There’s a chapter in my book Retention Fundraising devoted to “Five Easy Retention Wins.”

Among the top 5 actions that will improve retention is Monthly Giving.

By whatever name –monthly giving, recurring giving, sustainer giving—almost every organization, regardless of size, should already have, or at least should have plans to immediately launch a monthly giving program.

This post in the Bloomerang blog by Erica Waasdorp , veteran monthly giving guru, author and head of  the agency A Direct Solution, should serve either as a wake-up call or a fascinating benchmark depending on whether you’re thinking about starting a program or already have one.

Erica, thanks to anonymous and confidential data gathered by Bloomerang, the CRM firm that deliberately places top priority on donor retention, reports on highlights of Bloomerang’s study of almost 300,000 monthly gifts that generate $15 million + a year from users of the Bloomerang CRM.

If you already have a monthly giving program use some of Erica’s key findings as a sort of benchmark to compare with your program:

• The average monthly gift is $51 for credit cards and $60 for those given by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), from donor’s bank accounts.
• 7.5% of donations and 0.75% of revenue received in 2018 were recurring gift payments.
• 73% of recurring gift payments were monthly credit card payments.
• Religion and International Affairs are the two sectors with the highest # of recurring gifts per organization.
• The Education sector has the largest average recurring gift size ($71.76) and the Environment and Animals sector has the lowest ($33.35).
• Organizations with file sizes of 40,000 records or more had on average 3% of their donations come from monthly gifts. Mid-size customers (15,000 to 25,000 records had the largest share of their donations come from monthly gifts (9%).

As Erica notes, “Earlier studies published showed that monthly gifts were on average between $23 and $36 a month, so these Bloomerang organizations are doing better than ever before! “

Erica also notes the longer-term value: “Just think, $51 a month means $612 a year. And $60 a month via EFT/ACH/Direct Debit/Automatic Bank withdrawal means the highest retention possible and even more money, $720 a year!

Monthly Giving Varies by Type of Organization

Here, from Erica’s report, is an overview of how those average monthly gifts break out by type of organization:

We Pause for an unpaid, but well-deserved plug.

If you think that in the process of sharing Erica’s study, I’m also plugging Bloomerang you’re absolutely right.  I’ve preached too long about the importance of donor retention and the steps needed to improve it to let a good retention deed go unheralded.

In short, the retention steps recommended by Bloomerang to its users paid off big time with a rise in monthly average gifts of nearly 50%.  That’s a tribute to Adrian Sargeant, Jay Love, Tom Ahern, Steven Shattuck and many others who’ve been pushing for monthly giving as part of the CRM’s overall donor retention focus. It’s clearly working!

Just as importantly, my hat’s off to the Bloomerang users wise enough to act on their advice.

Now…back to Erica and this post.

“As you can see, smaller organizations tend to have slightly higher percentages of their donors giving monthly, but that means there’s even bigger potential for organizations with donor bases of more than 40,000 names. Just think of the impact if they could grow their monthly donors to 5% or even to 9% of all donors. Also, in the past not all types of organizations had monthly givers, now all types of organizations are represented.

“If you look at the percentage of gifts that comes in from the typical recurring donor, that still has a way to grow! Less than 1% of revenue came from monthly gifts.

“If you look at organizations that have been focused on monthly giving for a while, they’re seeing higher revenue from monthly donors overall and higher percentages? What would happen if you could double what you have now? You could only go up, right?

Erica, you’re right!  Absolutely right.  So, the question is why in the world would any fundraiser who seriously cares about the future of their organization not pay serious attention and make a serious investment in launching or growing their monthly giving program?

Roger

P.S.  You’ll find more details on the “whys” and “hows” of monthly giving in this four-part Agitator series here, here, here and here.

While we’re on the subject of  retention you’ll want to check out Erica’s How To Keep Your Monthly Donors.