Boosting Your Donor Retention – The Key to Growth in Giving

All right, well, looking at my clock, we are just a minute pass our official start time. And so I’m going to get started here. Welcome to the webinar, boosting your donor retention, the key to growth in giving, I am super excited to be here with you. And Read More

All right, well, looking at my clock, we are just a minute pass our official start time. And so I’m going to get started here. Welcome to the webinar, boosting your donor retention, the key to growth in giving, I am super excited to be here with you. And a couple of things that I’m going to just get out of the way before I do any official introduction and do the kind of agenda and the lay of the land is just to let you know that yes, this will be recorded. Yes, you can ask your questions, but they will probably not get answered until the end of the session. So the other common question that comes in is will you get an email. So yes, you will get an email. And if you don’t get the email, it’s still okay. If you go to the DonorPerfect.com website, and then you navigate to our expert webcasts, you’ll find the recording there, you’ll also probably find it in a couple of other places. But that is a common way that everybody can get access to the recording. So hopefully, knowing that is, in fact true. Everybody can take a deep breath and just sit back, relax. And let’s learn together. I am Kelly Ramage, and I am excited to be here with you. I am joining you as a lead training specialist, I have had the privilege of working with 1000s of customers over the years I have learned from you. And I’m hoping that together we can learn more together today.

Probably what I’m most excited about when I lead these types of webinars is while I have an official title, I really see myself as kind of your biggest fan, a cheerleader, giving you information to kind of bounce around and make some plans so that you can reach your missions. Because I believe in the work that you’re doing and the difference that you’re making. We all know, you know that 2020 is in our rear view mirror. And it had an impact. For some of us, it was a negative impact. For others, you may have seen some growth, but there was an impact. And 2021 is presenting us some challenges. But I choose to look at them as opportunities to maneuver the holes of the impact so that we can continue to make the difference in the world around us. One of the things that you may have received and had the opportunity of reviewing is the benchmark report that DonorPerfect put together, that kind of did a bit of a review of 2020 and how the pandemic impacted nonprofits. There’s, you know, a lot of great information in there. But I think one of the things that is very clear to me, as I read it, and even before I got to the summary is that the solid takeaway is that donor retention was the primary driver of fundraising success in 2020. So if that’s in fact true, that by itself might be enough to answer why does donor retention matter? But you know, sometimes you want to think about it a little bit more. So as I am looking at this chart, there’s three things that jumped out to me. I’m going to draw your my attention your attention to them. But let’s see what you think. So this first one, why does donor retention matter? Well, as I look at this box right here,

I’m very intrigued by this year over year retention rate for monthly donors is 90%.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the others are not important. But there’s something that we need to think about right there. Looking at this second diagram,

what do you notice the donor retention rate versus the number of days thanked after a gift, we would all agree that thanking donors is super important.

But what’s interesting is the breakdown of time. And of course, is this even possible the same day to and then it turns around and there’s a 61% donor retention rate.

This last one here, really intrigues me, because everybody is super excited about getting donors, new donors, one time donors, but how do we cross this line to go from a one time donor to a donor that’s giving multiple times? What I am

wanting to have us think about is that effective donor retention strategies require us to determine our baseline, define our success, and then have a way to measure our progress towards our goals. Now what we’re going to be

doing as we move forward together, just so you know, is that there’s going to be times for polls where I’m going to ask you a question. And you’re going to respond in the Questions pane, there’s going to be times for us to watch a video to get some ideas, we’re going to be looking at some other charts and data points that aren’t coming from different sources. And I’ll try and highlight them as we go. And then there’s going to be opportunity to review some of this in DonorPerfect so that you can see a little bit of it of it in action. But I’m hoping that at the end of our time together, that you will walk away with at least one nugget, one action item that you can put into practice. And that might be yes, I am on the right track, let’s keep going. Or hey, this was a really cool idea. Let me try that out. And I want you to know that no matter where you’re at, in your knowledge of donor, perfect your experience as a fundraiser, that all of us that DonorPerfect are really behind you, and we want to partner with you. And so that, you know, is really exciting for us that opportunity, and we would love to hear from you. So since we’re talking about donor retention, let’s start our conversation

with just simply identifying what it is.

