On Tuesday, my colleagues Roger Craver and Kevin Schulman hosted a webinar on ‘donor commitment’.

A simple to understand — but elusive — quality you would like to find in your donors.

Why? Because what our studies over the last several months have shown is that:

1. A high commitment donor will give on average 131% more than a low commitment donor.

2. Prospective high commitment donors can be identified and scored through a three question survey process that is markedly more accurate at predicting future giving than any other commonly used modeling tools.

3. Seven key drivers most influence donor commitment, and appropriate interventions under your organization’s control can influence these drivers … and thereby your donors’ commitment level and giving.

4. Using this conceptual approach, with its targeting and intervention tactics, a typical nonprofit can look to increase its revenue by $200,000 over three years for every 1000 donors moved from low to high commitment.

This fundraising strategy has emerged from our DonorVoice analysis of the actual giving behavior and attitudes of a nationally representative (US) donor sample, combined with corresponding analysis of donor files supplied by nearly two dozen nonprofits who participated this summer in our donor retention ‘lab’.

Our goal was to find a way to address donor retention rates that have been steadily falling across the nonprofit sector. We set out to identify targeting strategies and possible interventions that might reliably counter this downward trend. And we think we have succeeded.

But you need to examine our methodology and kick the tires yourself. Unless of course you’re already holding on to all the donors you need.

Visit our DonorVoice website to review our work, see our analysis of the data, and consider the fundraising and communications interventions we believe can significantly improve your organization’s donor retention performance (our Idea Bank, developed with our outside expert advisers). There you’ll find an executive summary of our study and a supporting Powerpoint presentation.

And within that material, you also find our white paper on relationship theory (if you want a better understanding of the theoretical grounding for our approach) and a ranking of some fifty high visibility nonprofits and charities according to their aggregate Donor Commitment scores (be prepared for some surprises).

So I urge you to visit the DonorVoice website. Consider the strategy we propose for arresting donor defection. Challenge our thinking. Kevin’s ready to field your questions and comments.

Tom