Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host, and I’m the pod father of your favorite hebdominal podcast. I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of Pacion Nicia if you nailed me with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, to introduce it. Hey Tony, here’s what’s coming. Low lift donor retention. So many nonprofits have a leaky bucket problem. Donors don’t stay after their first gift. We all know retaining existing donors costs so much less than acquiring new ones. Chris Vaughn shares his thinking on keeping donors in the bucket through mission connection, engagement, relationships, retention rate ownership, welcome streams, and more. He is co-founder of Sequence Consulting. On Tony’s take 2. A book update. Here is low lift donor retention. It’s a pleasure to welcome the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Sequence Consulting, Chris Vaughn. He helps associations grow their membership, revenue, and impact. He’s a frequent speaker and writer on the future of associations, membership, marketing, and growth strategy. The company is at sequence Consulting.com. And you’ll find Chris on LinkedIn. Welcome to nonprofit Radio, Chris Vaughn. Thank you, Tony. Great to be here. I’m glad you are. Thanks. Donor retention. Why don’t you, uh, set the stage. Uh, we’ve, we’ve heard statistics about, uh, dismal retention rates and costs of costs thereof, but It’s, it’s worth repeating because we don’t seem to be getting any better. So please help us, uh, like some motivation about why we should be paying attention to retention. Yeah, first, and just by way of background, uh, our focus is primarily membership organizations, and we’ve been working with them to help them grow for the last 25 years. Um, but we’ve also worked with major fundraisers, right? Folks like American Lung Association, the AARP Foundation, Jewish United Fund, United Way, and so on. And what we’ve observed across the years is that the retention issues are exactly the same. They’re almost identical, right? The struggles are the same, the root causes are the same, and the solutions are the same across membership and across the donor life cycle, which is, is interesting, but also really, really valuable because all the lessons that we’ve learned from helping associations plug their retention leak and grow also work, right, in the fundraising context and, and, and we know this as background, um, so on both sides of the equation, yes, the retention numbers are dismal. Um, fundraising excellence Project says overall retention, uh, fundraising donation, donor, donor retention is about 43%, uh, which is down 4 years in a row, right? So, uh, I believe, don’t quote me, but I believe it’s at an all-time low, right? So the trends have been, uh, declining for a really, really, really long time. Fewer than half. We’re, we’re, we’re keeping fewer than 50% of our donors. Total, fewer than half of your total donors, right? Or put it otherwise, half of your, more than half are walking out the door, right? Every year, perhaps never to be seen again. Um, what really jumps out about me in those statistics is first-time donor retention, right? Which the FEP says is the single most important unsolved problem in fundraising is that less than 1 in 5 first-time donors ever donate again. Man. So think about that, and that 60% of the overall funds that you raise are from repeat donors and you can see where the leaky bucket is, right? And that’s what we call it the leaky bucket. Uh, you’re working hard to acquire new donors, you’re bringing them in the door, but 4 out of 5 of those. are never gonna write a, a check to you sort of ever again. I have this image in my head, right, of Wile E. Coyote, you know, running off the edge of the cliff and his feet are just spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning. That’s acquisition, you know, that’s the way I think about it is you just gotta keep running faster and faster to replace the donor that you just got, you know, last month. The, the, the Roadrunner has the answer. If we, if, if the two could come together, they, they would, they would solve, they would solve this problem because the, the, the Roadrunner knows what he’s doing. Exactly, exactly. But we wouldn’t have much of a cartoon series. Yeah, well, all right, well, we’ll put the kids aside. I mean we’re trying to, we’re trying to solve an an existential problem here. All right, that’s true. Um, and, and we’re also really, really bad at recapturing those lost donors once they leave, right? The report says 3%, 3%, that’s the best we can do. So 3. 