Regular Giving isn't profitable. Unless...

Following on from Gareth’s article on how we all need to focus on profitability in fundraising, the team here at Engage and Experience want to share as much useful knowledge as we can. Over the coming weeks, we’ll drill into the detail about the numerous elements that drive profitability in regular giving. Here are some foundation topics, and some quick start takeaways that we hope will get you started on your journey to optimise your profitability, and engage your supporters better.

Regular Giving is now 30 years old, and how people relate to charities has changed dramatically in that time. Costs of living are up and right now, people are more likely to have to help themselves than others. Engage & Experience has been working with charities over the past 8 years to navigate the challenges of finding and keeping donors who have a meaningful connection to your cause.

We want to share some of our insights, because getting regular giving right can be tricky and we can all use simple ways to improve.

What’s really required to get this right? It takes a whole lot of pieces to complete the puzzle. Some are complicated challenges in technology and data, others you can do today.

My people.

Finding the right donors is the whole ballgame! If you don’t start here then you scorch the earth for everything that follows. A bad donor cannot be turned into a good donor, no matter how good your engagement content.?

If you use face to face fundraising, you need a quality agency committed to engagement with your charity and able to inspire their teams. The best retention is good acquisition.

One simple take-away - Ask your suppliers to give you additional data points.

Face to Face Team/Subcontractor is a key data point not always shared with charities. In 2021 we discovered that a subcontractor, desperate for income, had been signing up acquaintances who were all cancelling immediately after the claw back period. Without the subcontractor and fundraiser data points we would have assumed the whole campaign was performing dreadfully. Instead, a conversation with the agency was enough to save the charity thousands in lost sign up fees and revenue protection costs.

Where did they come from, where did they go?

Knowledge is power, if you know where your best donors come from, you can invest in finding more donors like them. If you know when or why your donors stop giving, you can tailor your communication tactics to ensure they feel valued, and keep them engaged.?

Almost every charity we’ve worked with has been able to improve the organisation of the key data points, recording how they found donors, how donors prefer to communicate and crucially, what asks donors do not want to engage with. With your data well organised, you unlock the power to act on the insights it gives you.

One simple takeaway - Review your supporter communication preferences.?

Implement clear business rules for how preferences are used. Clean up any preferences no longer used. Give your donors (and your supporter services team) the option of a short rest from communication instead of removing them from all future campaigns. There are lots of ways to improve supporter care AND your contact rates.

It’s all about the money.

When a donor has decided that your cause and impact is worth supporting, it makes sense to do your best to get as much of their commitment in the bank. Chasing up donors costs money you’d rather be spending on supporting your cause. Your donors would prefer that too.?

Engage and Experience helps charities save huge sums of money in lost revenue, bank fees and needless telemarketing by implementing our payment framework.

One simple take-away - Line up your payments with your donors pay day.

85% of Australians (and a similar percentage in NZ) are paid weekly or fortnightly. If you can, implement a 4 weekly payment cycle, but if not, ensure that you attempt your card payments that fail due to insufficient funds daily for 10 working days from the first attempt. This will mean you’ll most attempt the payment on payday.

Call me.

Most charities rely heavily on phone agencies to acquire recurring donors and then add value to their program. A supplier may be acquiring regular donors from online leads, and your own pool of cash and lapsed donors, upgrading your current donors, and following up donors with declined payment simultaneously. That’s a lot of data flying between you and the supplier.?

A profitable regular giving program requires continual optimisation of these phone campaigns. Taking care of the data is critical. Data dictionaries, outcome tracking, and reporting need to be in place so you can make tweaks and improvements to campaign selection, and segmentation. Once again, the key element here is to avoid the set and forget approach. Working together closely with your supplier and being ultra organised in terms of data are the two key foundations.

One simple take-away - Don’t keep asking if the answer is no.

Don’t select people for upgrade, conversion or reactivation calls if they have said no to the same ask more than once.

Effective intelligence for decision making.

We all seem to be lacking here. There is still (despite some good work from various industry-wide initiatives) a lack of understanding of what metrics we should be watching, at what level and how to use them for decision making. Also, because none of the CRM systems we use have really any effective reporting for RG out of the box, good reporting isn’t always easy or efficient to implement.

Reporting on donor development campaigns (which are segmented from your own data) looks a bit different, and relies on effective tracking of campaign members. If your system can’t easily do this (as is often the case with charities using RE NXT) you can rely to some degree on the suppliers own reporting, but if your program is medium or large, the opportunity cost is too great not to implement client side donor development campaign reporting. All CRM systems that charities work with can be configured to do this properly, and we can help you do that.

One simple take-away - If you’re going to drive your program to profitability you must be able to report, at acquisition campaign and supplier level at least (but we suggest going much deeper), on donor quality - lead scoring, validation rate, first gift success rate, clawback (F2F), survival (by instalment) and break even month.

How do these insights resonate with you? How well do you think you’re doing with this complex landscape? Are there parts of your program that you’re particularly proud of, and what about areas that need improvement?