83. Some Personal News (SPN)
What happens if you don't play the long game
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
There’s something donors want. I've found through extensive testing that supporters stay longer when they see that canceling their monthly pledge donation is easy.
You could run the same tests I did and invest a similar amount of resources. Or you could give your supporters a better experience from the get-go and use Fundraise Up. Their platform lets supporters manage recurring plans and donation receipts from within their very own self-service portal.
Game-changing platform? It was for me. Check them out here.
In today’s SPN:
Creating a system where marketing efforts have the ability to compound
Jobs and Opportunities
5 approaches that improved my donor retention
Let’s dig in!
Play the Long Game
The key to compounding marketing and fundraising efforts across individual giving is eliminating one-off initiatives and thinking in systems instead.
One of the best reframes I’ve used is thinking about how to create a system where your efforts have the ability to compound.
Not:
- One-off campaigns
- One-off content pieces
- One-off organic social posts
- One-off blog posts
- One-off emails
Instead:
- Monthly paid campaign plans with new themes
- Recurring content pillars that feed other channels
- Content pillars redistributed for paid social
- A landing page that feeds ads and emails
- Nurturing one-off donors with upsell messaging to monthly giving
When you do one-off efforts, you’re not consistent enough by design to make an impact.
Marketing will not fix the fundraising problem you have today. But it can generate existing demand today and create new demand so that over time, you receive a steady flow of inbound leads that fuel the growth of your Org’s mission and make outbound easier.
The only way to create that new demand is to consistently show up and clearly communicate your mission and value-add to your community.
Show up again, and again, and again.
Do that in the right way over time, and watch how you’ll start to consistently generate incremental fundraising dollars in 2024.
Jobs & Opps
IRC: Senior Director, USA Philanthropy (Western Region)
ALSAC/St Jude’s: UX Designer, Product
Great Ormond Street (UK): Deputy Director, Public Fundraising
Leader Dogs for the Blind: Chief Philanthropy and Marketing Officer
American Heart Association: Digital Fundraising Manager, Direct Response
9/11 Memorial & Museum: SVP, Marketing
5 Ways to Improve Retention
Most Org’s know their donor acquisition costs.
Yet very few Org’s seem willing to invest the same kind of money into donor retention. Keeping your donors is far more important than bringing in new ones in my view, even if your net acquisition is positive.
With the constant evolution in technology and the availability of new tools one fact remains the same: it’s always cheaper to retain a donor than acquire a new one (and often easier).
Retention marketing requires smarts and prioritization. Every Org worth their salt has a digital donor acquisition pipeline, but far fewer have a thoughtful pipeline for managing retention.
Here’s a little inspo courtesy of Warby Parker:
Check out the following approaches I’ve deployed that improved donor retention.
1. Audit Your Donor Journey, End-to-End
Auditing your donor journey can be a bit of a tedious process but it’s worth the effort.
The Goal: Ensure your brand/program messaging is crystal-clear for prospective, current and former donors.
The Why: Clear messaging helps bring the “right donors” to your Org - those with the potential to become your VIP’s. It helps keep donors informed, engaged, and excited about your upcoming programs or events.
The How 🛠️: Walk in your donor’s shoes. Live their experience with your Org. Review every touchpoint from first-touch (eg Facebook ads) to post-conversion (eg confirmation emails and online/offline donor support like chat and phone experience).
As you explore each stage of the donor journey, look for statistically significant behavioral patterns amongst people 1) who didn’t convert, 2) did convert but had low LTV, and 3) those who did convert with high LTV.
Pull on your product marketing hat and interview donors for each of these “buckets” at various stages of the donor journey. Here are some questions to mull over as a starting point:
• What stood out to you about our brand/programs from the first day you encountered them?
• What makes our donation experience easy or different?
• What makes engaging with us difficult or a faff?
• Is there anything unclear about our brand/programs from our ads/website/events?
Use logic. Use hard data. Use this feedback. Use it to find the touch points where engagement can be maximized. Getting ahead of things that precede churn is the name of the game when it comes to retention pipeline management.
2. Analyze Month-Based Acquisition Cohorts
The Goal: Look at the donors you’ve acquired over a particular time frame, review their donating behavior, and map that back to the various marketing initiatives you were running at the time of their acquisition. Look for statistically significant behavior patterns to identify which initiatives led to the stickiest donors.