123, folks who have, uh, who know about us and have cared about us enough to, to make a gift at some point in the past, um, 4 out of 5 of them are gonna walk and less than 3% of those will ever come back and give again. So it’s, it’s a real challenge. Um, and it’s a real growth challenge, right? It’s like driving a speedboat with a hole in the bow, you know, it’s, it’s really difficult to grow if you’re constantly plugging the hole right behind you. So that’s, that’s the dynamic. I mean, that’s the setup, and I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this podcast feels that, right, every single day. So, what, what, what is it, uh, why, why don’t we get at some of the causes that you’ve identified that you want to talk through and, and we’ll, then we’ll, we’ll make our way through the, the donor experience and how we can improve it. But what are some, yeah, what are some root causes you’re seeing? So, so, so why do donors lapse? Why do members lapse? It, it’s never in the mission, right? It’s not like they, they lose heart, right? Or, or, or they stop caring for the reasons that they cared about in, in the future. Um, it’s that they don’t see themselves in the mission, right? So, they don’t see it in a way that’s personally relevant to them, right? And ties back to the things that they care about personally that kind of brought them to your mission in the first place. I think that’s, that’s one really important one. It’s a sense of impact. Right? People don’t come, they don’t make gifts like this, you know, just because they want to be a part of something, they want to make a difference, right? They want to make an impact. They want to know that they’re part of something that’s changing a world, the world in a way that means something to them, and that connection gets lost. Sometimes it gets lost immediately, right? They, they just, they don’t know where the impact really, really was. Uh, and then there’s the sense of, of relationship, and not in the sense that people are coming to these kinds of nonprofits for, for community. But they want to feel like you know them, right? That, that you, you care about them, that you acknowledge them as, as people and as donors and as part of your organization. And most organizations are really bad about that for a, for a number of reasons, but those are the primary reasons is, you know, it, it doesn’t connect. We don’t connect very well to the people and we don’t connect them very well back to the mission that they just contributed to. So, you know, when we talk about a relationship, I mean, we’re talking about a first gift. So, it’s not gonna be a deep relationship, but are we treating it like the beginning of a relationship, or are we treating it like a mere transaction? Exactly. And I, I would say that most kind of new members, um, feel like a target, right? Less than a partner, right? Sort of, you know, we, we hounded them down, we sort of chased them down, we’ve got them to give one gift and they’re like, OK, now what? Right? What, what’s gonna happen next? In the donor experience, what typically happens next? Nothing, right? Perhaps nothing. We eventually we’ll acknowledge the gift. Um, that could take a long time, right? Small staff organizations that are overloaded, right? That’s sort of one of the things that’s easy to push to the bottom of the pile is donor acknowledgement, donor recognition. I’ve been on the other side of that myself. I’ve donated to new organizations, right, whose missions spoke to me or I felt compelled to, and don’t hear from them for weeks and weeks and, and weeks, and then, and I, I, I literally forget that I did it. I have to look them up and go, OK, who, who is this that’s writing to me? So, I mean, I think that was a missed opportunity or Our first opportunity to connect with one is one that misses the message, right? So maybe we acknowledge the gift, maybe we talk more about the organization and ourselves and what we do, but we miss the opportunity to make that initial connection in such a way that is going to bring them back, right, to make that next gift. Are, are you envisioning some kind of, uh, uh, a, a message about the impact of the gift that you made, you know, because of, because of you, this work continues or we can do this, or what, what are you envisioning in a, in like in an ideal first communication, uh, not a, hopefully, it’s not a tax receipt, you know, you know, right. I mean, let’s not send, uh, OK, let, let’s get that off the table. Like it shouldn’t be a tax receipt. Uh, that can come later or it doesn’t even need to come at all. I mean, you can, you can have a narrative letter that’s, that includes the date of the gift, the amount of the gift, and then goes on to, letter or email. Uh, uh, uh, I’m not suggesting it has to be print, but whatever the channel, uh, that, that ties back to what your gift did. exactly, and so, so, um, Real life case study, work that we did with the American Lung Association, although they’re, they’re quite large, I think all the lessons learned apply, right, to small and medium sized nonprofits as well. But they were in exactly the same place where only 25% of their first year donors would, would ever give again. And, and they had a file of several, several million. donors that weren’t coming back, right? That had gone back about 5 years. So that’s very typical, uh, uh, problem that you might be up against. Their solve for it was, was two parts, and the first part was welcome stream, which we’ll talk about first, and the second part was recapturing last slapsed donors, and they had a lot of success. So let’s talk about that too. But