Monthly donor best practices/procedures

Sunshine Reinken Watson

We just quadrupled our monthly donor base, and I am looking for best practices/procedures around monthly donor failed payment follow-up, moves management, reporting, and anything else you can share. If your org has any written procedures, can you share them here? Thanks, friends!

Leslie McGeady

Great topic and
one that is discussed with my team.  Some think monthly giving
isn't a great idea because donors don't tend to increase
their giving over time, therefore should not be presented as
an option.  I'm very interested to learn best practices
so thanks Sunshine for broaching the subject.

--

Leslie McGeady

Development Database
Coordinator

505 South Ludlow Street

Dayton, OH 45402

(937) 461-3740
x212

cjeagles.org

Timothy Smith

At my organization, we do a 0-30-60-90 for declined credit card transactions.  The day the gift is declined, the donor receives a phone.  If there is no response, around Day 30, we send an email.  If there is still no response by Day 60, we send a letter.  If there is no response by Day 90, we mark the recurring gift as inactive.  Each step of all this activity is recorded in Actions in RE.  We use the notes in the Action for each step (Day 0, Day 30, Day 60 and Day 90).  The reasoning is so that we only need to mark one action as complete as opposed to 4 steps.  We use reports for to find open actions and to determine which step the donor is at.

Elizabeth Perron

Sunshine Watson‍ Such an inclusive useful question to discuss I had to add it to the Community Dashboard Feature Slider to get more people involved!


Check out the feature slider by Navigating to My Community > My Community Dashboard.


All the best,

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Management Team

Sunshine Reinken Watson

Elizabeth Perron:
Sunshine Watson‍ Such an inclusive useful question to discuss I had to add it to the Community Dashboard Feature Slider to get more people involved!


Check out the feature slider by Navigating to My Community > My Community Dashboard.


All the best,

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Management Team

Thank you, Elizabeth!

Sunshine Reinken Watson

Timothy Smith:

At my organization, we do a 0-30-60-90 for declined credit card transactions.  The day the gift is declined, the donor receives a phone.  If there is no response, around Day 30, we send an email.  If there is still no response by Day 60, we send a letter.  If there is no response by Day 90, we mark the recurring gift as inactive.  Each step of all this activity is recorded in Actions in RE.  We use the notes in the Action for each step (Day 0, Day 30, Day 60 and Day 90).  The reasoning is so that we only need to mark one action as complete as opposed to 4 steps.  We use reports for to find open actions and to determine which step the donor is at.

This is very helpful, thank you Timothy Smith‍ !

Chris Fedor

We don't have written procedures (yet) but I know that recurring giving is great to have! We remove our monthly donors from any other solicitations throughout the year. Each January, we run a report of all of our recurring donors and call each one of them. It's a HUGE task, but at this time we still think the phone call is valuable. Depending on when they started recurring giving, we decide if they are to receive just a thank you call or if they receive a call asking them to increase their giving. We created a table we use to determine the amount of increase we are asking for and it's usually small enough that we get several people agreeing to increase. Over time, this makes a big difference! It's also a way to connect with those special donors. We also make it a practice that EVERY time we talk to a recurring donor, we confirm their contact information, thank them for recurring giving, and ask them if they would be interested in increasing their gift by a small amount.

Catherine Burns

Hi Sunshine

My charity has been doing regular giving for the past 17 years. Most donors are monthly but some are weekly, fortnightly, or 4 weekly. We rerun failed credit cards. We have a similar processes to Timothy and Chris. When a donation declines we try to call the donor first, if they do not respond or we do not have phone numbers for them then we send an email and then a letter. After 4 months of failed payments we cancel the gift. We also run reactivation campaigns to call donors 8 - 12 months after their last gift if they have given over a minimum number of gifts without too many fails. We also have an upgrade/thank you programme that starts 7 - 11 months after their first gift. We call active donors every 12 - 18 months to see if they will upgrade. We have also found these calls to be a great retention tool even if the donor declines to upgrade as it is an opportunity to say thank you, check their details and address any concerns. For this reason we are continuing to include people who have been contacted a number of time but said no each time. We do also include our regular donors in other solicitations, but send fewer to them than to our direct mail only donors. Some regular givers make one-time donations on top of their regular gifts.


We use actions to record each communication with donors. I create a pending action when I include a donor in a telephone campaign and send the details to our telemarketing agency. When the results are returned I update the action status and add attributes and notes recording the call outcome. This makes sure we get results for every donor we include, and we use the previous action details to determine when to call them again. 

Amy Dana

Absolutely following this one.


While we're at it, can you let us know how you managed such a drastic increase? I'd love to steal ADAPT your methods.

Amy Dana

+1 to Catherine Burns‍ for "fortnightly"! I wish we Yanks used that word more. This is now my personal goal.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

Amy Dana:

Absolutely following this one.


While we're at it, can you let us know how you managed such a drastic increase? I'd love to steal ADAPT your methods.

Amy Dana‍, for some reason I am not receiving update emails for this post. We had our first radio GIVE-A-THON

Elizabeth Perron

Sunshine Watson‍ thank you for letting us know you are not receiving email notifications. Let me troubleshoot for you.

Sunshine Reinken Watson

I wanted to follow-up on this with a failed charge process we created at my organization (attached) for anyone who is looking for an example. Enjoy!



 

Angela Tuttle

We just started using the Credit Card Updater, is anyone else using this? 

Chris Fedor

We started using the Credit Card Updater last year and it has helped a LOT. We still have several people to reach out to, but it drastically reduced the number of people we have to reach out to so it's definitely worth the expense!