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.

The Art Of Donor Retention

I just got back from the AFP conference in San Diego. Great energy, 4000+ people and it was wonderful to see my good friend Bob Carter leading many of the general sessions. The exhibit hall was overflowing with lots of companies doing some fascinating and interesting work. Donor retention has certainly become a hot topic and there were many  companies demonstrating their new tools to help address this challenging problem facing the nonprofit industry.

Here's the rub: the key to successfully addressing donor retention is not really about a tool. Having tools that provide you the information to make good decisions is critical but the fact is the way we have thought about fundraising needs to shift.

You could give me a Stradivarius violin but it would be useless in my hands unless I changed significantly so that I could use such an instrument to its fullest potential. When my team and I created a new fund-raising model that produced almost 300% increase in number of donors and increased donor retention at the same percentage Facebook had not been founded. We did not have anywhere close to the connection tools as we do today. Yet with all our ability to connect our retention rates continue to plummet! 

There is a significant culture shift that needs to take place within an organization in order to successfully increase donor attention. At the core of this shift is a new methodology of measuring what is successful in the business of raising money. The New Science Of Philanthropy has developed such a dash board from proven techniques that dramatically increased donor retention rates and exceeded capital campaign goals by 180%.  In the marketplace today you'll hear all sorts of suggestions about stuff to do to a donor in order to keep them. There's one simple key to turning around or understanding how to impact retention and that is you simply have to rethink what is. 

We have built an industry around measuring a single monetary transaction, yet we

speak a language of transformation with the most critical element being the quality of the relationship. I would suggest that there is not a single relationship in your life that is of significant value or meaningful because of the number of times you are called, taken to lunch or the average length of time each visit lasts.

There are multiple layers to creating a successful culture that can impact the quality of the donor experience. It begins with organizations understanding that in order for donors to desire a meaningful connection to an organization's mission, the organization first has to to create an extraordinary environment in which their employees can create such an experience for themselves. Seth Godin refers to people making their art. Donor retention starts with a nonprofit culture understanding that they are a blank canvas on which donors paint and create a life of significance and meaning.