How Many Did You Lose?
With our US readers celebrating Memorial Day on Monday, the majority of Agitator readers won’t be reading this post until Tuesday morning. But do I get a day off?!
[If Roger wasn’t such a slavedriver (insisting: “You live in New Zealand, you have no right to be celebrating US holidays!”), I’d be watching the French Open on TV and not writing a post at all. 
Hoping for my hero Roger Federer to defy his advanced age and critics’ pronouncements of retirement by winning another Grand Slam event. Perhaps world #1 again is not likely in the cards, but a couple more Grand Slams would be nice. But I digress, as usual.]
So here I am, writing a Monday post for a largely Tuesday audience. Am I resentful of the holiday-makers … nah, not really. But just to agitate a bit …
I ask you US holiday slackers: While you were partying, how many donors did you lose over the 3-day weekend?
Here’s my calculation; it’s simple enough, no algebra required (at Google they call this an algorithm):
Your organisation’s annual attrition rate (I’ll suggest it’s 40% or more) times 3/365.
You lost 0.0033% of your donors if each of those three days was an average day. Hey, you say, that’s only a miniscule 3.3 donors per 1,000. Drip … drip … drip. With 100,000 donors with annual value of $100 each? That’s 3.3 times 100 times $100 = $33,000. Maybe that’s just your nonprofit’s annual coffee budget.
Maybe those weren’t just average days. Maybe donors used some of their extra leisure time to clean the deadwood out of their head space and letter and email files. So maybe you lost 6.6 donors per 1,000. $66,000 lost … a staffer. Slightly bigger drip. While you watched the Indianapolis 500.
What are you going to do about your drips in the remaining four days of this week. You really can’t afford to party on, you know.
Tom
2 responses to “How Many Did You Lose?”
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happy memorial day, even in New Zealand..
even in the US, not all folks are not partying, they’re checking on ways to improve the drip drip drip…
cheers, Erica
the monthly giving promotor… 😉
Unfortunately, not many folks in our sector are concerned about the daily cost of attrition. They average donor attrition ranges from 60%-70% and less than 25% of new donors make a second gift.
Very few are interested in planned giving.
Most are focused on major gifts and/or in the midst of a capital campaign and giving no thought to next year or ten years from now.
Sadly, the majority don’t know their donor attrition rate.