- Hi Joy Olson here, BlockBuster Fundraising.
Hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend.
And get ready for our short but great week
and I thought a great way to set up the week for you
because we're getting into the last six month of the year
as let's take a look at retention
because the 2018 benchmark study was
just released last month and as always,
it's jampacked with useful data about online fundraising,
email messaging, social media, digital ads and more.
I found this great information from mnr.com,
Steve wrote this up and they have lots of clients
and he says, "Every time we release a new study,
"I start feeling competitive.
"I jump straight to the numbers I care about the most
"and start comparing the averages."
To what they're seeing with their own clients.
And he says, "I know I'm not the only one
"who sees every metric as a personal challenge.
"And I bet you're just like me as a development director.
"You do, you wanna be there on top."
If there's one benchmark that fundraisers all aspire
to exceed, it's your donors retention rate.
I mean it combines serious impact for your cause
with a warm, fuzzy feeling you get as a fundraiser
when you know your donors like you
and think you're doing a great job
and they keep coming back.
So let's take a look at those numbers
in the benchmark study that make us feel competitive
and median online retention is one of those.
How are you doing with your first year donors
that came to you online?
Basically, this is what's happening across the spectrum,
only 25% of those new online donors renew
and repeat donors though have an average retention rate
of much higher 60%.
We don't wanna lose those new donors
so right away we know 75% aren't coming back.
You have got to get to them with lots
of nice communications, alright.
As with so many lovely charts and studies,
this tells us the what but it doesn't tell us the why.
Why do donors choose to make another gift to us?
And it doesn't tell us the thing that keeps us up at night,
the big thing we wanna know how?
How do we inspire donors to make that second,
third or fourth gift?
Well, MNR says, "There is one obvious answer
"to the how question, we can increase retention just
"by asking more and more and more."
Obvious maybe but it maybe the most fraught subject
for nervous fundraisers.
You've heard it, you've heard it from your fundraising staff
or your marketing people, maybe even your ED
or your friends.
Hey, there's just too much email and it's so annoying.
And it's gotta be driving people away
from your organization.
There is a real fear that frequent fundraising appeals
into terrible message that we don't value
or respect our donors.
We don't wanna treat a valued supporter as an ATM machine
as I saw a recent blog referred to
or even worse, as a slot machine just yanking
on their arm over and over
in hopes that something good happens.
But with email response rates declining,
they were down 6% this year to an average of 0.6%,
one of the only ways left to increase email revenue is
by increasing appeal volume.
Year after year, we find a volume continuous decline
steadily higher and so does overall online revenue.
The people running these programs may fret some
but they generally believe that the increase
and immediate revenue is worth a potential loss
of donor's down the line who may eventually tune you out,
unsubscribe or worse of worse, mark you as a spammer.
Believe me, this is why heartfelt, wonderful,
interest communications are so important with your donors.
So who's right?
What does this year's benchmarks data set
of get this, four billion, 699 million,
299,000, 330 email messages, wow.
And 11 million, 958,000,
385 donations tell us about how volume
and retention are related.
Well, in short, there appears to be a relationship
between fundraising message volume
and every type of retention that was tracked
in this year's benchmark study.
Simply put, sending more messages tended
to go hand in hand with higher retention.
They saw at MNR a moderate but statistically significant
positive correlation between overall online donor retention
and fundraising messages per subscriber.
Get this, every additional fundraising message
per subscriber was related to .2% increase
in overall donor retention for the year, that's strong.
And while Steve says this was the strongest correlation
that they found when it came to retention,
there were some other statistically
significant correlations as well.
New online donor retention.
There was a positive correlation
between overall message volume as well
as fundraising message volume
on new online donor retention.
While both correlations were weak,
they were still statistically significant.
Overall, online donor retention,
there was an additional positive correlation
between volume for all messages, not just appeals,
and overall donor retention.
To be honest, the data didn't surprise MNR,
it didn't surprise me either.
The more opportunities a donor has to give,
the higher the chances are they will give
which directly impacts retention rates.
We've seen this show up in various test run
by direct mail agencies trying to reduce cost
while retaining revenue in donors.
A low volume cadence can negatively
impact retention
if appeal volume is dialed back too much.
They've also seen it when they look at the retention trends
for their own clients.
At MNR, two of their highest appeal volume clients
also have much higher than average retention rates.
But hey, they say,
"This doesn't mean that there's no limit."
Beyond a certain level and overly aggressive fundraising
appeal schedule might cause supporters
to turn away more than it really encourages them to give.
It's unlikely that sending infinite appeals would yield
100% retention rates and we get that.
So message volume isn't the only factor
that impacts retention, you realize they're not saying that.
