Re-Imagining How To Decrease Donor Retention

Just Adjust Donation Page

If you have never seen the movie Patch Adams see if you can grab it on Netflix in the next few days, or just watch it again. Today I was looking at a blog post about improving online donations. The point of the piece suggested that you focus on adjustments to the donation page and mixing up the dollar amounts that your prospective donors could give. While reading this piece I was struck at the traditional thinking that suggests it is best to focus on the stuff rather than person. This is where images of scenes from Patch Adams came drifting into my mind. We have over and over again focused on the transactional elements as a way of fixing or improving our support. This thinking has continued to lead us to incredibly poor donor retention rates, which ultimately translates into unsatisfied donors. Which = Lowering Lifetime Value

In the movie Patch was a medical nonconformist who believed that if you treat a disease you win or lose but if

Make A Wish Foundation

you treated the person you would always win. Our nonprofit industry can learn a lesson from both the results of our past instincts and from Patch Adams.

There is a completely other way to address the business of raising money. It is one that is human focused, with targeted specific outcomes and a model that has actually produced some of the highest retention rates in North America over the last decade.

The good news for the nonprofit idustry is there is a nation of donors waiting for their lives to be committed to causes they are incredibly passionate about and they also wish to share their enthusiasm with the world around them. The only thing standing in their way is decades of traditional thinking: as the gentleman in the scene below puts it:

“If you focus on the problem you can’t see the solution”

In the past week I have read that the solutions to our retention challenges and to increase giving is to focus on the timing of asks, increase the channels in which we communicate and make adjustments to our donation pages.  There seems to be a new industry developing on how to re-imagine or repackage  strategy to decrease donor retention.