I’ve been meaning to tell you something for a long time, and it’s time I finally say it out loud. It’s time to retire Renewal-as-We-Know-It—and the two donor behaviors that should replace the way most folks do renewals.

It’s a confession of sorts—one part memory, one part reckoning, and a larger part responsibility. You see, I’ve been in this trade long enough that certain origin stories start to feel like folklore. But this one matters. Because it’s how we ended up where we are—still grinding along in a model that should have been ceremonially retired sometime around the Carter administration.

So let’s begin there.

The Original Sin: How Magazine Circulation Gave Birth to Modern Nonprofit Renewals

Nearly sixty years ago, when the first wave of modern progressive membership organizations began taking shape, we were all feeling our way in the dark. There were no playbooks, no case studies, no donor journeys—just raw instinct and a handful of industries we could study from the sidelines.

One of those industries was magazine circulation.  They had the biggest lists, the most experience, and the best copywriters.  They understood issues, ideas, and content-driven communities.  And, most important, they had decades of learned behavior about how people renew.

So we borrowed their model.  Line for line.  Shot for shot.

We launched renewal notices 90 days before the person’s “expiration date”—an idea borrowed straight from Time, Sports Illustrated and the field generals of Time, Inc. We stacked six, seven, sometimes eight notices in a renewal series. And when a donor finally renewed, we didn’t consider the matter settled; we dumped them directly into the appeals track “just to keep them warm.”

If ever there was a sin of mail more to make more, I was both the priest and the altar boy.

And here’s the surprising—and damning—part:  That model still dominates the industry today.  Despite everything we’ve learned.  Despite all the research of the last 50 years—and especially that of DonorVoice over the last 10 years.  Despite donor irritation, rising attrition, wasted budget, and mountains of data showing it simply doesn’t match donor behavior.

In short, we are clinging to an aging unicorn and pretending it’s still a workhorse.

The Recency Switch: How a Useful Model Became a Blunt Instrument

The circulation model eventually fused with another fundraising holy relic: RFM—Recency, Frequency, Monetary. But as time went on, and as shortcuts became career habits, RFM devolved into its crudest form:  Recency—and nothing else.

A binary “recency switch” that said:

• If a donor gave recently, they get everything—full volume, full cadence, full ask stream.
• At day 365 they were “in.”
• At day 366 they were “out”—dropped off the cliff into the silent valley of the lapsed.

No nuance.  No behavior analysis.  No segmentation of giving patterns.  No recognition that donors are not one species but multiple.

This “switch” gives us two predictable outcomes—both bad:

1. Over-solicitation of the loyal
   We irritate the donors most likely to stay.
2. Under-solicitation of the rest
   We eject donors who still have value but don’t live inside a 365-day box.

As DonorVoice’s decade of data makes painfully clear—painful because I helped build the old edifice—we’ve been using a blunt hammer where we needed a violin bow.

What the Data Actually Shows (and Why It Should Reshape Everything)

Across every donor file examined since 2016, the pattern is as steady as winter returning to my home in New England:

• Upwards of 60% of donors make one gift and never give again
• The next largest group gives one gift per year—every year
• A small, consistent fraction gives two or more gifts per year

These patterns have appeared across cause sectors, geographies, list types, acquisition channels, and organizational budgets.  Not once, not twice, but in every file.  These aren’t theories.
They’re behavioral facts.  And they tell us that donors fall into two foundational behavioral segments:

Segment 1: The Mode of 1 Donors

This is the label created by the researchers at DonorVoice for the once-per-year givers.
They’re habitual and predictable.  Their generosity is seasonal, rhythmic—an “anniversary month” they gravitate toward like a bird to its nesting ground.

Segment 2: The Responsive Multiples

These are the  donors who give two or more times per year.  They’re more reactive and more flexible.   They respond to multiple moments, prompts, or urgencies.  They are fewer in number—but they are incredibly important.

These two groups behave differently and they require different cadences, different strategies, different expectations.  But for decades we treated them as the same animal.