So what’s your donor retention rate? So what, what is it? Well, I think everybody might know what it is. But we’re just gonna break it down. basically three things, you’re gonna take the total year

of donor, so one year total one year donors, then you’re going to take the total year to repeat donors. And you’re going to divide year two by year one.

Okay, so what does that mean? So for example, if you have 1000 donors in year one,

but you only have 400 of those give again, in year two, your donor retention rate would be 400, divided by 1000, or 40%.

Now that’s kind of looking at it big, you know, big definition. And when we think about donor retention, sometimes we want to think about it in all donors. But then there’s value sometimes where you can break it down into segments. So you would take the same formula, but you would break it down into segments, like your monthly donors, or your first time donors, or maybe your online donors are giving Tuesday donors, or maybe it’s event donors, and you’re trying to take those ticket buyers and convert them into donors. Well, one of the things that DonorPerfect offers

is this organization dashboard. Now this is an example of some of the metrics that you have available to you, in DonorPerfect if you choose to display them. And you can see that there’s a lot of great value here, growth and giving

total donors average gift, donor lifetime value. But the one that I skipped over is donor retention. Then as we take a little bit of a scroll down, we’re gonna see some charts where we can compare the last 24 months,

both for growth and giving, as well as donor retention.

And then there’s also some slightly different visual visualizations based on donation history cycle, and the donor retention by status. So this is just one way that DonorPerfect can help you figure out what your donor retention rate is, you still may want to come up with your own kind of validation with what you see in DonorPerfect because maybe not everything is in DonorPerfect. But I just wanted to highlight some of the things that DonorPerfect offers, when we’re just trying to understand what is your donor retention rate? So now my first question to you

is what does your organization do to retain donors? So there’s no wrong answer here. So let’s do a little bit of a group conversation. You’re gonna send it into the chat

or the questions pane as it may be, what does your organization do to retain donors?

And

one of the questions that I see coming in is what’s the donor retention rate, best practice or goal? Well as the last time I looked, the industry standard is right around hovering right around 43 and 44% of the donor retention

Alright, so

Let’s see. What are you doing

to retain your donors thanking, so I’m just seeing it scrolling. And those are the things that are popping up. Banking phone calls, quarterly reports.

monthly newsletters, Oh, I like the word that I just saw strategic communication plan, we are going to be talking about that.

Communications with mail and e mail e newsletters.

I saw some phone calls based on like certain dollar amounts.

All right now I’m not keeping track, I don’t even see a count of how many things are coming in. But I can tell you that all there’s a lot of you that are responding, you all have something that you are doing at your organization’s to retain donors. Now some of them might feel

challenging, it might feel exciting, it might feel new, but you’re all doing something because I think one of the things that we acknowledge is that donor retention is important. We know that. But the fact that that was kind of the driving factor of fundraising success, and 2020 gives us pause to want to review it.

Alright, so

thanks for the responses.

Because what I was curious to see is what you would say, and what you said, proved that a lot of you are, are doing something. And a lot of what I saw coming through was thanking donors, a lot of what I saw coming through was those coming up with plans, how do you stay connected and engaged? Get your board involved?

Alright, so one of the things that we’re going to kind of just, again, stop and think about in this chunk of time, is donor retention, and where does it fall within your fundraising strategy. So there’s a lot of ways that we could think about this, what we’re seeing here is a bit of a circular diagram of the cycle for fundraising. And donor retention is over here on the left hand side at point number five.

So it takes a lot of work to get to the point where you’re retaining a donor, sometimes you’re in an organization where you have to do a lot of work for at with acquisition, you have to get the new names, you don’t have many, or maybe there was a change where there was some turnover, and you lost some donors, but you have people that you want to work with you have constituents, so then you’re going to cultivate them, and you’re going to solicit them and then you’re going to be a good steward and build those and strengthen those relationships. And then you get to the point of really wanting to retain them. Because you know, the data says it is far less expensive to retain a donor than it is to acquire new donors.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to dive into some specifics and how DonorPerfect can help in these strategies. So we’re going to take a look at three different strategies.

The first is reviewing and talking about mastering the art of the Thank you.

