Yesterday, Roger wrote about the most fundamental and elementary step in communicating and building relationships with donors.

That step: stop sending stuff to people who are dead or missing!

If you didn’t read it, his post was about cleaning your lists … pretty basic (and he offers a great tool for doing the job).

But supposing you are indeed at least reaching warm bodies, what can you do about their non-responsiveness.

I’m using as the measure of non-responsiveness your donor retention rate.

Our colleague at DonorVoice, Nick Ellinger, cites the fact that since 2008 retention rates for new donors are down 22%, and for repeat donors 11%. He writes: “As an industry, we now have a 77% burn rate of new donors. We are taking more than three out of every four people who donate to us once and are flushing them away.”

But Nick’s article in NonProfitPRO is anything BUT doom and gloom. In Donor Retention: Winning the Attrition Battle, he works through the concrete, proven steps fundraisers can take to improve donor relations and significantly boost retention.

The steps he recommends — supported by examples of success nonprofits have had with these tactics — are grouped into three areas:

Donor Identity — Using any bit of information you have to communicate with more relevance to each donor. Show the donor you know them.

Donor Commitment — Different donors have different levels of commitment to your organization. But you can’t guess at this. You need to ask and measure, and then calibrate your messages and investment accordingly. Again, Nick provides concrete examples.

Donor Satisfaction — Donors’ satisfaction levels also vary … often determined by specific experiences they’ve had dealing with your organization. You need to provide feedback opportunities to capture signs of dissatisfaction; but you also need to be committed to acting on those signals.

Nick’s advice can be boiled down to this: You must get to know your donors.

Consumers of all kinds — including donors — are less and less responsive to undifferentiated, mass pitches and appeals that signal the recipient is just another anonymous prospect.

If you’re not prepared to get to know me — whether I’m a prospect for a car or a charity — you’re not going to get a response. And if you’re a fundraiser, you might as well resign yourself to a steadily diminishing retention rate.

Tom