How to Sustain Your Annual Donors and Engaging Your First-time Donors
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What’s next after your fundraising team wraps up a successful annual or mid-year campaign? Prospects have been targeted, engaged and are now donors or your annual donor has given for the fourth year in a row. Your effort shouldn’t stop there. This is where your relationship begins or continues, and you need to ensure that you are engaging and stewarding your donors. A healthy retention rate is what is needed for your organization to sustain its mission and be successful. Retaining donors is a multi-step process, but if you put yourself in the donor’s shoes, it’s also a simple one.
Donors want to be informed and feel connected to your organization. To do this, you will need to communicate with them and share your vision and mission. Once they see the validation of your organization and they give, you will need to immediately acknowledge and thank the donor for their support however, the relationship doesn’t stop there. You will need to engage them, to sustain their support and turn them into an annual donor.
A healthy retention rate relies on communication, personalization, and motivation. Sustaining your donors isn’t complicated, just be donor centric. Think back to when you last gave to an organization…
Why did you give?
Did you give more than once?
How do they keep you engaged?
What could they do better?
Donors want four things:
Donors want to be informed and feel connected to your organization. To do this, you will need to communicate with them and share your vision and mission. Once they see the validation of your organization and they give, you will need to immediately acknowledge and thank the donor for their support however, the relationship doesn’t stop there. You will need to engage them, to sustain their support and turn them into an annual donor.
A healthy retention rate relies on communication, personalization, and motivation. Sustaining your donors isn’t complicated, just be donor centric. Think back to when you last gave to an organization…
Why did you give?
Did you give more than once?
How do they keep you engaged?
What could they do better?
Donors want four things:
- Inclusion: Practice a two-way line of communication and encourage their feedback.
- Validation: Donors want to feel as they are being heard and that you align with their thoughts.
- Information: Share your news via newsletters, magazines, emails, etc. Don’t go dark!
- Transparency: Be as transparent with your donors as possible. Share your goals, successes and struggles.
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Organizational Best Practices Blog
04/23/2019 11:56am EDT
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