Increasing Monthly Donor Revenue & Retention

How a customized call to high at-risk donors increased 3-month retention by 45%

The Challenge

There is a lot of “buyer’s remorse” in sustainer acquisition.  Lots of people quitting very early into the monthly giving relationship.  This is attributable to, ​

  1. overemphasis on recruitment volume vs. donor quality,​
  2. Lousy ways to define and understand quality.  Age isn’t nearly enough. ​
  3. Ineffective one-size-fits-all approach in communicating with donors in the crucial first 3 months​

The economics are made worse with cancellations occurring after the “guarantee” period (i.e. clawback) of most F2F agencies.  This means the charity bears the full brunt of all the low-quality signups. ​

Our goal with this test was to increase month 3 retention rates and ROI by pre-identifying donors at risk to cancel their gift and implementing an “exit or save” plan.

The Test

The test phase lasted from July to October 2023 and included the following:​

  1. Individual Donor Data. We launched our Feedback Platform to collect data that is missing and necessary to understand donor quality.  This includes the donor’s Commitment to the organization and their satisfaction with the sign-up experience. The latter wasn’t evaluated with a global satisfaction measure which would have yielded no real insights, but with a satisfaction measure of the basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness). Learn more about the basic psychological needs.
  2. At Risk Model. Combining the above data with other demographic, email and giving data, we built a model that produces the TrueQuality Score, the only measure that pre-identifies with high accuracy who is at risk of quitting before it happens.
  3. Customized Calls.  We added in a customized call to the supporter journey to occur before the 2nd monthly payment was due. We also had a holdout group that didn’t receive any calls. All calls were personalized, conversational and customized to match the TrueQuality Score risk level. Fundraisers also had access to specific satisfaction feedback data and used it to further tailor the conversation. 
    • Welcome Call. Half of the low-risk donors received a call to either address the feedback they had already given or ask them to share it.
    • Exit or Save Call.  Half of the medium and high-risk donors received a call with the goal being to either push them out of the door before the claw-back or save them by allowing them to change their gift.

The Results

The calls resulted in a small 3.3% uplift in 3-month retention across all risk levels. ​

However, the real question was how the calls affected the retention of high and medium risk donors. Looking at each risk level individually, we saw that at month three,​

  • our ‘exit or save’ calls significantly increased retention for high-risk donors by 47.7%​
  • our ‘exit or save’ calls significantly increased retention for medium-risk donors by 5%​
  • the welcome calls did not affect low-risk donor retention.​

These uplifts more than covered the cost of the calling program and some of those who would have quit after the clawback window closed dropped sooner, saving acquisition dollars. 

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