Retain: Unlock the Power of Monthly Giving

Announcer, as your organization grows, you’re probably ready to expand your fundraising efforts and become more efficient in your operations. To help you accomplish both goals, you’ll want a solution that integrates with your online donation forms, email and accounting solutions, Read More

Announcer, as your organization grows, you’re probably ready to expand your fundraising efforts and become more efficient in your operations. To help you accomplish both goals, you’ll want a solution that integrates with your online donation forms, email and accounting solutions, donor, demographic, data and other top tier solutions. To make more time for your expansion efforts, you need to automate fundraising tasks, such as creating personalized thank you letters and receipts. To expand your fundraising, you need tools to help target the right donor with the right message, whether they’re major donors or monthly givers, from events to Moves Management, having a solution that can offer these capabilities means you can increase fundraising capacity without having to switch systems to make better decisions. You need a solution with the analysis tools and reporting your team needs to understand where you’re being successful, as well as areas for improvement in a time of frequent staff turnover, you’ll also want access to onboarding, training and support specialists whenever you need them, like members of your staff that will always be there to help you. DonorPerfect checks all of these boxes and perhaps others you didn’t know you needed get answers to your questions and learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar. Emma
three Hello. Hello, everybody. Hi. My name is Sean patero and I’m a training specialist for backstage.
Can you not hear me? We’re still backstage.
It’s showing me on stream. Let’s check with the chat. Do you have chat? Do we have two Sean’s on live? That’s what I love about Chad. We can hear both of us. Awesome. I don’t we don’t need to check with our team. We are getting a we’re getting emoticons, and we are getting two thumbs up. There are two Seans. This Sean is going away, and I am introducing Sean Mac McClellan. My name is Sean patero. I’m a training specialist for DonorPerfect, and welcome to Sean Mac McClellan’s session. He’s going to go by Mac to avoid any confusion. Sean session is understanding the power of a monthly giving program. A little bit about Mac. He started working with DonorPerfect in 2017 his favorite topics are database maintenance and reporting, and he loves seeing when clients master the basics and start to understand and use more advanced tools and functions in the database in his spare time, Mac enjoys writing. He’s a published author, by the way. Might look his name up, designing games and watching sumo wrestling and the Seattle Seahawks. He has three delightful cats, Opie Jax and Nico. Now, before Matt takes it away, just a couple quick housekeeping items you can download today’s presentation from the details section to the right of the presenters window. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab so that we can address them at the end of the session. And do know that all sessions will be recorded and they will be available on the DonorPerfect website at the end of the conference, and in just a moment, we are going to have Mac take it away. We did lose Mac. Let’s get them back. Let’s get them back chat. There is only one Sean now there is, and that is quite all right. I am going to we’re going to fill in some time we want Mac. Sarah, I agree. If all of you could find beneath my face there is a smiley face emoji, bring him back. I hear you. If you could find that smiley face emoji, and put in some reactions just like that. This is the type when Mac does get back in. If we could get some just a little bit of this energy for that, that would be awesome.
Perfect love to see it, apparently, also you might not have known this. If this happens to be your very first session, we also have gifts that you can enter in the chat, something like that. A little bit of hype for when Matt returns time for a Mac. Attack, attack, I agree. Oh, okay, it has said that he is on his way back. Very good. And we’re going to have some big fanfare, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you. I present to you the man of the hour of the year, of the month, Mac chat is going crazy. The people are dying for a Mac attack. You are are they ready?