The Why: If you can identify which marketing campaigns, objectives, efforts, etc. result in your highest LTV donors, you should be able to work on a refresh/rinse/repeat model.
The How 🛠️: Use a data visualization tool that allows you to compare donor behavior by monthly cohort. From there, review metrics such as donor acquisition cost (CAC), re-donation rate, time to CAC payback, # of donations over time, and lifetime value by cohort.
Then inhale your fundraising/marketing data (ads, email, SMS, social - all of it) starting from the highest LTV monthly cohorts to identify if and how to replicate that stickiness again.
Similarly, it’s important to know which months or campaigns resulted in the lowest LTV acquired donors, so you can dig in to what happened there too.
3. Dive Deep Into Your Donor Support Practices
The Goal: Review how and why your donors are engaging with your Donor Support Team to ensure their experiences are nothing less than stellar.
The Why: One of the easiest ways to burn a bridge with a donor? Offer slow or dissatisfactory support.
The How 🛠️: Depending on what tool(s) you use for donor support, this can either be easy-breezy or require some serious focus time. When analyzing your donors experience, review the following:
- # of support tickets in relation to fundraising revenue volume per month
- # of donation cancelations per month
- # of requested refunds per month vs actual
- Average time to ticket resolution
- % donor support survey response rate
- Donor support survey response data
If you can find patterns in the above data, you’ll unlock insights that improve the donor experience, and ultimately, donor retention. Ensuring that more first-time donors receive a seamless and informed experience can vastly improve the retention of those donors.
4. Get Serious About Email & SMS Segmentation
The Goal: Make sure every text or email hitting your donors’ inbox is adding value.
The Why: Perceived spam can only lead to two things - an unsubscribe or a breakup.
The How 🛠️: There are many, many ways to approach email & SMS segmentation. Simply put segmentation is light personalization, and personalization adds value.
Consider the difference between:
1) A standard offer email from an Org, letting you know that whatever event is happening next month.
VS
2) An email sharing what programs you’ve been running in the past year, results visualized in a graphic, a match code for an additional 10% + a section showing the journey of a “$100” donation.
One of those is definitely better to open in your inbox.
Segmentation can be built on whatever you find valuable based on your Org’s needs. In addition to standard segmentation, some other segments I’ve built have been based on:
- Donations to specific programs (for sending product specific recommendations or updates)
- Reason for donation, which I’ve collected in a post-donation survey (for sending holiday gifting vs in-honor style comms)
- Birthday month, collected in a post-donation survey (for sending upsell or matching offers)
- Active social posters (for encouraging them to follow Org accounts)
- SMS VIP (for sending exclusive content and programmatic updates)
5. Implement “Surprise and Delight” Activities
The Goal: Make donors ADORE your Org (and increase donor LTV, reduce churn).
The Why: This one’s easy. For as long as they can, donors that adore your brand will keep coming back. It’s that simple.
The How 🛠️: Surprise and Delight can mean a variety of things - sending VIP donors direct ‘love’ mail, and/or offering them exclusive access to online events, inviting them to vote on new products in your program’s pipeline, or sending digital surprises like iPhone wallpapers.
Consider this: If you were about to churn from an Org’s monthly pledge program, what might change your mind?
Wrapping Up
Ok. There you have it. 5 approaches for improving retention that you can start implementing this week. Even if you implement just ONE of these, good things are to come.
That’s all for today!
Don’t hesitate to email with any questions. Thank you to those that do.
And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for powering nonprofit fundraising.
See you next week at the new time of Monday morning!
And now onto the fun stuff.
Interesting Reads from my Week
Making Olive Oil Cool - Behind Graza Founder’s Unorthodox Approach.
Instagram and Facebook Will Stop Treating Teens Like Adults.
Why Your 2024 Marketing Budget Falls Short - And How to Do Better in 2025.
As AI Rises is Web3 Dead In The Water?
Why Ecommerce Conversion Rate Is Stuck at 3%.
Crazy Apple stock chart showing Apple has gained 1% every 18 days for 20 years.
MonopolyGo are thought to be spending over $4m a day on social ads. This analysis of their activity is insightful - and highlights the need for lots of creative.