The Fatal Myth of the “Second Gift”

Before I go into more detail on how to identify and best handle Mode of 1 and Responsive Multiples let’s first tackle a sacred cow—or sacred unicorn—head on:

The belief that the second gift must come fast on the heels of the first.

For Mode of 1 donors, this is not merely wrong—it’s delusional.  The period immediately after their first gift is the worst possible time to ask for another.  Their readiness is near zero.
It doesn’t begin to rise again until they approach their anniversary month—the time of year they have always preferred to give.

And remember, after the never give again crowd, the mostly likely outcome for a new donor is that person settling into their strongly preferred habit of once annually.  This means your best bet is helping that new donor settle into an annual giving pattern instead of a never giving again one.  And that bet is ill placed if your tactic is early and often soliciting.

Conversely, Responsive Multiples do sometimes give again soon after their first gift. But here’s the nuance:  It’s not because you asked.  It’s because they behave like responsive donors.

Asking all donors for a fast second gift has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of human behavior.  Truth is we built an industrywide strategy on an anecdote—and it never matched reality.

Introducing the Anniversary Halo:

This is the strategy/cadence—the folks at DonorVoice call “Personalized Pulsing”  that actually fits or matches donor behavior

The Mode of 1 donors—the largest retained audience—need a strategy and cadence in harmony with their nature.

It’s called the Anniversary Halo:

1. One appeal the month before their anniversary month
2. One during their anniversary month
3. One the month after

And for the other nine months?

No asking.  Only stewardship, warmth, impact stories, and brand reinforcement.

This strategy  reduces irritation,  increases response, raises ROI, lowers cost, improves long-term retention, and it aligns with who these donors actually are—not who we wish they were. These are the quiet workhorses whose behavior we’ve ignored.

The Responsive Multiples: these are the donors who give two or more times per year.

They react to multiple appeals, engage with rapid-response digital efforts, read, click, and share more, give in alignment with events and need, not calendar anniversaries.

For Responsive Multiples, the ideal cadence is not three touches per year—it’s a dynamic set of well-timed appeals tied to: breaking news, program milestones, emergencies, opportunities, political or social inflection points.

Yet for decades, our RFM-derived renewal model has treated them as Mode 1 donors with a caffeine problem. We have flattened them into sameness, ignored their responsiveness, and bluntly overwritten their natural pattern with a schedule that wasn’t built for them.

The Responsive Multiples need their own oxygen, their own rhythm, their own strategy.

The Endgame for Both Groups: Annual Auto-Renewals

There is a moment of elegance in all of this—one clear place where the orchestra resolves and the dissonance settles.

It is the power of annual auto-renewals (or monthly/quarterly auto-renewals for Responsive Multiples).

For Mode of 1 donors, auto-renewal aligns perfectly with their once-a-year pattern: one habit, one moment, one friction point removed

WOW!  Retention in these programs is 75–80%.  That is not a small improvement.  That is a structural transformation.

For Responsive Multiples, recurring monthly auto-renewal gives them stability, predictability, a natural continuation of their multi-touch behavior. This is not like forcing a monthly donor into a Mode of 1 cadence;  you are formalizing the rhythm they already show you.

The Unicorn at the Gate

So here we stand—sixty years after magazine circulation gave us our first renewal model—watching a unicorn that once carried us proudly now stand with stiff legs under a burden it no longer fits.

The truth is this:  We don’t need more volume.  We need more listening.  Donors are not mysteries.  They are patterns of rhythms and seasons.  If we watch how they behave—not how we wish they behaved, not how our models said they “should” behave,  but how they actually behave,  we will see everything we need to see.

• Mode of 1 donors always return in season.
• Responsive Multiples return in moments.
• The second gift is not a finish line.
• And auto-renewals are simply the cleanest expression of donor preference.

It’s time to unhitch the unicorn.Thank it for its service.  Walk it gently to the pasture.  And then build the fundraising models that match the world as it is—not as we once imagined it to be.

Roger

P.S.  You can view  a detailed explication –and valuable questions and answers –about how this process works for the clients of DonorVoice in this recorded YouTube webinar