I hope so. All right, I think we’ve got everything. Love a Big Mac. We are good. We can see my screen. Sorry for the issues earlier. It wouldn’t be a conference if we didn’t have one or two tech issues. So today, we’re going to talk about the benefits of a monthly giving program. To that end, we’re going to talk about ways to set up DonorPerfect For your monthly giving program, and we’re going to talk about running some reports to see how you’re doing. Are you succeeding? Are you hitting those goals? Are there things that need to be tweaked? Now, for the sake of time, we will have to stick to a high level overview, so I definitely recommend checking your DonorPerfect fundraising guidebook that you got just for attending the conference. There will be additional resources, such as the monthly giving webinar series that you can dig into for a deeper dive. So why set up a monthly giving program? Well, on average, DonorPerfect clients retain about four out of 10 donors by utilizing a monthly giving program and automating the process, this rate can increase to nine out of 10 people. So 40% is nice. 90% is nicer. With monthly giving, you can raise more capital in the long term. After all, would you rather have a one time gift of $100 or would you rather have 12 monthly gifts of $10 each with a more stable revenue stream, you can focus on your mission and worry less about where the money is coming from. It’s also more convenient for your donors, they can simply set up their pledge and go about their day knowing that they’ll be supporting a cause they believe in. And in today’s world of subscriptions and services, people are more willing to sign up for things long term, plus, if we think about it from the donor’s perspective, you know, are each of you more capable of giving a single gift of $100 or are you more capable of donating $10 each month? Your donors probably feel the same way, and you’ve already got all of the tools that you need. You have your DP forms where you can set up a donor page. You have your safe saved gateway where you can process your donations. You have constant contact for communicating. You have the receipts module for thanking your donors, and you have reports where you can review your success and develop strategies to grow your program. So who are your monthly donors? They are your donors who are on a fixed budget and maybe can’t write larger checks consistently. They’re the donors who believe in your mission and are probably already in your database. In fact, Dana Snyder, who spoke yesterday, states that monthly giving is often an expression of values and personal identity, so they’ll use this as an opportunity to basically put their money where their mouth is. They are donors who have already given to your organization, very likely through an online form. They’re already engaging with you via social media or through your newsletters. And finally, they are many of your younger donors who typically prefer to give online. So how can we take these people and get them into our monthly giving program? Well, first we need to prepare that program. So there are three key items that we want to keep in mind. There’s the ask, the goal and the steps for success. So taking a page out of monthly giving, the sleeping giant by Erica wastorp, the Ask should be your average one time gift amount divided by three. Additionally, when building your form, your lowest ask should never go below $5 or higher than $10 and our own studies have shown that increasing the Ask Amount by $5 increments has the most success people just like the number five. Then you want to set your goal for your monthly giving program. So I’m going to take a moment to show you the monthly giving calculator so you can find the monthly giving calculator on our DonorPerfect site. It’s also going to be included in the handouts for the conference. But using this tool, you can simply enter in your average monthly pledge amount, whether that’s a number that you have determined. By looking at your data, or if it’s a number that you are hoping to make your average so for example, I’m just going to notice it. So I’m going to keep my numbers nice and simple, but we’re going to say we have an average monthly pledge amount of $15 then we’re going to take the number of active donors, in this case, we’re talking the last two years, and we’re going to put that value in there, nice, even 100 click Calculate, and then this tool will let us know, if we convert 359, 12, 15% of our database to our monthly giving program, how many donors will have so if we can convert 9% we’ll have nine monthly donors. We can estimate $135 a month in stable revenue, or $1,600 and a little bit of change a year. And the other nice thing about this is it lets us see what happens if we scale up or scale down. So again, that’s the monthly giving calculator, which you can view@donorperfect.com and the link will be in all of your follow up materials. And then finally, you want to determine the steps that your team needs to take to make a successful monthly giving process. So the first thing that you’re going to need to establish is who is the program manager. Now, obviously, there’s probably going to be cases where multiple people are working with the monthly giving program, but you want to make sure that one person is really owning it, making sure that the website, DonorPerfect, your accounting software, Constant Contact, that everything there is working moving nice and smoothly. You don’t want to have a scenario where you’ve