Last week I talked about upgrading your monthly donors, a very important part in growing your program.
Today I’ll go back to something that’s even more important with any monthly donor program: Retaining your monthly donors.
Like anything with fundraising, the rule of thumb is: If you can keep a monthly donor, that’s still cheaper than bringing in a new one.
To calculate how you’re doing with your program, we use the following formula, called Coverage ratio. To grow your monthly giving program, that ratio should be higher than 1.
new monthly donors + reactivated monthly donors
_____________________________
lapsed monthly donors
So, let’s look at an example:
You’re bringing in 200 new monthly donors a year and you’re able to reactivate 50, but you have 300 donors who lapse every year, that means:
200+50 divided by 300. Coverage ratio is: .83. Your program is shrinking!!
Now what if you could bring in 200 new monthly donors and reactivate 150 monthly donors with 300 monthly donors lapsing every year.
200+150 divided by 300. Coverage ratio is 1.17. Your program is growing!
Using this calculation, you can quickly see the impact of preventing drop offs and reactivating as many monthly donors as possible. It also shows you how many new monthly donors you’d have to bring in to continue to grow your program.
We’ll talk about how to go about acquiring new monthly donors and reactivating monthly donors in a future post.
Sign up for my blog so you’ll receive future posts on monthly giving and tools as they’re developed. And if you’re interested in finding out how to start or grow your monthly giving program, just contact me!
And be sure to check out the new Monthly Giving Help Line where we can discuss specific questions you may have. It only takes one extra new monthly donor to pay for it! You can’t beat the price.
