Everybody wants more regular, monthly givers but do you know what an at-risk regular giver looks like?

The non-answer on this is a “clawback” in the F2F, canvassing world which quickly became the number one channel for sustainer acquisition in the States (pre-covid) and always was in many other countries.

The clawback is a full or partial credit back to the charity from the F2F agency if the donor doesn’t make some predetermined number of payments, typically 1-3.

The charity side could argue, “who cares”?; what at-risk donors look like if you don’t have to pay for them.  But in reality, there is still plenty of quitting after the clawback period and the polluting of the commons is a macro, industry issue of churn-and-burn that afflicts almost all mature, channels.

Some charities and agencies respond to this by violating the Einstein maxim of making things as simple as possible but not simpler.  In this reduced view of the world the cost of a new, regular/sustainer giver might differ based on payment method or donor age.

Why? There is a relationship between both age and payment method and retention.  As age goes up, so does retention.  And ACH and American Express payers stick around longer than the same person on a Visa.   This is a sledgehammer to a scalpel problem.

There are two major problems with this oversimplified approach.

• There are many more factors at play than just age and payment method.  You’ve got lots of error is this “model” with folks quitting on ACH and young people sticking around,  and Visa staying and older folks quitting.   Such simplification is a sledgehammer approach to a scalpel problem.
• The bigger failing is having very little cause and effect in this model so there’s no way to improve the situation,  the model,  the donor experience and the retention.

What’s a better alternative?

Get your missing data and use it on the supporter side and the canvasser side.  What’s the missing data?

• Commitment to the organization.  This is a measure of their attitudinal loyalty to the brand.
• How the signup experience delivered or did not on a the donor’s sense of autonomy, relatedness and competence?

We get Commitment at point of signup;  census not sample.  The signup experience is asked of each new donor on a Welcome call (not the contrived, hideous version of many agencies that is little more than an administrative, cover your ass call) and as an email or SMS for those we don’t reach on the call.

Guess what the number one predictor is of quitting in first 90 days?  It’s age.  But payment method is 9th among the top 10 predictors and the other 8 come from this process.  The full model has well over 20 predictors and it’s much, much more accurate than age or payment method alone or in combination.

Much more important is how these measures are used as actionable intelligence at both the individual donor and the canvasser level. In addition they’re aggregated to change and improve the process.

The donor gets a specific message (on call or as follow-up email) tied to their specific experience.  This increases the chance they’ll stick around.  The canvassers can, for the first time ever, see the quality of their signups along with the quantity.  You can imagine the implications for this as you roll up that data to make process improvement.

Kevin