Chapter 9 of my book, Retention Fundraising: the art and science of keeping your donors for life, focuses on ‘Barriers to Retention’.

The top two barriers? The real killers? #1: Silos and #2: False Attribution.

Silos. Those who work in organizations with more than one department are familiar with silos. The online personnel do little to coordinate with the offline folks. Major gift officers look down on direct mail fundraisers and vice versa. Communications people and fundraisers are seldom on the same page where messaging is concerned and everyone ignores the donor service staff.

Consistency is an essential element for building a solid relationship and there’s no greater enemy of consistency than the silo.

Example: the direct mail department brings in a new donor with a powerful message of saving baby seals. The online department sends an email thanking the donor for his or her gift, but ignores any mention of seals while emphasizing the organization’s work on climate change. A week later the organization’s newsletter arrives touting the importance of saving wetlands.

There’s little chance the new donor will stick around. At the very moment the organization needs to be building trust, it undermines itself with inconsistency thanks to the ‘silo’.

False Attribution. We’ll never make much progress solving the retention problem until we rid ourselves of the myopic and wrongheaded metrics used to measure and reward success in holding onto donors and increasing their value.

Part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the term attribution. In terms of retention and lifetime value, it means assigning performance results to various actions or sources. As in which factors (message, donor service, communications, thank-you’s, donor recognition) contribute in what proportion to increasing or decreasing the Lifetime Value of a donor base?

Unfortunately, for too many organizations, attribution amounts to little more than the annual or semi-annual internal battle over who gets (or takes) credit for the proceeds from various fundraising efforts. As in: How much did the renewal program bring in? What about the appeals and reinstatement campaigns? Immediate money, not long-term value, is the misplaced metric used too often.

This is where the problem initially created by silos is exacerbated. When it comes to the metric that matters most — improving Lifetime Value — research shows that the tactics, techniques, or frequency of campaign activity from the fundraising department accounts for less than 20% of the ultimate value of a donor.

Nowhere in this type of calculation is value assigned to the donor service department or the work of the program and communications staff.

Despite the obvious value of viewing holistically the experiences the organization offers its donors, fundraisers and their consultants continue to insist on overvaluing single campaign activities and attributing results in a campaign-by-campaign, transactional approach. “Yay! The October appeal was gangbusters; guess our great RFM selection (or creative, or positioning, or … or … or …) was the reason for success.”

Meanwhile, the important ongoing activities that add real and lasting value (proper thank you and onboarding programs, donor-focused newsletters, extraordinary donor service) are discounted or ignored.

In short, most approaches to attribution radically skew value by focusing only on a handful of organizational actions (e.g. the email and direct mail appeal from a single campaign) and bias everything toward short-term metrics.

Did the well-constructed thank-you letter to donors of the appeal that came before Campaign X have no impact on the donor’s subsequent decision to give to Campaign Y?

And what about the massive number of non-responders to Campaign X? What if the message used actually hurt retention and subsequent giving? Shouldn’t the fundraising team, always clamoring for credit, receive a negative attribution for harming retention and Lifetime Value?

Bottom line. My goal in raising these issues is simple: to encourage you to consider, encourage and recognize the collective actions of everyone in your organization. Why? Because it is the sum of these organization-wide activities that will determine whether your donors stay or leave.

10 Helpful Tips for Focusing Your Organization on Retention 

For many groups the fiscal year begins in July, but hopefully there’s still time to set some goals and plans for getting everyone in your organization aboard the Retention Bandwagon.

To help guide you, read and heed 10 Ways to Make Sure Donor Retention Is Everyone’s Job from our friends at Bloomerang, the donor database firm that puts a special focus on retention.

Bloomerang reminds us that “a common thread for those nonprofits with high donor retention rates is the awareness of the importance of donor retention by every single team member throughout the organization.”

In a nutshell, here are the 10 approches they suggest will instill and raise this awareness. I urge you to  Read their full post for details behind every recommended action.

1. Hold a Donor Retention “MOMENT” at Every All Staff Meeting

2. Present the Case for Donor Retention at Individual Department Meetings

3. Make a Donor Retention Metric Part of the CEO Compensation Plan

4. Have Donor Retention be a Part of Everyone’s Goals/Bonus Plan

5. Create an Organization Wide Key Metrics Dashboard

6. Share the Financial Benefit of Improved Donor Retention With Everyone

7. Make Donor Retention Part of Board, Staff and Volunteer Orientations

8. Share Donor Retention Success via Social Media/Communications

9. Make it Key in System Selection

10. Make it Fun!

How a many of these 10 methods are you already using?

Roger

P.S.  An Agitator raise goes to the folks at Bloomerang for their untiring work and focus on retention. Not only did they design their donor management software with ‘retention’ at its core, their blog and wide range of experts and continuing education resources are a treasure trove of good advice for organizations of all kinds.