Keeping Your New Donors!

Hooray!  Your conversion strategies worked swimmingly and you’ve received a glorious gift from someone who has never given!

No matter the giving level, you can do many things to thank and ultimately, retain this donor:

• Yes, send the standard thank you letter.  Of course you would do this.  Personalize the text of the letter and hand-write a brief note.
• A couple days later, send a hand-written thank you note, that’s personalized and customized
•  Call to thank
• Email a thank you – especially Gen Y or donors without phone numbers, but with emails
• Text a donor, if you have the phone number and a ‘texting relationship’ with the person (or again, Gen Y)
• Send a welcome/thank you email or letter => share how can your donors learn more, or understand your full scope of work, or become more engaged/volunteer
• Invite to a free program/event
• Have a Board Member write a note/make a call of thanks
• Invite to a program milestone
• Invite for a tour
• Invite to volunteer
• Send a thank you card from your recipient/client
• Send photos of people you’ve impacted (or include photos in the welcome thank you email or letter)
• Email or mail a survey; maybe you’re a multi-issue organization and want to find out your donor’s priorities?
• If the gift is above a certain level, invite to an event for free or a lunch with your ED/Chair.

Spread these out a bit – don’t bombard your donor within 12 hours of their contribution. 

But don’t deliberately protract your thank yous over several months.  You can certainly follow up in a few months to invite the donor to a program milestone and include a thanks, but don’t send a welcome email four months later. 

Your touch points several months later are part of recognizing and cultivating, not explicitly thanking.

And, customize your response to the donor’s giving; we immediately reply to online gifts with impactful and personalized thank you emails. 

Yes, we follow up these emails with “standard” thank you letters and hand-written notes, but you were pinged with the donor's contribution, so take a hot second to share your appreciation. 

Case Study: Membership Retention

Many associations are struggling with their membership renewals and Arrowhead Management has successfully increased membership renewals with our clients by analyzing our client’s database.

We’d like to share a sample case study.

The Association of Good People (AGP) is examining ways to increase its membership retention rate. Currently, AGP’s retention rate is at 76% and they wanted to see the retention rate at 80%.

Our first question wasn’t why should people renew, but rather, why do people allow their membership to lapse?

We looked at the behavior of members to see which subsets renewed memberships. Not surprisingly, we found that the more involved somebody was, the less likely that person was to lapse.

AGP’s retention rates:

Involvement Level	Members		Renewals	Retention Rate
Board Members	25		24	96%
Committee Members	91		85	93%
Donors	75		68	91%
Attended 3 + events in previous 12 months	48		42	88%
Attended 1 or 2 events in previous 12 months	132		109	83%
Opened newsletter	96		72	75%
Total Involved Members	467		400	86%
Uninvolved Members	183		94	51%
Total Number of Members	650		494	76%

Now that we know why members lapse – they are not involved – we could implement strategies to reduce membership lapsing.

The Board split up the list of “Uninvolved Members” and called everyone to invite them to the next event. The goal was for 50% (91) of the 183 uninvolved members to attend the next event. If this happened, it would increase AGP’s overall membership renewals.

Watch what happened when this was successfully executed (the blue marks the changes to note):

Involvement Level	Members		Renewals	Retention Rate
Board Members	25		24	96%
Committee Members	91		85	93%
Donors	75		68	91%
Attended 3 + events in previous 12 months	48		42	88%
Attended 1 or 2 events in previous 12 months	223		185	83%
Opened newsletter	96		72	75%
Total Involved Members	558		476	85%
Uninvolved Members	92		47	51%
Total Number of Members	650		523	80%

You’ll notice that a total of 523 members renewed, for a net increase of 29 renewals by current members and the overall renewal rate is AGP’s target rate of 80%.

By increasing the engagement and involvement of members through event participation, AGP not only improved its retention rates, but also tangibly impacted its bottom line; its annual membership was $1,000, so these changes translated into an increase in gross revenue by $29,000!