But what they are saying is from the data that they've seen
and they study this data and they test their list,
they believe scheduling regular, frequent,
relevant appeals and messages will help you
as a fundraiser improve your retention rates.
If you're worried that you're pushing the limits
of how many appeals you can send, they say,
"Consider pushing a little further.
"Odds are adding a few more messages
"to your calendar will increase revenue and retention."
Since we're paying attention to our retention rates
and Steve at mnr.com wrote such a good article,
I went back and reviewed a retention blog that he wrote
in January of 2018 this year.
And I thought it was interesting,
I wanted to share it with you.
Steve says, "I'm not so sure about retention.
"I used to think that I knew a lot about retention.
"I was so sure the key to keeping your donors around was
"to thank them, respect them, listen to them,
"nurture them and show them how they're making an impact."
Obvious, right?
Intuitive even.
But what does it mean to respect,
to listen to and nurture donors?
Th truth is people have very different ideas
about what those words mean.
Let alone how they feel in action.
And even if we all agreed with each other,
where's the evidence that any
of it actually helps improve retention?
Despite some decent benchmarking data on retention rates
and the best that he'd seen at the time came from the FEP,
the Fundraising Effectiveness Project,
there's simply isn't much good public data
about what strategies work to retain donors.
That's partly because it's hard to get this data.
Retention by definition takes a while to measure
and in that time, lots of things happened
and lots of variables intrude setting up a test
to major the impact on appeal volume,
cultivation content or donor satisfaction surveying
is complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
And yet, retention is really a big deal.
Depending on the size of your organization's
fundraising program, a 1% improvement
in retention can meet hundreds
of thousands of dollars in revenue.
That's why they've included retention
in the 2018 benchmark study that we've just talked about.
They're also running longer term retention test
so that we and their clients can better understand
how some of the most popular retention theories
actually work.
And the questions that they're working on
and they want answers to does dramatically increasing appeal
volume significantly reduce
in organizations retention rates?
Or will an additional solicitation drive retention up?
Because the more you ask, the more people will give.
Will sending regular content showing the impact
of a gift improve retention?
Can you improve retention by regularly asking your donors
for their opinions about you?
And their donation experience similar
to how corporations use their customers
for feedback using net promoter score?
While it's gonna take some time to get the results
from these kinds of test looking at the data
that they do have on retention for some
of their big clients suggest that
what might seem obvious is not always true
for example, we've looked at appeal volume.
They give us two large organizations
with mature, digital fundraising programs.
Listen to this, organization A sends more than four times
as many emails than the benchmark for large organizations,
six times more appeals and has an online only retention rate
of 50%, wow, and new donor retention rate above 40%.
This doesn't even factor in the bump in retention
that all organizations see from adding
in multi-channeled gifts.
Those retention rates are way above the average
for the industry, yay.
And above the average for peer
to peer organizations that they work with.
Let's look at organization B.
It sends far fewer emails in organization A,
about the same number as other large organizations,
in about 1.4 times as many appeals
and has an online only retention rate of 26%
with a new donor retention rate at 20%,
wow, so much lower.
So sending far, fewer emails led them
to a retention rate roughly half
of what organization A experienced with a lot more volume.
Of course Steve says, "The other factors likely play
"into this retention figures including mission,
"brand awareness and other issues."
But at a minimum, this data calls into question
whether or not the conventional wisdom
that says bombarding your list
with appeals will drive down your donor retention.
He says, "I get why people think this.
"It does feel like a lot of email."
We've likely spent hours drafting, editing,
securing approvals,
then reporting on each of the emails we send out.
We also sign after we receive appeals
from other organizations so we can see
what our peers are doing.
And put in our inspiration folders, the ones that we love
so that we can glean in and kinda copy their great process.
At some point though, it gets old seeing the nonstop flood
of appeals but once again, hey, we fundraisers
are not our target audience, you gotta remember that.
And while we may think we know what our donors want,
the only way to understand how to improve retention is
to test some of these theories.
This is why I love reports like this
and I love to see what companies like MNR
and the mini companies bloomering, they have lots of clients
and I love to see what their test result show
because a lot of us maybe aren't testing.
And if you have run long term treatment test
on your files to test retention,
we'd all love to hear about it.
How is it working for you?
Hey, Joy Olson here, BlockBuster Fundraising.
I hope that your final six months of 2018,
your retention rates will go way up
that you're gonna work hard on that end
because it is really important to your bottom line.
Joyolsongroup.com, blockbusterfundraising.com
is where you can find more information.
And on our YouTube channel, we have over,
way over 303 fundraising videos,
that's BlockBuster Fundraising on YouTube.
We're here each Tuesday live, 1 pm Pacific Daylight time.
We know it's a short week but make it a great one.
Ba bye and thanks.
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