If The Agitator were part of Big Pharma, we’d be writing to invite you to participate in the development and testing of vaccine to ensure retention – a breakthrough in the war against donor attrition.

At the end of this post we’re going to call for 5 nonprofit professionals working within organizations and 5 outside consultants, both goups willing to spend a few hours each week over the next six months using a series of empirical tools and protocols designed and developed to increase donor commitment, retention and lifetime value in their organizations or among their clients.

The goal of this project is to determine if highly sophisticated, but easy-to-use and user-friendly tools can be employed on a self-administered basis to increase retention.

All the tools and guidance will be provided without charge by The Agitator and our partners at DonorVoice.

Background

For nearly 30 years the commercial world has spent literally billions of dollars in understanding how to drive customers toward greater and greater customer loyalty and commitment.

The result? The commercial world enjoys customer retention rates approaching 90% while the average of nonprofit retention rates hovers near 40%.

Why the difference? Because the commercial world has understood the importance of attitudinal data combined with transactional to focus on cause and effect, while the nonprofit world has concentrated mainly on slicing ’behavior’ – RFM, upgrades/downgrades, almost anything related to the transactions a donor makes with the organization – data for targeting.

Few organizations focus on donor attitude, yet it is the donor’s attitude that ultimately influences the donor’s behavior (giving, renewing, etc.)

The key components we will be using in our ‘Commitment Project’ are designed to strengthen the donor relationship and retention by focusing on collecting the missing attitudinal data you need to understand the behavior/transaction data you already have, and what you can do to change it – i.e., cause and effect.

Specifically, by using these tools we believe participants will be able to identify the key actions their organization can take to:

1. Measure and score the current strength of its donors’ relationships, and;
2. Identify the organization-specific set of activities, touch points, messages – from among all those currently served up – that impact the strength of donor relationships and increase retention and lifetime value.

Participants in the Commitment Project will find all the tools needed to:

1. Properly collect the attitudinal data missing from the donor files (i.e., conduct a survey);
2. Analyze it to identify the touch points, activities and messages that matter (and those that don’t); and,
3. Present and share the insights with staff members and leaders in the organization, including templates for clearly presenting the goals and results for their organization.

What’s In the ‘Box’?

In addition to weekly live, webex and telephone sessions, participants in the Commitment Project will be given five tools or protocols.

1. Template Commitment survey – complete with a purpose statement for each section, programming notes if done online and instructions for doing a printed version.
2. Commitment Project Six Step Analytical Plan – for the data, to show you how to apply the Commitment Framework for the answers you need to build relationships.
3. Commitment Project PowerPoint – showing how to present and discuss the findings and how to apply them to drive change in your organization.
4. Retention Revenue Forecaster – to project the financial return from increasing Commitment on your file.
5. Survey Design Best Practices document – with how-to’s if adding additional questions to the survey template.
6. Commitment Project Online Widget – designed to quickly and easily solicit on-going donor feedback and take automated steps to most effectively respond in ways that increase retention.

What’s Not Included

We haven’t found a way to package patience or willingness to change mindsets. Both however are necessary in order to realize the powerful financial potential of improved relationship building and greater retention.

We believe working with the tools in the Commitment Project greatly simplifies the process, but it’s wise to remind those contemplating participation that positive change is never quick and simple.

Participants will be pioneering a breakthrough approach in retention and increased donor value for their organization using a ‘new world view’ – because the reality is that real change will not come by simply trying to force change into the ‘old world view’ of donor behavior, targeting to the nth degree, and thinking that off-the-shelf ‘best practices’ based on the ‘old world view’ will cut it.

It’s probably a good idea to remind potential participants that the end result of your work is likely to be well worth it. On average, we have found that if you have 5,000 donors, a 10 point increase in retention could mean $175,000 in additional net income … 10,000 donors and you put an additional $350,000 to your bottom line … 20,000 donors, $700,000 … and so forth.

Patience pays!

How All This Works for You

Using the Commitment Project framework is a proven way to:

1. Identify those with weak and strong relationships to your organization;
2. Determine the actions and experiences you deliver that truly impact that Commitment level.

This insight can be applied in three, high level ways,

1. Resource allocation – shifting time and spend from experiences/activities that don’t matter to the donor relationship to those that do.
2. Optimizing donor experiences – experiences that matter are, in the eyes of the donor, either performing well or not. The latter need to be fixed. The former should be evaluated to determine if, by channel or frequency, they can be further optimized – e.g., creating an offline version of a key experience currently only delivered in the online channel (or vice versa).
3. Targeting – Commitment scores collected during a single survey administration AND by putting the three Commitment questions on all other communications (online, offline) can be used to focus limited resources (time and money) on those most likely to be responsive – the Committed. If other transaction-based segmentation is done, the scores can be used to further refine groupings – e.g. drop some, add some.