the, the welcome stream acknowledged the fact that the decision to give again is made in the 1st 90 days at most, right? So if, if someone hasn’t recommitted. That they’re gonna support you on an ongoing basis in the 1st 90 days. They probably never will, and often it’s made much faster than that in the first month. So a really effective welcome stream responds immediately to the gift, right? Acknowledges it and then asks questions, right? Tell me more about you, Tony. Why did you give? What is it that you really, you really care about? How is this personally connected to you? So in the lung association, people give, uh, perhaps because someone or someone in their family, right, has, has, uh, you know, been exposed to had an experience of cancer or of COPD. So very personal missions. If we know that. We can communicate with you so much more effectively in the future about the things that we know you care about. So the first message was getting to know you. Tell us more about you and, and what brought you here. That was number 1. OK, well, before we go to number 2, how, how do you get that feedback back? So this is, this is an email and then folks are answering or it’s an SMS. It’s a, it, it goes in an email, but it’s a quick pulse survey. It’s just a really quick 5 questions, Quick survey. No, no more. Takes 10 seconds to answer it, right? But now I have that information on the file and I can segment my communications to you in a way that’s 100% more effective and people appreciate being asked, right? Like, oh, they want to get to know me. I’m not just a number. This isn’t just a transaction. This is more than a tax receipt. That’s week one. Week 2, we give them an offer, right? Here’s other ways that you could get involved. Thank you, Tony. You told us you care a lot about smoking cessation, and here’s some programs that you can get involved with, right? Here’s some other things that you can do. Here’s some other ways that you can give to sort of bring them in, sort of invite them into the organization in ways beyond writing checks. Also important, right? Sort of expands the relationship. And the third week, and this is counterintuitive, is to ask again, right? Make another gift. Three weeks after the first, and the campaign was incredibly successful and many, many people did because it was recent, right? It was personal, right? And we had shown both interest in them as a person and connection back to the mission. So very simple 3 part email series. There’s no reason, uh, any size not for profit couldn’t do that. Um, you know, based on all the modern email systems that we have now, uh, it really transformed their donor cultivation, right? Their first year retention skyrocketed by a campaign really just as simple as that. And over the next couple of years, they grew their donor file by 50%, 50, through a combination of more effective welcome stream and then this lapsed member campaign that we ran. OK, before we get to the lapsed members. Uh, all right, so this welcome stream is, uh, 1 a week, so you’re doing it in 3 weeks. So you’re trying to capture the, the, the, the, capture the folks who make that decision. You said, uh, most people make it within 90 days whether to give again, but a lot of people make it within 30 days. So you wanna, you wanna get, you want, you want the more recent. You’re, you want the within, within, you’re doing it within 3 weeks, 21 days. Yeah, the the the soon, the sooner the better, and I think that’s a big miss in a lot of these organizations is they feel like it can wait. Um, and we see this across voluntary organizations of all kinds of membership and donors. You, you cannot wait. Why, why do they, why do they, I, I haven’t heard that. I mean, I know we have trouble with retention. Obviously, I, I’m, I’m completely on board with, uh, uh, and agree with the, with the, the problem, but I, I haven’t heard, you know, we, we think we can, we figure we can wait. What do we, wait, wait, wait to thank, wait to welcome. Wait to, to engage, uh, that’s, that’s, that’s counterintuitive. All, all, all of the above, and the reasons are, uh, uh, uh, we think are really structural, right? Retention is not a strategic priority. Boards get excited by acquisition, right? How many new donors did you get? No one gets excited about retention, although we can all do the math. Um, that’s one reason. No one owns the number in most of these organizations. No one is accountable to the retention number, right? It’s just a number that’s sort of, uh, out there. That’s true. That’s a very good, uh, I don’t want you to lose your other points you’re gonna amount to make, but that’s, that’s very true. Acquisition, then the, the channel gets, uh, the, the channel gets the credit or the, the, the accolades for the, the number or the percentage of, of, Gifts that we got from the acquisition campaign, whether it’s digital or print. Then, but then no, you’re right, nobody owns the retention number. How many of those donors did we keep? How, how many of those made a second gift within, uh, let’s say 30 days or 60 days, whatever our, you know, we should be able to do