got too many cooks in the kitchen making too many different decisions and maybe not communicating with one another properly. The easiest way for it to collapse is just conflicting opinions. One person put them in charge. You also should name the program. People love feeling like they’re part of something. Turn your monthly giving program into a club. To take another page from Dana Snyder’s book, donating creates a sense of belonging. When people feel like they belong, they’re going to be more loyal. They’re going to be more generous. Provide a monthly donation process. Identify how you’ll be accepting your donations and processing them. I’m going to recommend DonorPerfect forms, and that’s what I’ll demo later, but you have different options. And then ask your donors to give monthly this is all about the communication. Tell them about your program. Ask them to join the program. Keep that avenue of communication going. The last thing you want to do. We want our donors to set their pledge and forget about it. We don’t want to set up our donors and forget about them. We need to make sure that we keep talking to them and then organize the process. Make sure you know how you’re going to thank your donors, how you’re going to recognize your donors, how often they’re going to be thanked, and make sure that everybody on the team knows what’s going on. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to talk about online forms as the tool to get people started with your monthly giving program. So a DonorPerfect form is the easiest way to give your constituents the ability to set up their monthly gift. The drag and drop form builder can be accessed through DonorPerfect under the Apps menu. Now while building a new form, it’s important to consider your donation amounts. Again, we want to have that $10 minimum. We want to go with increments of five whenever possible. Report on the monthly giving programs impact. We also need to set up the right gift codes. This is a this is a very important item. I can’t harp on it enough. Get those codes in the system, because having the money is nice, but knowing where it came from, what it’s for, so that way we can build on our success. We can avoid things that maybe didn’t work in the past, and we know how to allocate our funds. That takes you from an organization that can work well to a fantastic organization. You’ll also want to set up your email template, or you can direct your form to an email receipt template that you’ve created in DonorPerfect. That’s also my preference, just because you can attach a PDF to it, which a lot of people like. Now, for the sake of time, I can’t build an entire DonorPerfect form from scratch, so we’re going to highlight the key areas on an existing form. So if I’m in DonorPerfect, I can go to Apps, online forms, and we’re going to be talking about the drag and drop form builder today. You can do this with classic forms, but I want to highlight the drag and drop. So as I mentioned, I have a form already start. Edit. Now, one of the things I want to do here is make sure that this form is just for monthly donations. So I’m going to take this one time option out entirely. To do that, I just click on the item that I want to edit, and then over here on the left, if I come down to amount settings, I can turn off my one time gifts.
Now, normally, I would recommend have a description of your gift impact. Telling people how their money is going to be used is a great way to get them invested. It’s a great way for them to see, you know, hey, if I just give $5 more, you know, My impact is multiplied by, you know, value. I’m going to turn it off for now, just because I don’t have something pre written, and I want to take the time and make sure that my descriptions are meaningful to my audience. I am going to leave monthly giving on. Now. I want to set up my donation amounts so my donor base’s average gift amount hovers around $100 so based off of that formula, I should ask for a donation in the $30 range. So I’ve got 30 here. I’ve got 25 already set a $20 amount, and then I’ll have my $10 base. But if I wanted to change anything, all I have to do is enter in the value. You can also add more buttons, although generally we do recommend keeping the keeping the options limited. We don’t want to incite any sort of option paralysis. Now I want to make sure that my form is properly coded. So on the left we have the hidden fields option here. So my general ledger, this is where the money is going, my monthly giving program is going towards my annual fund. So I’m going to select the annual fund ledger and then click Save my campaign. A lot of organizations will have a monthly giving program campaign code just to represent the program as a whole. So I’m going to select that code. Now, if the code doesn’t exist yet, you can just jump over to DonorPerfect, and then under code maintenance, you can add those codes in my solicitation is going to be monthly giving 2025 now I have a lot of solicitations, and I don’t want to scroll through it, so I’m just going to search for it and select Now this allows me to keep track of when people’s pledges first started, so I can see which years had the greatest impact on my monthly giving program overall, and then my sub solicitation. This can be representative of how I’m communicating with my constituents. So if I’m using this form in conjunction with Constant Contact, I might code this to email blast. Or if this is the form I’m going to share on social media. Later, I might mark