The second is creating a donor retention strategy. And the third

is launching or perhaps for some of you reviewing and refreshing your monthly giving program.

So the first strategy that we want to review is mastering the art of the thank you

it’s time to rethink

excuse me how you say thanks.

Sorry about that. Tis allergy season.

All right. So, you know there is an art to saying thank you. I never really thought of it as an art form before. But I have seen some really amazing thank you letters. And then I have seen and received thank you letters that gets the job done. Now if you were to think about it and kind of mentally review the status or the quality of your thank you letters, is it getting the job done? Or is it really engaging the donor? Is it telling the story that you want it to be

tell is it showing the appreciation that you really want it to, to convey? Because I think we can all agree that without donors, it makes it really difficult to fulfill your mission. And we know that that’s what you’re most passionate about. So one of the things that I find interesting when I think about thanking donors is how do we do it in a timely manner. Now, you know, this is a bit of a blown up image from what we started out with this just a couple of moments ago. But as you look at this, they’re all effective. But the power of that timely thank you is really kind of amazing when you think about a 60, almost 61% donor retention rate. Now mind you, this data is based on the days thanked by email after receiving a gift now before you even think an email because I know some people

like emails, and other people don’t. But we’re really wanting to just kind of stop and think about the importance of that timely, thank you. Now the data is supporting the email, but the data is also out there for letters if you go looking for it. So one of the things that we

have learned, or I have learned and been reminded on a regular basis,

is truly understanding what it is that a donor really wants. Now, I could probably turn this into a poll. And I’m guessing with all of you, the brilliant people in my audience, that you would get this right, what do you really, what do your donors really want, when it comes to a thank you

is they want the acknowledgement that the gift was received and that you were pleased to get it. And they want the assurance that their gift was set to work as they intended it. Now one of the things that you are going to discover when we hop into DonorPerfect here is that there’s a wide variety of opportunity and options for you to thank your donors, and one of them is using video. So I am going to pull up a sample video of something that you could consider using to thank your donors.

Hi, Chris, from the teammate, Cora, Lakers, thank you so much for your very generous gift of $1,000. If it wasn’t for you, and to here would still be waiting for the critical surgery she needed to stop cancer in its tracks. Now she’s on the road to recovery and can soon get back to doing regular cat stuff. We can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done for us over the past 11 years from your contributions that helped us build our newest shelter to the over 200 hours you’ve spent caring for our animals and making them feel loved. You are truly appreciated.

All right, so that is a sample of a video that was made with a tool that’s available in DonorPerfect. So one of the things that I want to also just continue to reassure you as we move through this is we’re reviewing information that you might be very familiar with. And then some of you might be brand new and feeling very overwhelmed. Or some of you are so busy. You don’t you know that you have the kind of the thing the things are the tools in place, but you don’t have the time to review or refresh it. So one of the the items and things or tools that we’ve made available to you over the years are these ebooks or kits if you will. So this is one example of a digital donor Thank you kit. And in the kit, you’re going to find how to segment donor thank yous, you’re going to find the information on the thank you email and the video best practices.

You’ll see email thank you templates

you’ll see video, thank you scripts

and then you’re gonna have tools to streamline your thank you workflow. Now at the end, I’m going to show you how easy it is to find these resources. But what I want you to know is that they exist. Now as we kind of just pause that you know the big picture conversation about donor retention. How can

DonorPerfect help? Well, DonorPerfect can actually help in a lot of ways.

It can help you acknowledge your gifts promptly. It gives you the ability to have personalized thank yous.

It gives you the ability to show the impact of the gifts because as many of you indicated, that’s, that’s something that they really, really want to see and hear about.

It can help you organize your thank you letters, or emails.

And it’s going to save you time. Now, I, as I said, have been doing this for years. And one of the things that I

am always excited to see and have the opportunity of helping organizations do is take something that is a very manual process, and turn it into something that’s a bit more efficient without compromising or giving up the personalization. And, and those are some of the things that DonorPerfect, afford you. So I’m gonna now hop into DonorPerfect.

And I’m going to look up a donor.

And we’re gonna just kind of talk through some of the options that’s available.

