How to build donor loyalty

Around 40% of regular donors will stop giving within 12 months, and 64% will stop within five years (source: Engaging Networks). It can take up to two years to recover the cost of signing up a new £5 monthly donation, with nearly half of donors cancelling in their first year, there is significant opportunity to reduce turnover and increase donations by encouraging more donor loyalty. Recent benchmarking data also shows a growth in regular giving, with a 6% increase in revenue from regular donations in 2023 compared to 2022, while revenue from one-time donations has decreased by 6%. This indicates a potential for charities, as it shows a trend of increased willingness to commit regularly to a charity. However, achieving this potential requires the right approach and investment from your charity to see the benefits.

Get the basics right to build loyalty and trust

Your donation experience needs to feel secure and satisfying, not just for the individual transaction’s sake, but for the general relationship you're building with your donors. A donation funnel that feels dubious will undermine a donor’s willingness to engage with you, even if they are committed to your cause, just like how a clammy, limp handshake might make you recoil in real life.

The transaction needs to flow seamlessly, allowing the donor to make their donation, and be certain that you have received it. Does your donation platform allow this to happen? If it's slow, illogically structured or just feels complicated to complete, it will cause friction that can trigger the present donation to be abandoned and future donations to be directed elsewhere. These points of friction are all part of your brand experience, and give supporters a subtle sense of who you are and how you operate.

Once a donation has been made, make sure you confirm you have received it and thank the donor. Do this on the success page, as well as by sending an email - make sure they feel confident you have their donation and you are going to use it well. Remind them of what their gift can achieve, and encourage them to take a next step to learn more about the impact their donation will have. This is the start of the relationship and not just the end of a transaction.

Communication builds donor loyalty

Firstly, you must honour the communication preferences a donor has made. If they have said they want emails from you, send them good emails. Email is one of the most underutilised tools for maintaining engagement and effective communication with charity supporters. In The Nonprofit Recurring Giving Benchmark Study from Next After, they highlight how only 14% of organisations prompted one time donors to upgrade to a regular donation, and for regular donors, after month three of giving, only 1 in 10 continued to acknowledge the support.

These are the people that are telling you with their hard earned cash that they want to support you month after month - you need to tell them how much impact they’re having, or risk them feeling like they’re not really making a difference.

The support your regular donors give to your cause is a relationship that needs work to either maintain or grow it. While you don’t need to thank them for every donation they make, you do need to demonstrate that their support is having an impact on the cause they care about, and that you’re a responsible partner who is well placed to keep generating that impact. It's unlikely that you’re the only charity or nonprofit working in your specific cause area, so your supporters need to know that you’re the right choice for them. They can only know that if you keep showing them that you are.

Convert your one off donors

People that have taken steps to donate to you once are already primed to be potential regular donors. The way you engage and thank single donors will play a large role in how likely they are to go onto be a regular donor. How does your single donation journey flow at the moment? How do single donors feel when they have completed their donation?

When we compared single donation experiences as part of an internal research project recently we found a noticeable difference in the experiences different charities offered donors. Based on our comparisons we felt Save the Children offered the best feel-good and motivational experience both in the success screen content design and the follow up email they sent. What stood out was the careful use of copy that framed the donation as being a positive and impactful action that the donor had made:

"Wow, thank you Bonny! Your gift of £2 will help children get the food, learning and medicine they need for the future they deserve”.

This simple sentence does so much to bring the donation to life, and the impact that is possible from supporting Save the Children. They couple this with a prompt to encourage further engagement with the charity, rather than just exiting the website from the donation success page with the great prompt “Want more of this great feeling?” and listing three onward journeys: become a monthly giver, organise a fundraiser and a link to an article about practical action.

Provide opportunities to give more for less

Donation matching campaigns are a great way to engage existing donors to make additional, impromptu donations. Donation matching gives your supporters the opportunity to feel like they are creating increased impact, beyond what they could otherwise afford to do. You can run donation matching yourself, or choose to partner with a specialist that can simplify how you run a trail campaign, and how you source the fund matching. Big Give offers a range of donation matching options, including:

• Pledge model: charities work with Big Give to secure their own pledge matching donors alongside those from Big Give. This is suitable for larger charities that can secure support from significant donors.
• 1-1 Model: charities apply to a Big Give campaign and if successful, donations they receive are matched by the funder. This is suitable for smaller charities who may struggle to find donors who can pledge to match donations.
• Multi model: charities use a combination of the Pledge Model and the 1-1 Model as part of their campaign.
• Collective model: A set amount of funding is shared between a range of charities who receive matched donations on a first come first served basis.

Participate in giving events

While Giving Tuesday started out as being a US-centric movement (inspired by Black Friday and Cyber Monday that follow Thanksgiving), the movement has launched a European hub this year with the aim of increasing generosity across the continent. Giving Tuesday can prompt donations following customer spending activity on the commerce led sales promotions of the preceding days/week. It's timed to tap into people’s feelings of generosity following their other spending activities. If your supporters are going to be tempted to donate during Giving Tuesday, make sure you’re front and centre of their thoughts by engaging with the event otherwise another charity will happily receive their support.

