With her usual style, grace and sense of humor Margaret Battistelli Gardner, the Editor-in-Chief of Fundraising Success helpfully added to the growing chorus of concern over donor commitment and donor relationship management.

Margaret correctly notes “That lazy, ineffectual approach of talking at donors is so over that we need a new word for how over it is.“ She goes on to add, “The word ‘donor’ itself even seems one-dimensional these days because it simply doesn’t speak to the depth of the relationships supporters are looking to build with their organizations of choice.”

She observes that ‘donor engagement’ is the au courant topic among fundraisers and that at the recent Bridge Conference in D.C.,  speakers offered “tons of tips on how to build better donor relationships.”

Therein lies a problem. And an opportunity. You see, tons of tips and conjecture, while well-meaning, aren’t going to get us very far in dealing with the horrendous problem of donor retention that continues in free fall mode.

Of course retention is but one side of the ‘acquisition/retention coin’ and just about everyone acknowledges the problem of getting and keeping donors has created a real and urgent financial imperative to find solutions.

In short, why aren’t donors who give you one donation not motivated to give you a second.

Tom and I have long believed the answer lies in ‘commitment’ – the motive or intent to maintain the recently formed relationship with your organization. After all, everyone knows a committed donor generally makes a higher average gift and certainly has a higher lifetime value than the Un-Committed Donor.

What we believe — but don’t yet know for sure — is that it is possible to score donors on commitment; to establish a math-based linkage that identifies a FINITE number of activities organizations undertake that truly impact donor commitment.

In late June we issued a call for volunteer organizations to participate in a benchmark study of commitment and what key engagement activities an organization should use to positively impact commitment.

Clearly we struck a nerve. More than 20 organizations, large, small and representing all sectors came forward and are participating in The Agitator/DonorVoice Retention Lab. The process is detailed here.

In addition, many Agitator readers requested that we keep them posted on the progress of the Retention Lab and the findings that spring from it. As of today here’s the plan:

• Our National Benchmark Survey — which we’ll use to validate the Commitment Model, produce (and publish) Donor Commitment Scores for 50 large charities, AND most importantly, to identify the activities any organization must undertake to impact Commitment and by extension, donor behavior — has just come out of the field and is being analyzed as I write;

• 21 organizations participating in the Lab have provided email addresses and the transaction history behind them so that specific engagement practices can be tied back to actual giving. These studies will be in the field in a week or so with analysis beginning immediately thereafter.

• As soon as we complete the analysis we will hold a series of briefings with participants and our panel of loyalty/engagement experts on the National Benchmark and privately review the results, findings and our evaluation with each participating organization. We anticipate these briefings will get underway the first week in September and conclude by the end of the month.

• Working with DonorVoice and a group of communications, loyalty and tech experts we’ve also designed two automated, online engagement tools to help organizations quickly and inexpensively start getting more engagement and greater commitment from their website and Facebook visitors.

• We anticipate being able to share some early findings with you, other Agitator readers and the nonprofit community by mid-September.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to be kept updated on the progress of the Retention Project and Lab just shoot a quick email to Kevin Schulman, project lead and CEO of DonorVoice, and we’ll keep you posted.

Roger