Which chart would you rather show your CEO, finance chief, or Board?  Chart 1 or Chart 2?

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The answer is obvious and paradoxically, revealing, showcasing our innate desire to avoid thought of loss. The rub is that both charts use the exact same data, one shows donors acquired and retained, the other shows donors acquired and lost.

This bias toward the retention chart creates a false sense of comfort and hides story needing our attention. A percentage-point improvement on the lost group has a much larger financial impact than the same improvement on the group we keep.

To see the mental distinction, look at Year 4:

• Retention framing: We keep 90–95% of Year 4 donors (meaning those still around to keep, which ain’t many)
• Loss framing: We’ve lost 85–90% of the donors we acquired four years earlier.

Focusing on who stayed creates a more insidious problem. This surviving group is, almost by definition, innately invested in the cause. They’re the low-hanging fruit, easy to keep because they’ll tolerate a marketing, fundraising, and communications experience that’s far from their preferred one.

What about the much bigger group that leaves every year?  Surely the “donor journey” we’ve designed to show impact and generate warm glow, loaded with “you” pronouns can’t be part of the problem?

Chart 3, the Volume Trap, shows the correlation between years on file and cumulative communications received. The correlation coefficient is 0.9, nearly perfect. And while correlation doesn’t prove causation, causation does produce correlation.

This is a cause-and-effect relationship that reveals the business model: if a donor exhibits a pulse during any 12-, 18-, or 24-month window, they receive another 12 to 24 months of communications. A donor showing life in a given year is what causes another year (or two) of communications.

Many agencies and consultants draw the exact wrong conclusion: the stuff we send causes people to stay. This flawed logic only measures success among the tiny group who stick around rather than failure among the much larger group that leaves (the attrition framing).

Chart 4 is the evidence against volume. This chart shows the relationship between the number of communications sent in a given year and a donor’s likelihood of staying for another year. The correlation is moderate and negative, −0.33: more communications in any given year have a negative bearing on the decision to stick around.

More = more irritation for most donors, not an isolated few.

And it often doesn’t matter whether the communication asks for money. The internal distinctions between solicitations and “stewardship” or “no-ask touchpoints” rarely exist in the real world. We’ve conditioned donors to expect that anything they receive is an ask. It takes too much mental effort for a donor to review each piece and judge its intent. It’s far easier to assume it’s another request for money, which is exactly what happens.

Who Survives?  Who sticks around through years of this? Not many, as the loss chart makes clear. Those who do are the most loyal, the ones with a pre-existing connection to the cause, or the ones simply better at tuning out the noise and giving in spite of it.

I once worked with a for profit company that proudly tracked customer satisfaction among its active customers. The trend line moved up each year and leadership celebrated.  What they failed to notice was that dissatisfied customers were leaving faster than ever. Only the happiest remained to be surveyed. The company eventually went bankrupt with an upward sloping satisfaction curve.

When we only show the retention chart, we are doing the same thing.

Kevin