Retaining monthly donors can be extremely valuable in reaching your fundraising targets. Monthly donors tend to have a higher donor lifetime value than one-time donors and typically lead to donor retention of over 80% after one year.
You can monitor your monthly donor retention rate by dividing the total number of existing monthly donors from the current year by the total number of monthly donors from the previous year. Then, you multiply that result by 100.
You want to keep increasing your monthly donor retention rate as your organization grows. Doing so will help your team better understand your current fundraising performance, accurately forecast revenue, and improve planning for future campaigns.
With that said, here are six ways to nurture and retain more monthly donors for your nonprofit organization
1. Share Impact Stories
Monthly donors want to see the results of their donations. One way to do this is by sharing stories that show the impact of their contribution. The goal here is to elicit emotion and make the donor feel even more connected to your cause.
You could use video to capture and share beneficiaries’ stories or write personalized thank you letters that show how the donations made a difference in the community. You could also invite monthly donors to special member events where they can hear directly from your team about your organization’s work in the community.
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Use this FREE annual report template to demonstrate impact to stakeholders, communicate your team’s performance, and create a shareable report.
2. Be Transparent About Your Campaign Performance
It is essential to follow up the emotive storytelling with data that paint a more comprehensive picture of your organization’s work and impact. More so, you should keep your donors in the loop throughout each step of your campaign.
Donors value transparency, so consider using FundraisingKIT to stay on top of your key nonprofit KPIs and create presentation-ready reports that you can share with stakeholders.
3. Make the monthly donor experience exclusive
One way to show appreciation to your monthly donors is to offer them an exclusive experience. You can invite them for site tours, meet-and-greets with beneficiaries, or appreciation dinners. What matters most is that you make these donors feel appreciated for their continued support.
4. Create a Community
One of the most effective ways to retain donors is to strengthen the ties between you and the donor and between the donors. You want to make them feel like they are part of a wider community of supporters who are passionate about your cause.
5. Simplify the Giving Process
Credit cards expire, donors can change payment methods, or economic situations may cause donors to rethink their giving amounts. But don’t let any of these events be the reason you miss out on a monthly donation. Make sure you have an automated workflow in place to let donors know when a payment has bounced, and invite them to update their card information or change donation amounts.
6. Send Targeted Email Communications
Segmenting communications involve creating different groups within your donor list based on their giving behavior or demographics. You should consider creating a monthly donor segment that is made up entirely of donors in your monthly giving program.
You can regularly send targeted emails to this segment, e.g., a monthly newsletter. Doing so will ensure your monthly donors are engaged and aware of your organization’s continued efforts in the community.
Creating and implementing a monthly donor engagement strategy can seem overwhelming, but the good news is there are tools to support you in this process. Fundraising KIT is a data-driven tool that integrates with your CRM so you can segment and learn more about monthly donors.
With Fundraising KIT, you can identify contacts who have a good likelihood of being monthly donors and gather the insights you need to encourage them to give regularly. More so, you’ll be able to analyze each contact’s historical preferences and get recommendations on how to nurture your relationships with them.
Ally Smith
Content Writer at Fundraising KIT
With a passion for nonprofit innovation, Ally has spent her career helping build community capacity and supporting social innovation as a customer success manager turned, youth worker, turned social researcher.
After leaving the tech start-up landscape, she pursued a Master’s in Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership and has since supported nonprofits to innovate and grow. A Canadian ex-pat and social entrepreneur based in Edinburgh, she enjoys hiking, baking bread in a panic, and pursuing the full Scottish experience – rain and rugby included!
