If your answer is YES, I am serious about your recurring giving program, then you MUST:
1. Evaluate your current processes.
2. Project what you can expect, in terms of number of new recurring donors, existing, types of gifts and projected revenue.
3. Decide if you’ll be able to manage the processing in-house or if you should decide to outsource.
This is the second in a series of blog posts that will address each and every one of these areas.
In the previous post (Part 1) we talked about evaluating your current processes. You’ll be amazed what you learn by just taking an hour to review what you’ve done and where you’re going.
Depending upon what came out of your evaluation, you may now have a list of potential action items. Most of them you can probably address right away.
But, some of these may involve having to invest more resources, more time and money.
That is why it is important to project what your potential is before you decide.
If you’re an organization with only 200 donors and 100 email addresses, it’s going to be great to offer recurring giving to your donors, but you may just be able to get away with adding PayPal to your donation page and allow for recurring donations to come in that way. You should be able to handle pretty much everything in-house without too much trouble. And entering in the monthly donations manually will be doable.
But, if you’re an organization with 8,000 donors, 5,000 email addresses and an extensive annual fund program, the equations are starting to look at lot different. If you could convert 10% of your donors to recurring givers over time, that’s 800 people. Too much to handle manually.
So, what I recommend is to take another look at my Monthly Donor Calculator and make some projections with your numbers and evaluate what your potential is in terms of annual revenue.
That will help when we go to Part 3 of this series, on in-house processing or outsourcing. So, keep your evaluation part handy, plug your numbers into the Monthly Donor Calculator and stay tuned for the next part in this series.
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! Or check out the new Monthly Giving Help Line where we can address any specific questions you may have.