this for social media, and then what that allows my team to do in the long run is see, hey, how are people joining the monthly giving program? Are they responding to an email blast? Are they following us on Facebook and LinkedIn? Are they opening up our direct mail? Are they just visiting our website. So I’ll save the email blast, and then as again, as donations come in, everything will tell the story of where the donation came from. Now, the last item that we want to address while we’re in the form builder is the email receipt. We want to make sure that we are sending a timely and meaningful Thank you. So if I go to settings again on the menu here on the left, I have the ability to set up my email template. I can either use the default template or customize the template within the form or what I prefer with a monthly giving program is to use a DonorPerfect template that I’ve built in my database. And there’s two reasons I prefer this over the default template on the form. One is, again, you can include that PDF attachment, which is a nice way for people to be able to store their receipts on their computer. They print out a little more cleanly, but then also it ensures that they are getting a very consistent design and message with their template. So I’m going to select the monthly giving template here. And as I was working on my form, you may have noticed it says, last saved a few seconds ago. Once I click the Publish button, everything that I’ve just done will be visible on the Final Four and then an easy way for my donors to tell me how much they want to donate to coral acres is. And join my program. So we’re going to get into the email template here in a little more detail shortly, but for now, we’re going to get back into my present, back into the slideshow. So once you have your form set up, it’s time to put the finishing touches on your monthly giving program. So one tool that’s very important is automatic processing. This is what lets DonorPerfect do all the heavy lifting for you. It means that no one has to go in and manually process pledges. So each day, automatic processing will check your database for pledges that are ready to be processed, charge the accounts and get the money moving into your organization’s bank account. Then there’s automatic receipting, which allows DonorPerfect to send an email receipt whenever a gift is processed. In this case, you can keep your donors informed and provide them with the necessary tax documents that they’ll need during the next spring. So if we go back into DonorPerfect under tasks you have monthly giving. So this is the tool that handles all of those recurring pledges. So we can see in my system, automatic processing and receiving is already on. If you click on edit, you have the ability to toggle them on or off. So again, automatic processing just means that DonorPerfect is going to check your database every day, process those pledges. No one on your team has to worry about it, and then automatic receiving. It’s going to send those thank yous right away. Somebody on your team, your program manager, should receive an email confirmation that way, if something fails, if there’s an issue, they’re alerted right away. They can fix the problem. So I’ll go ahead and put my email in there and save
now the actual template that’s going to be found here under mailings email templates. So you can see we have a whole bunch of email templates. This is a training system. Your database is probably going to have a smaller number, maybe a little less intimidating looking, but I’m going to edit my monthly giving thank you right here. So we have our template name. The most important item is the thank you code Association. This is how DonorPerfect knows that when a gift receives the monthly giving Thank you code that it’s supposed to get the monthly giving email. You also want to make sure you have a reply to email. Ideally, it should come from a person, so I’m going to go ahead and put my email in there. And again, we want our donors to feel like they’re part of a group. We want them to be able to feel like they can talk to our team. We can add a BCC email,
and then we have our subject line. I always like to include the salutation. Now, in order to include those merge fields, you just have to click the Insert button look for the field,
and then we have the email itself. Again. I like to keep the email nice and short. I don’t want people to feel like they’ve got to read a book once a month, so we’re just giving them a quick thank you. There’s any questions or concerns they can reach out to the staff. Attach is a downloadable receipt. We go up top to our PDF attachment. This is where we can give them the full receipt experience. So again, they just get a quick little email, and then if they want to, they can download the actual template or the actual PDF. So I’ll save those changes, and we are good to go with our receipt. You Yeah. Now after your forms go out into the world and the donations start pouring in, because we know they’re going to start pouring in, you’ll want to be able to report on the success of your fundraising efforts. So what steps do you need to take? So we’ve already touched on this one to an extent, but it bears repeating. Make sure that you have codes set up that will make it easy to identify your monthly recurring gifts. You should focus on the campaign, the solicitation and the thank you codes. So if you’re only going to write one thing down in your notebooks today, this is the thing. But from my