{"id":11943,"date":"2018-12-05T20:30:12","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T01:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qgiv.com\/blog\/?p=11943"},"modified":"2021-05-28T09:37:14","modified_gmt":"2021-05-28T13:37:14","slug":"10-things-need-know-recurring-giving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qgiv.com\/blog\/10-things-need-know-recurring-giving\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Things You Need to Know About Recurring Giving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every once in a while, we spotlight amazing content from our friends in the nonprofit industry. Check out this fantastic post on recurring giving from Brady over at NextAfter<\/a>! Brady is the Vice President of Innovation & Optimization, and he’s pulled together some fantastic insights on how you can built the best-ever recurring giving program. Check out NextAfter’s blog<\/a> and other resources for more stats, best practices, and industry research.<\/em><\/p>\n

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For organization sustainability and growth, you\u2019ve got to have a strong recurring giving program. In this post, I want to share 10 key takeaways that can help you increase the number of recurring gifts to your organization based on <\/span>The Nonprofit Recurring Giving Benchmark Study<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recurring giving is a part of annual fundraising that you can\u2019t afford to get wrong. In fact, recurring donors can give over 5 times more to you over their lifetime through their faithful year after year giving.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is backed up by a <\/span>2016 study which showed that monthly recurring donors have an 90% retention rate<\/span><\/a> compared to the average donor retention rate of 46%.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those are just a few reasons <\/span>why recurring giving is crucial to your fundraising<\/span><\/a> and because of that, we decided to conduct a study to see how nonprofits were cultivating and acquiring recurring givers. From the data, we hoped to see if there were practical things nonprofits could do to optimize their recurring giving programs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, <\/span>The Nonprofit Recurring Benchmark Study<\/span><\/a> was born.<\/span><\/p>\n

In collaboration with <\/span>Salesforce.org<\/span><\/a>, we investigated the current state of recurring giving by making multiple donations, including a recurring gift, to 115 nonprofit organizations and recording our experience with each organization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are just 7 of the takeaways from the study that can help you optimize your recurring giving fundraising.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Make it simpler for donors to make a recurring gift.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

It was surprising how difficult it was to actually make a recurring donation in most cases. <\/span><\/p>\n

Many organizations identified in the study placed multiple barriers to giving by asking for unnecessary information like a spouse\u2019s name and cell phone numbers (in addition to home phone).<\/span><\/p>\n

Other giving pages had unclear language that was confusing or jargon that only people in the organization would understand. <\/span><\/p>\n

One annoying barrier in particular was that we had to prove we were humans over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Pie<\/a>

Pie chart showing how hard it can be to make a recurring donation<\/p><\/div>\n

Worst of all, nearly 1 out of 10 of the organizations didn\u2019t have a recurring gift option on their website!<\/b><\/p>\n

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2. Make it easy for people to find the donation page<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Don\u2019t make the donor wade through layers of your website to find your giving page. <\/span><\/p>\n

Put your donate button prominently in the navigation bar and make it stand out with different color and styling. As the results from our experiments show, <\/span>emphasizing your donate button can significantly increase traffic<\/span><\/a> to and conversions on your giving page. <\/span><\/p>\n

Food for the Hungry\u2019s homepage is a great example of an optimized donate button:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a>

Screenshot of a nonprofit website that has a nonprofit fundraising best practice: making it easy to make a recurring donation<\/p><\/div>\n

3. Show donors WHY they should make a gift<\/strong><\/p>\n

You get what you ask for \u2014\u00a0so try making a separate call to action expressly for recurring giving that explains the impact a recurring gift will make.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not enough to simply give the donor an instruction. You\u2019ve got to show them how that action will produce the impact on they\u2019re looking for. This is your value proposition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some examples from organizations that did a good job showing their value proposition:<\/span><\/p>\n