating a monthly giving offer take the time to review what the confirmation form is doing. The confirmation response is every bit as important as the graphics, ask amounts and copy of the initial appeal and donation page.
• Have a friend or donor check it also.
• Be especially mindful of your system’s settings on the backend. Because of an incorrect setting do donors get a confirmation for a three-month commitment when, in fact, they intended the monthly gift to go for a year or more?
• Make sure the information on all the forms used in the appear is consistent and that your forms feeds into your database the correct way.

Taking that extra half hour to sweat the details can save you lots of administrative headaches and embarrassment help grow you your program.

More Monthly Giving Detail Nuggets

Beyond the donate and completion forms there are, of course, other details and practices the wise monthly giving manager will pay attention to.  Here are a few nuggets from the DonorVoice research and monthly giving practice that will pay dividends for your program.

Payment Method:  EFT (and American Express) has nearly twice the 5 year lifetime of Visa

Declines “Best Practice”: What’s the “best” way to deal with the issues of sustainers’ credit card payments that have been declined.  Following are takeaways from a series of interviews of managers of large sustainer programs conducted by a DonorVoice team:

• Because EFTs have overdraft fees and the like, they don’t retry EFTs – they just go right into the recapture process.
• Hard decline v soft decline: hard declines go immediately to the updater, with the exception of those codes that don’t tie to any sort of repeat giving (e.g., deceased).
• Soft declines get three retries.  Make  all three tries made before the end of the month so that if a charge goes through there aren’t duplicate charges in the next month. Make one of the retries on a Friday to coincide with possible paydays.
• If the rejection is due to technical issues or Do Not Honor, retry in a space of time varying from an hour to three days.
• Do not do daily retries (can create red flag issues for card issuers)
• For expiration date related declines, resubmit the card with strategic expiration date logic. If your payment gateway partner supports it, send the transaction with a blank expiration date. If unsuccessful you should try variations of 3 years, 4 years and 2 years

Recapture. Email first, then telemarketing ( TM ) call within the first week of the new month.

1. 1. TM vendor should also ask for a make-up payment if someone agrees to sign up and usually gets it.
   2. Telemarketers should make sure to load the reason for the bounce into the TM system so the caller can say “it says here that your card was stolen…”  or whatever.
   3. Also mail to recapture at about the three-month out market, which is like a re-signup rather than an update.
   4. Some organizations have used text and Facebook Messenger for recapture with success

Behavioral Science. Here’s a brief summary of details the behavioral scientists at DonorVoice have learned about monthly givers:

• Tests have been run allowing people to defer first 2 payments at signup in order to generate lift in conversion.  (Behavioral science principle: We’re always more optimistic about our future than our present.)
• Test the idea of letting donors pause or defer payments if they are calling to quit. Although most donors don’t contact the charity to quit, the organization should want to get the donor to agree to auto-starting back up rather than seeking a new pledge to do so.

Churn Prediction.  If you want to get ahead of and fend off a  lot of attrition by newly acquired monthly donors, DonorVoice recommends collecting zero-party data at signup and  building attrition prediction models –within a week of sign up– on who is likely to quit in first 90 days so that proactive steps can be taken to significantly reduce attrition.

For more detail on the use of predictive models to improve monthly giving retention see these Agitator posts:  How To Reduce Monthly Giving Cancellations & Build Supporter Relationships and The Zero Party Future is Already Here.

REMEMBER….

 Fundraising success lies in mastery of the details.  Or in Leonardo Da Vinci’s far more lofty words, “Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.”

Roger

P.S.  While we’re on the subject of monthly giving, don’t forget to order a copy of  Harvey McKinnon’s new How to Create Lifelong Donors Through Monthly Giving, reviewed in the Agitator here and available at Amazon or from the publisher.

Also check out Jeff Brooks’ review of Harvey’ book which contains a helpful 19 item checklist with some details you shouldn’t overlook.