Last week Tom appropriately boiled the pot with his posts Acquisition Addiction and Hold the Line. The Agitator’s Comments section bubbled.

Tom ended his last post with this sage advice: “Any acquisition strategy should begin with a retention improvement strategy.” Amen.

Rinse and Repeat: “Any acquisition strategy should begin with a retention improvement strategy.”

The incisive and quality comments to Tom’s post accurately reflect what I consider a fundamental paradox among practitioners:

• On the one hand … the belief that the fundamental focus must be on retention and building donor loyalty;

• On the other hand … in the words of Agitator reader Brian Weiner: “it is recapture strategy that is critically important.”

In short, some folks believe it’s better to keep the horse happy and in the barn than go chasing the pony after it’s bolted from a badly maintained or open barn door.

Although I have no quarrel with the occasional round up of strays and agree there’s a place in our repertoire for ‘recapture’ or reinstatement, I sure don’t recommend it as part of a basic acquisition-retention strategy.

Why? Because every burn-and-churn fundraiser on Earth follows this pattern. And retention rates keep dropping. And just because “many others are also doing it” contributes nothing to improving donor commitment and lifetime value.

Of the dozens and dozens of fundraising plans I see each year, the vast, vast majority seem to automatically include a substantial spend for ‘acquisition’ and ‘recapture’ (in fact recapture or reinstatement is often included as part of the acquisition budget!). Yet these same ‘plans’ seldom contain any activity or spend that contributes to retention, loyalty and long-term lifetime value.

With planning and budgeting like this, no wonder donors keep heading for the exits in droves.

I’m not picking on Brian, who correctly urges The Agitator to at least do a post or two on the ins and outs of ‘recapture’. What I abhor is the mindset on the part of those fundraisers who can’t be troubled to fix the leaky bucket of donor retention in the first place.

As I noted in the final chapter of Retention Fundraising:

“Deep down I suspect most experienced fundraisers — particularly direct response fundraisers — believe that acquisition is a lot easier than retention. They simply don’t buy the adage that it’s easier to keep a donor than to find a new one.

“And, in truth, donor acquisition is still easier than retention. Not less expensive, not more valuable, but easier. Retention requires time to analyze and measure. Time to improve donor experiences. Time to test and evaluate improvements. A lot more time compared to the very short-term tactics and measurements involved in acquisition.

“Surveying your donors’ attitudes, creating effective messages, providing good donor service — these combined activities require considerable effort and planning. Few organizations have either the stomach or the resolve.”

Given the obvious concern over this topic as reflected in The Agitator’s Comments section, I recommend you read — or re-read — our post, Donor Churn: How To Stop It Before It Starts.

Key takeaways:

• Few organizations truly understand why donors leave, let alone know when the donor makes the decision to leave.

• As a result, millions are spent in the mistaken belief that donor churn (aka ‘attrition’) can be solved through navel-gazing ‘best practices’ labeled with all sorts of nonsensical terms like ‘stewardship’, ‘engagement or loyalty touchpoints’, ‘ask/no ask’.

• None of these ginned-up strategies has worked. In fact, most have had the opposite effect — churn increases.

• And for good reason. They’re almost always applied after the donor’s decision to abandon ship. Too little too late. The horse is out of the barn.

For those who really want to understand why current ‘best practices’ are deficient, I urge you to dig into this DonorVoice White Paper. It shows you what’s possible when the effort is made to ‘fix’ some of these deficiencies:

• A 3X increase in acceptance of additional offers;
• A 50% decrease in attrition;
• A 35% increase in net income.

Pay special attention to the detail presented in the section “Four Issues That Get In the Way of Fixing Donor Churn”:

• Thinking churn can be addressed when donors call to quit or with a reinstatement program.

• Believing churn can be fixed by sending more communications dubbed ‘engagement’ or ‘loyalty’ touchpoints, meaning those with no hard ask.

• Only assigning value to transactional data and being forced to guess at the ‘why’ of donor behavior.

• Treating donor service as a cost center and a burden.

Fortunately, as the white paper notes: “Slowly, ever so slowly, the nonprofit sector is waking up to the realities of donor churn and attrition. Leading organizations — distinguished by their mindset, not size — are re-examining the way they think about donors, non-transactional data, relationships and service.”

Roger

P.S. In Friday’s Comments section Erica Waasdorp of A Direct Solution and author of Monthly Giving: The Sleeping Giant observed:

“Never mind acquisition, never mind recapture (or lapsed reactivation as I tend to say) … 
here’s the long and short of it; you have to do it all. Every piece is part of the puzzle.

“Keep your donors, reactivate those you lost (even though in many cases you did not actually lose them, they just have not given in a few years), bring in new donors, ask donors to join a monthly giving program and ask donors to leave you in their will.

“Yes, it’s a lot of work, but when you ask those same organizations if they have a fundraising plan with all of these elements in them, the answer typically is NO … 
so, start with a FUNDRAISING PLAN including all of the elements (acquisition, thank you/cultivation, ongoing donor appeals and cultivation pieces, monthly giving, legacies, lapsed reactivation and major donor activities)
 and no boss is ever going to tell you to go away, because you’ve got it covered and you’ll work towards achieving your goal and growing your donor base full of happy donors who love investing in your organization.”

BONUS: Erica volunteered to provide a template for such a plan. You can download it here. Thank you Erica!