Alright, so I looked up a donor, Heather Blake, and Heather has given a gift and I can see some quick data points here looking at her record in the donor profile. And the gifts can be manually entered, if you get a check in the mail. It can be brought in from an online form, it could be imported, and some of you might be using some of our other partners. And so there are integrations. So there’s a wide variety of ways that transactions gifts can get entered into DonorPerfect being that weren’t connected the way that we are, I’m going to go ahead and add a gift so you can see everything that I’m doing. But here I’m going into the gift area, I’m clicking on Add gift.

Some of the things that I am taking advantage of and DonorPerfect is the default so that I am saving myself some time.

Here, I can choose the payment method and tring in the dollar amount.

And you’ll see some of the things that are going to happen as you’re using this is that there’s going to be some tips along the way. Now, as I said,

Don’t perfect can help you reach and increase your donor retention rate with those timely thank yous. So in DonorPerfect, you have the ability to upload your own letters, more documents if you’d like. And you also have the ability to create your own email templates. But when you’re doing the gift entry, or you’re looking at the donors record up here in the action bar, or the blue banner menubar, you can choose to thank the donor and you can send an email or a letter. So I’m going to send an email.

Because I want to try and increase the speed in which Heather is going to get her Thank you. This is grabbing an email template.

What I love about this is while I can look at it here, I can also add a personal note.

Okay, I can review it.

And excuse me as I’m typing.

And then once I’m satisfied, I can send the email.

And there goes, a couple of things that are you going to notice is that the record has been updated in terms of when it’s been saying so it’s been received and thanked. And if I choose because staying connected and informed about my donors, I can also have validation and a record have that in context, because this is where you keep track of that. And that was done by the system very efficient. Now you might be thinking, Well, what about the busy seasons, I’m not going to do this one by one. That’s okay. We have a process, not that I’m going to go into it today. Under receipts, where you can do things in groups, you’re still going to use those letters, you’re still going to use those emails, you still get the personalized results. You just get to handle it in a little bit of a more efficient fashion when you have a high volume time. So thanking donors is important. We don’t disagree on that. I know but trying to rethink the message. Okay, now, before I go for, this is the Thank you. I want to thank them in a different way I want to use

that video, well, where I’m going to find my video option

is here on my main page.

And it’s going to be an action bar where I can send a video, depending on how you choose to set this up,

is going to then determine if I send the video

once and done, if I am using a, like a stop video that you built that you’re going to send the same message to everybody. And they can also create a contact. So again, here is sending a video.

And I can choose

to record one or upload one pretty amazing ways to stay connected to our donors.

Now, moving on to our second

donor retention strategy

is creating your organization’s donor retention strategy. So there’s a lot of different thoughts out there. But I think at the most basic, simplest core kind of way of thinking about this, a strategy is you ask you thank you report, and then you repeat.

Okay, so again, the Ask thank report and repeat model. But no matter what you want to keep the number one thing that the best fundraising systems have is their donor, so they need to be front and center of your efforts.

So when you think about strategy, for some of you, you might cringe. And you might get a little bit of a Twitch, because now you have to think big, you have to think about the system. Well, let’s break it down. So how do you design your donor retention strategy, and maybe it’s not for all donors, it’s going to be a segment of donors, we’re going to begin with the end in mind.

You can work backwards to create a path. And you’re going to focus on building a repeatable and sustainable process.

Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar, or have ever seen the show Undercover Boss, I don’t even know if it’s still on. But one of the things that I liked about Undercover Boss is that it took the CEOs or business professionals and brought them in as if you will just an employee so that they could experience what it was like to work at their business. Well, what if we took that same idea? And it was an undercover donor? What if you became a donor, you gave a gift or you had somebody else give a gift? That you know, and they’re going to report back exactly what their experience is like? What would you learn? Would you find any ways to improve? Would you be so thrilled that everything is working exactly as you intended it? What would you discover?

So the idea here is that you’re mapping out a sequence of events.

So that you can kind of meet your donors in the journey from acquisition to retention,

and then maybe even upgrade.

But one of the key or core concepts in all of this, no matter how you kind of map this out, is that it all needs to be interconnected.

