Monthly gift upgrade campaign

Perrine Punelle

Hello everyone,

I am trying to figure out how to have an upgrade campaign by email (we usually do them by mail).

Directing donors to the Self Service Centre is not an option as we are not using it, and most of our monthly donors are still managed in RE (we started using Luminate just a few month ago).

So what'd like to do is to get the donor confirming she agrees to a $X upgrade. And our team would update the gift info either in LO or RE.
I am thinking of using a survey: the CTA button in the email would direct the donor to a survey page that would says something like “Yes, please upgrade my monthly gift by $X”.

Has anyone done such campaigns? Do you have any suggestion on how to manage them?

thanks,

Perrine

Austen Brown

Hi @Perrine Punelle - I agree that a survey seems like the best mechanism to accomplish this. I have not done anything like this in practice, but in theory it seems like a great idea!

Faith Murray

Perrine, we do a snail mail gift upgrade for our monthly donors. I would suggest giving your donors an option in your online survey, similar to a gift array menu:

Yes, please increase my monthly gift by:

O $10 per month

O $5 per month

O $3 per month

O $ _____ per month

This always works well for us in snail mail, and I don't see why it shouldn't translate to digital! This will be especially helpful if you have donors of varying gift sizes. With a survey, you won't be able to customize the ask amount well – and asking a $200/month donor to upgrade by $10 is very different than asking a $10 donor to upgrade by $10.

Perrine Punelle

Hi Faith,

Thanks for you answer. That's what I had in mind actually. I believe it is better to leave a choice to the donor.
Have you ever tried a digital upgrade campaign?

Perrine Punelle

Thanks Austen.

Faith Murray

Perrine Punelle:

Hi Faith,

Thanks for you answer. That's what I had in mind actually. I believe it is better to leave a choice to the donor.
Have you ever tried a digital upgrade campaign?

We do send an email follow-up with our monthly upgrade appeal, but not a survey. Our donors are still mostly direct mail or in-person responders – online giving is growing, but still a smaller percentage of response. So we get a better turnout with direct mail, plus we value the ability to customize the ask and gift array with their current giving level.

Gaby Gollub

Hi Perrine,

For many years, that was our process. We would email a subset of our monthly donors and ask them to upgrade their gift by visiting a survey page and confirming the upgrade amount. Everyone who upgraded got an autoresponder to confirm the change and let them know it would occur within 30 days. Then, we would review the survey responses and manually increase each donor's gift accordingly. We now have a custom-built process where donors indicate their upgrade and it takes effect immediately. The survey process works well, it just isn't automatic and requires a small amount of effort on the admin/member services side.

Good luck!

- Gaby