Who Is Your Ten Year Donor?
If your nonprofit has been around long enough, you might be lucky enough to have a small percentage of donors who have stuck around for ten years plus.
What do you know about these special people?
Do you think they were just "born" loyal?
Have you ever surveyed or interviewed them? (If so, did you find out why they were loyal to your organization and not all the other riff-raff?)
Have you tried to determine or record the types of non-fundraising interactions they’ve had with your organization?
Was there some distinctive pattern to their early giving behavior?
How does any of that intelligence compare to similar information about your expires … the folks you’ve lost (or, depending on your perspective, abandoned you)?
Isn’t it time to find out?
Tom
P.S. And if you’ve detected some meaningful distinctions, would you share your insights with us?
2 responses to “Who Is Your Ten Year Donor?”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Your email got me thinking about something else: the One Time a Year Donor. These are donors who, no matter how many times you mail to them, they (loyally) give only one time a year. We started thinking about this group this past year and created a grid to identify past historical giving patterns by month. We found a large portion of this group were December/January givers, putting them in that end of the year, tax write off group. Every good Direct mailer knows that you have to be in your donor’s mailboxes often to generate the gift, but we wanted to see if slightly altering the number of times we mailed made a difference or not. We thought we could take the saved expense money, and put it to better use to acquire new donors or reactivated lapsed segments. We’re still in the processing testing this theory by slightly altering the # of times we mail and evaluating their long term performance – and I will let you know how we do –
Kimberly Haywood
March of Dimes
We also evaluated our “Once Yearly” donors but also donors who give consistently in December no matter how many appeals you mail to them in the fiscal year.
In early 2007, we decided to evaluate those “year-end” donors and code all who gave consistently for the last five or more years in December as “Mail Year-End.”
We saw an increase in response with these donors because they were not flooded with mailings in the year and received one or even two year-end appeals to renew.
Evaluating donor behavior and giving patters is crucial in minimizing the dreaded “donor fatigue.”
Sandro Tejada
AFS-USA