And you want to keep the donor in the center. Now, okay, it’s a lot of words, a lot of theory. How do you do this? Now, there’s a lot of ideas out there, you could do a timeline, you could do a calendar, I’m proposing, you just create a map. And it could look something like this, you break it down into chunks of time. Now, I’m also going to suggest that maybe what you want to do is you want to think about a segment of donors, for example, your new donors.

So if we think about new donors, and we break it down into time, okay, so what do we have here? Week one, and I don’t know

what you can how well you can see things but I’m gonna tell you week one, you’re going to show gratitude.

Week three to six, you’re going to send or invite them and welcome them.

Then we’re moving into months, you’re going to show some impact. You might do the ask at month four. As we progress along month seven, there’s some opportunities month 10 There’s Appreciation Month 12. There’s gratitude.

So what you put in these boxes is going to depend on your map. But let me show you how DonorPerfect can help in this area of

of donor retention. Okay, so as we think about this, showing gratitude, a donor gives a gift. Well, that would be the thank you process that I just showed you.

Then if a donor gives their first gift, wouldn’t it be cool if you as the director, or the admin, or the executive director, or the board chair, or whomever could get a notification that Joe Schmo just gave his very first gift? And it didn’t have to be an extra step, it was all part of somebody entering that gift into DonorPerfect, or they gave the gift online? Well, we have that capability, using Smart Actions, then you can record it in contacts. Okay, so now times moving along. And you may not necessarily always want to be doing asking, because it’s important for them to understand that they’re appreciated that their investment in your organization is making a difference. Well, what if you use the integration between DonorPerfect and constant contact to just send an appreciation email?

What if

you were seeking help, and you ask them to be a volunteer? There’s some really amazing information out there that volunteers make the best some of the best donors because they understand what you’re doing. What if you wanted some feedback?

Did you know that our online forums there’s a survey?

Sorry, folks, I have a little bit of a dry tickle in my throat.

And then of course, don’t perfect is going to be able to help you generate your solicitation list, whether that is going to be

a letter, whether that’s going to be an email, you can have peer to peer fundraising campaigns, there’s so much that DonorPerfect can do to help you in this journey. And again, what we’re trying to suggest is just coming up with that strategy. So what I’d like to do is to show you one facet of how DonorPerfect

can be used in this map for my new donors.

All right, so looking at DonorPerfect, what I’m going to do is I am going to look up one of my prospects, Jim Emerson.

Okay, so Jim Emerson, as I look at his account,

has never given a gift.

You’re seeing it on the screen. I’m not, I’m not hiding anything, here, I’m showing you that he has never given a gift.

So over here, in settings, I have the ability to create a smart action.

And a smart action is just simply a business rule that you get to define. And when something takes place in DonorPerfect, it’s going to do the action or the the result that you set up. So I have a smart action called my new donor first time gift. And it’s a process of going through and telling it DonorPerfect. What is the criteria or what’s referred to as a trigger. And then what is the action. And there are several different actions that can take place. You can send emails, you can create a contact update field, you can have a popup message or you can even launch another website URL. So in this smart action, when a new gift is entered and saved, and it’s not just any gift, it’s their first gift, I want to be reminded, I’m the Executive Director, that I want to call this person and thank them so they’re going to get their thank you letter or their email that’s going to happen. But I want to take it a step further because I know that if I can convert this person from a one time donor to a second gift donor, my donor retention rate of keeping them is going to skyrocket. Alright, so going back to my record my donor here and if technology is working in my favor.

I’m going to excuse me add a gift

just

is going to key in the information we have here.

Okay, pretty standard stuff, just doing some basic data entry.

And then I’m going to save.

Okay. So based on that, if I go here to contacts.

And again, things are working in my favor.

We’ll look at that. Seven days from now, I have a contact assigned to me that I need to call, because this was a first time donor.

You’ll also notice that the profile has been updated as well.

Now, that is just one small, tiny step in the journey strategy, if you will, of moving my donors along and staying connected to them, engaging them retaining them.

Lots of ideas out there.

What happens if you’re new to this? Again, what we want to make sure is that you know, that while we are providing some ideas and some examples, there’s even more tucked in here. So here is another kit, it’s the new donor welcome series template kit. And what you’re gonna find is this is going to include Mad Libs style templates for targeted donor thank you emails, and volunteer and event newsletters,

donation impact updates,

new donor surveys.