presentation, this is the thing. Put those codes in your system. Then you want to make sure you have an easy way to identify your monthly donors. So you do have the campaign solicitation and thank you codes, but it may be to your benefit to create a monthly donor flag that you can pin on the main screen, because maybe you have a few donors where they don’t use the recurring process they send. Checks, or they’re not exactly monthly, but they’re close enough we want to be able to still incorporate them into our monthly given program and make sure they’re receiving our communications. In order to run reports, you’ll also need to be able to build your selection filters. So I’m just going to share a few tips. It’s good to know which records you want in your output. So when you go to run a report, make sure there’s one or two people who you know should or maybe should not be in that report. If John Smith is a monthly donor, if his name shows up in the report, it means that you’re on the right track. If his name’s missing. And now we know we might have to switch things up with our filter, and also know which fields you need to use in your filter. This is the part that a lot of people tend to have a little bit of difficulty with when they first start using DonorPerfect is just, there’s a lot of fields, and if you got to write them down, make sure that you know, hey, solicitation is a Filter field to use when running my monthly donor reports, or that the flag field is something to use in my monthly donor reports. And finally, determine the best reports for your needs. There are some reports that may be more useful than others depending on what exactly you’re looking for, or maybe even depending on the person that’s running the reports. So I’m going to focus on the monthly giving dashboard and the monthly giving report. So the monthly giving dashboard can be found under Reports dashboard, and then you’ll have your organization dashboard, your My Dashboard, and then the monthly giving dashboard in the upper right corner. So the monthly giving dashboard has a variety of widgets that will provide different data points about your automatic recurrent gifts. So right away I can see, hey, I’ve got $100 in failed donations that I need to go check out. If I click on that, it lets me know, oh, there’s my donor. I need to go check out his record. Maybe it’s a bad credit card. Maybe something else is happening. It’ll also tell me how much money I’m pulling in over the last 12 months on average, and how much money I’ve pulled in total over the last 12 months. It’ll also give me a count of my donors, and it’ll also let me know what my overall conversion rate is, and then we can see our gift totals for each month. So if I started this program in January, you know I have that information here, and then I can also see my counts by month. The monthly giving report can be found under Reports, Report Center. It’s in the Financial Reports folder, but again, I don’t want to have to do any scrolling, so you can use the search bar in the top right corner, and you’re going to open up the monthly giving report. With this report, you can put a date range in if you’re looking for something specific, you can apply a filter. If you’re just looking at your monthly giving program very broadly, we’re going to click on Run Report, and it’s going to give you the name of each of your donors that has a recurring pledge. If somebody has multiple pledges, it will show you that so we can see Mr. Wilson has three pledges. So that’s something where we may want to take a look at it, just to make sure there’s no data issues in our system. It’ll tell you when the pledge was created, when the pledge is starting, when they made their last donation. The total now for monthly pledges, your total is usually going to be $0 because it’s ongoing, then you have your billing amount, your frequency, how much has been paid so far, and the annualized value. Just as a quick note, if you do have a recurring pledge that is not monthly, it’ll still show up in this report, because it’s about the monthly giving tool.
Sorry to cut you off, Matt, just popping in, coming up on the end. If we have time for one or maybe two quick Q and A’s, sorry, do a lot of people, you’re you’re an author. You’re a published author. Everybody knows this. You had a good book recommendation for us earlier, and the crowd wants to know what that was. What was that book that you mentioned earlier? And the author, if you remember from your slides,
yeah, let me get you the exact name, because I don’t want to, I don’t want to say anything incorrectly here. So we’re just going to flash through some slides real quick. I know it’s Erica wasdorf. It’s monthly giving the sleeping giant,
monthly giving the sleeping giant by Erica wasdorf, excellent, correct. Okay, check out. Erica wasdorp, check that out. And I. Yeah. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Sorry we weren’t able to get to all the questions in the chat. If you want to see more about drag and drop forms at 145 today, my presentation is a little bit more free time to dive into the who, what, when, where and why of the drag and drop forms. But thank you everybody for attending Max session. We hope you had some great takeaways. Next up, we have Donna Mitchell, who will discuss how to maximize major donor impact, and Amanda. Amanda tadsky With transform data into meaningful donor engagement. Thank you. Everybody in the audience, take care. We’ll see you in a few minutes. Bye. You she’s.