New Monthly Giving Program!

I'll keep an eye on this discussion as we are also re-vamping our Monthly Giving program!  


We don't provide premiums like t-shirts, mugs, etc. with a monthly gift.  We've heard a great deal of feedback that nobody wants their donation monies going towards buying pens, address labels, calendars or any of that other typical stuff.  We have a few things like logo magnets that are "gifty" but they aren't assigned to any one level.  It's more or less, "You want a magnet for your office?" when people drop by.  We buy swag more or less for our volunteers!


CRA has similar guidelines surrounding the cost of the membership premiums and charitable receipts; I just don't recall them off-hand since we avoid the situation!  :)


Monthly donors have their own Const. Code of Donor-Monthly for us, so that simplifies the tracking at the moment.  


Does anyone have multiple Appeals that they track these by Giving Amount?  We just have two (flow-through through CanadaHelps and our internal gifts processed by BBMS), but we could say there are 6 Giving Levels of Donation Amount.

 

Remember to design a system that will alert you when an expected monthly payment is not received.  Sometimes donors stop giving and never let you know.  If you don't catch their absence early it's hard to get them back.

We always send personal thank-you letters with our current monthly donors, but the parts that I found most useful from a recent webinar on the subject was 1) to create two different donation links on the website, one for "Donate Now", and another for "Become a Monthly Donor" -- and then 2) to invest in a credit card updater service so they don't get lost by expired credit card numbers. We used to craft our appeal reply cards with pledges in mind, but pledges have expiration dates, so we recently switched to a "$ per month" format on our appeal cards instead, and we enter them as recurring gifts instead of pledges.


I agree that a Constituent code should definitely be in place to track these people as a group. We do not use the "Membership" feature of RE, but if you did, that would be an ideal place to track their giving levels as well. Gift benefits could definitely go under the "Benefits" section, and you would need to create a reporting system to add the cumulative totals of all annual benefits received.


Another question I've encountered is: once a donor becomes a monthly giver, do you exclude them from all your other appeal mailings? One very successful organization I know says yes: in fact, once a donor gives to any appeal, they are then excluded from all subsequent appeals that year. However, another org (also successful, but with an entirely different approach) believes that donors need contacted at least 6 times a year and will appeal monthly donors for other targeted projects. Curious about other people's opinions on this.  

Faith, love the idea of separate link on website and focus on monthly giving.  We're looking at design of our pledge cards right now.  While it's on there as an option, I think it should be more prominent.


My 2 cents on soliciting a giving person - we don't ask them to give to that fund again.  We only do a couple of direct mail appeals each year but we exclude those who've given to that fund. Once I didn't run filter correctly in RE and it pulled some who had given. While we got a couple of second gifts, it caused a lot of confusion with people saying they'd already given.

Andrea Humenick:

Donors are frequently concerned with the calendar year giving for tax purposes - I would add this receipt generation to your to-do list, if it is not something your organization already does.


Also, on the database side of things, I believe Blackbaud would recommend these gifts be entered with the gift-type Recurring...

One or our biggest issues is that donors who change/update their credit cards often don't cancel the existing monthly gift, but set up a new one. That makes reporting very difficult, as you can't get an accurate picture of retention, and you can't easily go back a year later and ask them to upgrade their giving amount. The automated email that goes to them when their card stops working does have the correct instructions, but about 25% still do it incorrectly.

Plus, the donor keeps getting the automated email from the non-working account, which totally confuses them since they don't understand they have two accounts. We do our best to catch these dupe accounts but due to time constraints, we do a poor job.

 

Angela Bertrand:

This fall we're launching our first-ever monthly giving program. We've always accepted monthly gifts- and now there are benefits - tshirts, tote bags, free addmission to community events... all sorts of stuff. Right now we have a concept with levels and rewards etc... and the next step is implementation and I'm hoping some of you have monthly giving programs and can share some of what you've learned through running your programs!


Some of our questions include:

• How do you track who is in each giving level?
• What report do you use to track how many people are in each level?
• Increased engagement overall (due to the monthly giving program)
• How many people used/received their benefit (ie, got a tshirt, attended an event, redeemed a drink ticket...)
• What general advice would you have for us as we start setting this up? 

Is there anything else you track that we're missing? 


We have some ideas about each of those things... but I'm going to keep our ideas to myself so I can hear all of yours! Thanks for all of your help!

 

How did the program launch go, Angela?


After reading through this discussion, there are a lot of great ideas here. If you don’t mind sharing in the Best Practices section, I started a new discussion about this same topic.  Join & share your feedback in this discussion.