And a lot more, I promise, at the end, I’m going to show you where you’re going to find all this great stuff, but I wanting you to see that it does exist.

Alright, so the last and the third thing that we want to kind of highlight as a strategy for donor retention. And increasing your growth and giving increasing your donor retention is to launch a monthly giving program.

So let me ask you this question. And for some of you, you may already know the answer. Who would like $100 from a donor? I’m gonna guess all of you, you’re not going to say no to $100.

All right. But if I asked you who would like 240 from the same donor?

Which would you rather, that’s silly. Of course, you want the 240? Well, how is that possible? Well, that’s called the monthly giving math. So

let’s talk about some of the value

to monthly giving. And some of the things that might help. If you have a board that is not sure if this is going to work, or maybe you’re not even sure if it’s going to work. Let me show you a couple of details, if you will, the magic of monthly giving. So did you know that the average monthly giving gift is $53?

The median annual gift one time don’t I repeat, let me rephrase that. The average monthly gift is $53. monthly donors give more pretty amazing.

Lifetime value,

a one time donor, give $70.

If they’re a monthly donor, their lifetime value is 34 times higher $2,400.

And what about

this only three out of 10. One time donors give again,

eight and a half out of 10 monthly donors continue giving year after year.

So what’s involved in getting a monthly giving program? Well, sometimes it requires

to get your team on board. Sometimes it requires to get your board on board. And what you’re going to see is there is another kit that I’m going to highlight and I’m going to show you but one of the things that

has always kind of been important for me as I’m interacting with customers is to kind of break it down into real numbers get a good estimate of exactly how much your organization could benefit. So you do have to do a little bit of homework and trying to find out the dollars of the average gift and things you know along those lines. You do need to keep your expectations in check. You do need to

They kind of keep emphasizing the impact of a monthly giving program and how it can impact donor retention. Our data DonorPerfect. Research shows that organizations who have monthly giving programs increased donor retention for those donors from 43% to 90%.

According to fundraising Professor Adrian Sargeant, you’ll double the lifetime value of your donors by increasing your donor retention rate by just 10%. So, how many of you would like to share or could share very quickly? The name of your monthly giving program your monthly donor program?

And I’m guessing there’s some really great names out there. But

what would you what are you willing to share the name of your monthly donor program or your monthly giving program?

Okay, you don’t have one fair enough.

Okay, great. Sustainer circle Sustainer, circle nourishing circle, employee giving

keyholder monthly miracle partner carpenters club literacy camp champions.

pillars, constant change, constant companions, heroes for Hope circle of friends.

Raise the roof, Holman hearse.

Now as many of those names that I’ve been rattling off, there’s just as many that are coming in saying they don’t have a name. They haven’t named it yet. They don’t know one of the things that you will discover in the resources that we are going to provide so that you can start a monthly giving program, or maybe refresh your monthly giving program. So that it is successful, you need to have someone who owns the program and is committed to its success. Now that might be you wearing a different hat. And we are here to partner with you to try and make this as easy and as efficient as possible. But it does have to have somebody kind of owning it as theirs. We have found that it is most successful. If you name your monthly giving program, it doesn’t need to be fancy, it doesn’t need to be, you know, long, it can be just simple words, champions, ambassadors sustainers. as just a couple of examples.

You will have to ask your donors to give on a monthly basis. And there’s a lot of information out there that supports and says it’s okay to ask them to give a monthly don’t become a monthly donor. They don’t even if they’ve just given it’s okay to ask them to join the monthly giving program that you’re trying to launch.

You will want to set recurring as the default gift type on your on living donation form, you need to make it as simple as possible, it needs to be almost like there has to be no thought. They’re just going to go to their your website or they’re going to click on a link in an email that you send to them. And they’re going to sign up it’s going to be easy. Then from there. Once you have your donors kind of involved and engaged and interested in doing that. How can DonorPerfect keep the momentum keep it as easy as possible? Well, there’s actually four ways to automate your monthly giving program. First off is your online forums where you can have a recurring donation on all of your forms. And maybe you’re going to take a strategy where you have just recurring donation.

