Your database knows a donor gave again but not whether she remembered why, responded automatically to the annual appeal, forgot about the monthly debit or was briefly unable to say no to a cheerful stranger in a branded vest.

Your database is a security camera recording the behavior, not the motive.

Volume Machine Fundraising (it’s opposite is here) routinely treats repeat giving as evidence of a habit. Yet habits are formed by the same cue in the same context leading someone to repeat a behavior so often that, eventually, they do it without much thought.

That definition creates a problem for monthly giving. The donor acts once to authorize the gift, then the payment processor handles the next 11 transactions. Congratulations to Stripe on its excellent habit.

Annual donors do act again, although one gift a year provides very few repetitions from which to form an automatic response. A donor giving every December for five years has completed five repetitions. In the most famous habit-formation study, people attempted a behavior daily for 84 days. Even then, the time required to approach habit formation ranged from 18 to 254 days.

A second, third or tenth gift establishes repeated giving. It does not identify what caused the repetition.

There are several factors that determine if a habit is formed: frequency, complexity, autonomous motivation, positive feelings, difficulty and context stability.   And these factors interact.  Repetition works best when the behavior occurs in a recognizable context, feels personally chosen, produces some internal reward and is reasonably easy to perform. Habits also tend to weaken when the context changes.

What doesn’t matter to habit formation is perceived importance.  Thinking something is important may help produce the original decision but does little to make repeating the behavior easy or automatic.

This suggests that habit and psychological commitment perform different jobs. Habit makes behavior easier within familiar circumstances. Commitment gives the donor a reason to continue when those circumstances change.  Having said that, there is overlap.  We have tens of thousands of Commitment Scores and monthly donors do have higher Commitment than one-off donors.

But that’s on average and “average” is doing some lifting there.

Consider two monthly donors. One visits a charity’s website, selects monthly giving and completes the donation without human intervention. The other is stopped on the street, has an engaging conversation and agrees to the same monthly amount. Both leave identical transactions in the database. Their routes into monthly giving reveal very different starting conditions.

The first donor demonstrated autonomous intent. The second may also have discovered a cause that genuinely matters to her. Or she may have experienced a pleasant interaction, social pressure and a powerful desire to stop talking to the fundraiser sometime before nightfall.

Durable repeat giving is more likely when three things develop together:

• The donor repeatedly performs an action rather than merely having transactions performed on her behalf.
• Recognizable cues make the behavior easy to retrieve and repeat.
• The experience reinforces an autonomous reason for supporting the organization.

This has implications for acquisition and retention. Measure post donation the donor’s sense of autonomy, relatedness and competence and their Commitment.  Address any subpar scores with automated outreach tailored to the donor’s response.  Create recognizable occasions for support and provide experiences that make the donor feel pleased, capable and consequential.

Break out acquisition source and retention data by these pyschological measures. A recurring designation tells you how the payment was arranged but not whether the donor has developed a habit, built a relationship or simply has not cancelled yet.

Repeat giving is the name of the game, it’s value increases considerably when we understand what’s producing it.

Kevin