Grow deeper engagement

I will never stop advocating for more user research. You can never know too much about your supporters. Your research activity needs to be ongoing to ensure you have an evolving view of how your audience of supporters, and service users, engage with you and what their needs are. This can give you the insight needed to see how you can grow their engagement and support beyond passive donations and into active participation in your cause.

Your donors have the potential to grow into supporters who fundraise, campaign and volunteer. But it's easy to miss opportunities if you are working with stale insights about what's influencing your supporter’s attitudes, interests and motivations. While people’s fundamental needs and attitudes tend to change slowly over time, their specific contextual experiences can shift a lot in a short timeframe. These shifts can be triggered by things like changes in income and spending patterns, experiences driven by friends and family, events in the news (e.g: war, natural disasters), wider societal changes (e.g: the media focussing on an issue more so than previously) or access changes (for instance a bus route closing). As people’s context changes, opportunities are available for you to deepen your relationship, but only if you are actively engaging with them.

If you fail to adapt your relationship with your supporters you risk becoming less relevant to them, and instead of growing engagement you can shrink it.

Personalisation and segmentation

A great challenge for many (if not all?) charities is how to make sense of the data you collect about your supporters, and use it to its best advantage. Due to the way most charities have been set up and grown over time, most will have issues with siloes. Siloes impede effective data use when you can't meaningfully segment your audiences to understand how they split based on their behaviours, interests and goals. For instance, how easily can you see if your donors are also your service users? Of those that are both, how do they divide based on what behaviours and requirements?

Many charities collect huge amounts of data and struggle to identify actionable insights from it. Having a huge amorphous “blob” of data isn’t very helpful to your organisation. There is huge potential to increase engagement with your cause, as well as donations if you can find ways to give your supporters more personalised, targeted messaging as it will resonate with them more strongly than anything generic. If you segment your supporters and build out specific pictures of what they need, their behaviours and what they respond well to, you have a map for assessing your content, journeys and interactions. From there you can make informed choices about how to best route people to and through your website depending on their needs and behaviours, for instance: ensuring you provide prompts that are in line with what your audience is looking out for and gives you a good starting point to experiment with things like A/B testing.

Every charity is on its own journey when it comes to managing their data and making the best use of it. If you are early on in your journey it's a good idea to invest in external support to help you lay good foundations. Don't try to collect all the data all at once, instead focus on the areas that matter most to you and your organisation’s mission. Build out what you collect over time, and do whatever you can to avoid your organisational siloes from seeping into your data in ways that you can’t unpick. If you want help with this, we’ve got you covered with our team of expert analysts!

As you grow in your data maturity and confidence, consider building out your own team and investing in them. They can bridge siloes and tie together insight from across your organisation and will help you confidently make informed decisions, especially when it comes to those that will impact your donor loyalty.

Don’t confuse your brand with your purpose

Your donors are motivated by the cause you work in, and the impact your work has and not your brand. If a supporter wants to associate themselves with you, it's more likely to be based on your impact rather than who you are. This means that every communication you have with your supporters and donors is a chance to reinforce the impact you have rather than who you are. Let your work shine through with stories that show your impact, and the impact your supporter has been part of creating. This is the biggest motivator to stay engaged and keep donating.

Offer flexibility with regular donations

This is something we know many charities would like to offer but have not necessarily taken the steps yet to enable their donors to do this and it could significantly impact their cost of acquisition. The cost of living crisis has forced many donors to consider whether or not they can continue to support charities with regular donations, and as it's usually easier to cancel a regular donation than it is to reduce it or pause it, those that feel unable to keep up with the cost are more likely to cancel.

Part of the problem here is that many donation platforms are simply not set up to enable regular donors to adjust their donations and this is increasingly a problem in several ways. Not only does this force a decision to stay or cancel, it doesn’t feel like a good brand experience either. Cancelling a regular donation is not a good feeling. Being able to pause it, or reduce it could give donors a much more positive experience all while keeping that regular donation (even if it is smaller).

This lack of flexibility from traditional platforms is leaving a gap where new providers such as Toucan are stepping in to give donors the ability to manage their donations in more modern ways. While Toucan might be great for donors, it separates the relationship between charity and the donor themselves, so your organisation will get less data about donors engaging with you via their intermediary service. We hope that donation platforms take note of this and offer more flexibility to donors in the future to avoid this relationship gap from deepening.

Can we help?

Our team has extensive experience working with charities of all sizes to grow their supporters and reduce the cost of donor acquisition. If you’d like to have a chat about the work we’ve done or the challenges you face, please get in touch and we’d be happy to have a call to help you identify opportunities.