But once that recurring donation has been given,

then take full advantage of DonorPerfect and make sure that you set up automatic monthly giving, which means a donor signs up for $10 a month. And then they do that today, the 20th of April, automatically on the 20th of May, the next transaction is going to be processed, you don’t have to do anything. And in fact, you could receive an email in your inbox to say hey 10 transactions were just successfully processed today. And here are the people that you might have to follow up the ones that failed.

In addition to that, you can also have receipts. Now there’s you know, different opinions about whether a recurring donor needs to be thanked each and every time. But we’ve made it easy where it just does it automatically. So $20 is taken on the 20th of each month. And then that same day they’re going to get an email that you are in charge of you can make the message exactly what you want. Going back to that thank you conversation that we had just moments ago.

And then, because of trying to stay on top of when credit cards are going to expire, or if there’s been a change, take advantage of the service called account updater, where it’s going to manage that for you where you don’t really ever have to reach out to the donor and say, Hey, your card is has expired or it’s about to expire, can we get an updated information, remove all of that take full advantage of the tools that don’t have perfect offers.

One of the things that we have seen and know firsthand is that you have to make it known, you have to like shout it from the rooftops, hey, we have this monthly donor program. So you want to spotlight monthly giving on your website, in your emails and in social media, everywhere you have the ability to kind of broadcast that you want to do that. One of the things that is super, I think exciting is when you start thinking about the projects. And the initiatives that you’re asking your donors to join you in fulfilling is if you can come up with translate a monthly gift into tangible outcomes. It is amazing how many people want to get involved. So for example, $5 a month gives a dog’s month gives a dog a month’s worth of food. $10 a month gives a dog a month’s worth of food and a toy $20 A month gives a dog gives a dog a month’s worth of food, a toy and a blanket, and so on. You want to make it as easy and as engaging for your donors to want to partner with you. As I mentioned, there is a kit that is available for you, and like the others is going to be packed full of information. And this guide, you’re going to find the importance of naming your monthly giving program and some ideas, you’re going to find solutions for how you can promote your monthly giving program, you’re going to have great samples for thanking Your generous monthly donors, you’re going to be able to learn more about spotlighting your monthly giving program on your website. There’s these kits are just filled with information. And again, I’m going to show it to you. But one of the things that I want to do is I want to quickly go into DonorPerfect and just highlight just a couple of these things. So that you are aware of what I’m referring to. So when I take a look

at a form

and you turn it into a recurring giving form a monthly giving form, one of the things that you can do, and I clicked on the wrong thing, excuse me here

is you can go in, and you can change these buttons from just buttons have numbers and dollars. But you can turn it into messages. And it’s really easy.

And this is just the one thing that I want to show you because breaking it down into those tangible dollars is really important. So I’m just gonna go in here and that we have lots of training resources out there, and trainers and support a awesome support team that can help you. But it’s really just a matter of

that you just add text. And if I were to save this

and then view the form again.

I’ve now broken it down.

Okay, once these transactions, these gifts come into DonorPerfect, they’re going to come into the system and then they’re going to be queued up and ready to go under monthly giving. And this automatic processing is going to take it from there, all you have to do is you have to make sure that you come into the settings and enter in your email address so that you can see every day that transactions have been processed and how many has been processed. And if there’s any things that you need to address, if you choose to use the automatic receipt, and why not it’s there. Then you can create you turn it on and you create your email template. So every month not only is the donor supporting you, you can immediately without having to do it it’s do it the system’s doing it for you send them a thank you and share the impact of what their gift is doing.

The last thing that I just want to draw your attention to about monthly giving that some of you may or may not be aware of is that we have a monthly giving dashboard. And this is going to give you some really amazing data points about the success and the progress of your monthly giving pro

Graham’s

absolutely

exciting stuff here. And in my opinion, now one of the things that I said all along is that I wanted to make sure that I showed you how easy you could get those kits and where they’re at. So you will find the kits in our knowledge base. So from within DonorPerfect, you can go to the knowledge base, and that is going to bring you here.

Then once you’re in DEP community, then you’re going to go to the learn button. And here is where you can find the fundraising resource library. And in this resource library, you are going to find a treasure trove of information. So for example, down here at the bottom, your donor retention toolkit, there is a toolkit that I haven’t even mentioned specifically about donor retention. Here’s the one about thanking your donors. Here’s the new donor, thank you. Up here

is our monthly giving.