Call for Participation

If you are a nonprofit professional or a consultant to nonprofits and are in a position to tackle the issues of retention, please email us at Editors@theagitator.net and include your phone number.

We’ll use the busy October-December year-end period to:

• Recruit and vet potential participants;
• Gather some benchmark data from participants;
• Hold one or more orientation and Q&A sessions for participants, and make sure you’re familiar with the tools.

Then we’ll formally launch the Commitment Project in January.

A polite admonition: Don’t raise your hand if your organization or consulting firm is not able to commit to the full process, including making meaningful changes in the way you currently do business. Answering this question requires a level of candid introspection we know you are capable of; however, we hope you’ll also understand that our ‘trust but verify’ mindset requires additional screening for all handraisers given the limited number of slots.

We’ll get back to you as quickly as possible to discuss your possible participation.

Thank you.

Roger and Tom

P.S. To help you get a sense of how this might all work in your real world, please read the following hypothetical ‘case story’.

A Short Story Overview of the Commitment Project in Action

Like most organizations, The Good Works Charity is finding it difficult to grow net revenue year-over-year. The cost of acquiring new donors has been going up, and holding on to both new and older donors has proven problematic. The organization realizes that it needs to improve the retention rate of current donors, but it doesn’t know what actions it should take to do this. Furthermore, there just isn’t a lot of money in the budget for this.

Development Officer Jane Jones gathers the folks responsible for communications, marketing, and donor services and explains: “We need to measure our donors’ level of commitment and find out what we’re doing that pleases or displeases them and what actions we’re taking that just don’t matter.”

Jane explains the Commitment Survey designed to measure how Good Works compares to its main competitors in its donors’ eyes, what the overall level of donor commitment or loyalty is and just what actions the organization is taking that matter most or don’t matter at all.

Jane tells the group, for example, that she believes the Good Works Annual Report currently sent to everyone is expensive and probably doesn’t make much difference. This sparks a spirited conversation about other experiences the organization offers its donors.  Some express the belief that the ‘thank you’/acknowledgement process is too slow … others chime in claiming that the organizations asks for money too frequently, doesn’t do a good job providing evidence of its success … and still others are convinced that by offering t-shirts and tote bags the organization “cheapens itself”.

The group, following the suggestions in the Commitment Project Survey Template, narrows down what they consider to be the key experiences/actions the organization is offering its donors.

The Commitment Survey is emailed to Good Works donors representative of all segments of the donor database.

Next, the results are tabulated using the Excel Workbook in the Commitment Project.

Jane takes the results and places them in the Commitment Project PowerPoint Template so she can easily share them with the group and eventually with the CEO and Board.

At the same time she uses the Commitment Project Retention Revenue Forecaster so she can quickly and clearly demonstrate the financial return that will come from increasing donor commitment on the Good Works file.

Jane finds that:

• Donors who score as ‘High’ commitment yield 217% more revenue than ‘Low’ commitment donors.

• That for these High Commitment donors the key experiences that matter most are 1) proper ‘thank you’s’ expressing true appreciation; 2) ability to reach the donor service line in the evening; and 3) real-life stories about the people Good Works is helping.

• Jane also discovered that her hunch about the Annual Report was correct. Donors – whether ‘high’ or ‘low’ commitment – didn’t care about that, but they really did care that the donor service folks were knowledgeable and responsive.

Jane gathered the group again to review the results. Eyes were opened, a discussion ensued and the following decisions were made.

• Eliminating the Annual Report would save $47,000.

• Part of that savings could be used to improve both the speed and content of the ‘thank you’ process and another part of the savings could go to extending the hours and training of the donor service representatives.

• In addition, it was clear from the Commitment Survey that other changes/tweaks in the communication and appeals schedule could be made that would cost little or nothing. Among them was the realization that substantial cost savings and far greater income could be realized if Good Works concentrated on offering the best donor experiences to the ‘High Commitment’ group of its donors.

All of these findings, suggestions for changes, and a schedule of improved donor experiences prepared by the working group were presented to the CEO, using the Commitment Project Powerpoint Template … and she approved.

Each quarter Jane monitors progress against the plan and at year-end checks the improvement in retention rates and increased income against the Revenue Forecast.