And here you can see,

it is filled 21 pages worth of information.

Not only are you going to see the, the templates, but you will also see that there is a kit here for getting started. There’s a kit here for marketing.

So if you have not ever gone into dp community, I would encourage you to check it out. And then go to learn. And then the fundraising resource library. Now I just glanced at the clock. And I’m always amazed at how quickly these sessions go by. So I said I was gonna start with a poll, I’m actually going to end with a poll. So for some of you this was review for some of you, this was just a maybe that confirmation that you are on the right track. And it’s just giving you wind in your sails to keep going for others of you, it might be all new. So my question to you is, what are you planning? Or what are your plans to retain your donors moving forward? It has anything changed? Do you have an aha moment?

Now you don’t necessarily need to answer that in the Questions pane that’s more rhetorical. But what I am going to do is I’m going to glance over at some of the questions because I said that we would answer a couple of those at the end. And let’s see what we have here.

Okay, a question that came in is when I have regular donors, for example, monthly donors who have given faithfully over many years, what are some of the best ways to show appreciation,

I could open that up to the group. Some of the things that I have heard from

customers, when I interact with them is ways to show appreciation is just kind of out of the blue, you send them a note, there’s something about that out of the blue communication that really connects with people. And that could be an email, a nine, it could be email, because the person is very much connected to email. It could be the good old fashioned pen to paper, kind of a thank you. And just that appreciation that the pause, it could be the use of the

the videos and showing kind of how much you appreciate them. Fun story, I was working with an organization where they’re kind of their population that they were supporting were were children. And what they did to show appreciation is the children made cookies, and then they delivered them. So they had to pick and choose exactly who they were going to send and deliver these cookies to Now obviously, this was pre pandemic. But what struck me about that is it was meaningful, it was showing the impact of the donors dollars in a very tangible, thoughtful way.

There are lots of ways that you could show appreciation, and I’m sure you know, there are plenty of others. But that’s you know, kind of what crosses my mind is there a donor retention rate that is best practice or goal that we should be working towards, in general the industry

The standards as you know it’s exist right now it is in a little bit of a decline from previous years. It’s at 43.6%

Lots of great comments and questions

and I’m joined by my colleague here Laurie and so she’s been flagging some things as they’ve come in

um a question why does DonorPerfect use a rolling year over year versus calendar year or quarter comparisons per retention rate and other metrics in large part some of that is based on the industry at large some of that a large part of it Excuse me

but

in large part it is based on the feedback that we got from from customers when we asked about this, like what would be meaningful what is important how would you measure it? So, that’s what we started with but like many things in DonorPerfect it doesn’t mean that it’s going to remain that way forever, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have some flexibility to kind of get the information in the format or in the in the way that you want

um, a question that came in is is there a cost to getting these kits? Absolutely not. They are if you are using DonorPerfect you have access to them

can you customize the thank you letters to be different each time they give or every quarter? So they don’t always add them automatically get the same exact messages? Absolutely. You have that capability you can modify the email templates very easily and the letters can just as easily be modified as well

just scrolling through here

in terms of Thank you calls how often should you call your called donors to thank them if I have a donor who has donated four times in last six months should I be calling them every single time they make a gift I don’t want to overwhelm them you know it’s it’s an interesting question the calls are very personal connection and I think that is fantastic but you might want to consider that I have heard has worked for other organizations is have different people called now that’s a little bit more work on your part. But that could be

a board member that could be it could be you you know is it every time they give a gift I don’t know that there I’ve I have seen enough data that says here’s the if you will the sweet spot of the number of calls but I do think that the variety of people that call can go a long way

DonorPerfect community you can access from the question mark bubble and DonorPerfect in the upper right hand corner

All right. Well, I again, I just glanced at this the clock and realized our time has been spent. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope that this was beneficial. And I wish you all the absolute best as you move forward in 2021. And just know that I am in the in the distance cheering you on as you make a difference in the world around us. Thanks so much and I look forward to interacting with you and perhaps implementing some of these strategies. Take care