this, the welcome stream within 30 days, but how many of those folks do we keep? But nobody, nobody really is accountable to that number. No, right? And that, that’s surprising considering how important it really is, right? Like a, a, a 10% increase in repeat donors will net you far more than a 10% increase in retention because we’re gonna lose 80% of the folks that we acquire. We know that. The, the other number, and again, this holds true across all kinds of organizations for the last 25 years, right? A first-time donor, maybe 30% chance that they’ll repeat. A 3 time donor is 70% likely. To repeat, a 7 time donor is 90% likely to repeat. So the more you give, the more you give. And this dynamic, it’s like a law of nature in these kinds of organizations is that there’s a threshold, it’s typically 3. Beyond which this becomes a long term commitment. It becomes a long term relationship, and 3 is not a lot if you think about it, right? If you make a gift, if I can get you to give again in the 1st 3 weeks and then get, get, get you to give again a few months later, and now I have a, a reliable repeat donor at 70%, that’s way better than 20%. Mhm. Yeah, yeah, that’s excellent. OK. OK. I, I, I, I derailed you a little bit. Uh, uh, we were talking about why, why, why are we, why are we think thinking we can wait? And, and I made you digress around, uh, the thing that boggles me, uh, that, that I’ve heard is that, that, uh, well, that nobody owns that retention rate, but are there other, uh, I want to go back to, other reasons why we, the nonprofit feels that we can just hold off on this? I, I, I think there’s a sense of learned helplessness, right, which is, you know, we’ve sort of trained ourselves that most donors don’t give again, um, which is unfortunate because in our experience, this is something that you can change, but I think ingrained in these organizations is the expectation of, I better go find a new one because this guy’s not coming back. Well, that’s self-fulfilling. Well, yeah, that’s self-fulfilling based on bad behavior by the nonprofit. Agreed. Uh, most of these organizations don’t have a structured welcome stream process like I just described that, that runs automatically, which is the ideal. I mean, this is something, you know, as soon as the donation hits the system, it should trigger this campaign to folks. I think a lot of these associations have a campaign mindset, right, is we’ll wait until the next campaign to ask again. Uh, even if the next campaign is 6 months from now, right, by which time 80% of these people have, have moved on. Well, they’ve long forgotten. They, they forgot the donation that they made 6 months ago. Exactly, and then they go into our lapsed donor file where we generally forget about them. Yeah. Yeah, every couple of years we try to revive them. Exactly. It’s time for Tony’s take 2. Thank you, Kate. Just have an update on my book, which is on schedule to be launched. September 15th, it’s planned giving accelerated, the cut through the shit, no-nonsense, practical, step by step guide to launch long-term fundraising at your small nonprofit within a week, starting with bequests. The title may be longer than the book. Did you need a nap? That’s the book title. So it’s, um, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. Once you hand it over to the editorial process, which the first editor is the line editor. Which is mostly about substance and organization. Once you hand it over there, then, uh, you, and then it goes to the copy editor. The copy editor is mostly about consistency, rules of grammar, Chicago Manual of Style type editing. And, uh, then it goes back to the line editor, then it goes back to the copy editor. And then it goes to the graphic designer. You notice the writer is out of it. Uh, uh, I mean, they asked me questions, but Once you, once you write your manuscript, you’re pretty much out of the process, except for answering some discrete questions about what did you mean here, or can we say this a little differently, things like that. So. Uh, interestingly, I’m not, uh, I’m not too involved. I mean, yeah, I’m not too involved. They keep me apprised, but I’m not too involved. Oh, and then after the back and forth with the editors, two rounds of that, then you have a proofreader. You don’t want to skip the proofreader either, so that’s a. It’s another iteration you go through. But we’re on, we’re on schedule, so not to worry. Nunja worry, as, uh, as my grandpa Martine Etti used to say, would be Kate’s, uh, great grandpa in his Italian New Jersey accent. Nunja worry, Nunjawari. So, none to worry, it’ll be out by the 15th of September. And that’s just an update on my book. And that’s just Tony’s take 2. Kate, I am excited to, I don’t know. I don’t think you’ve shown me like the cover yet, but I’m excited to see the cover and the whole entire. Title on it. It fits. It fits. It fits. I want people to know this is not some academic text that you’re gonna find at the Columbia University, uh, master’s degree program in nonprofit management and fundraising. It’s not gonna be at Columbia or any, it’s not gonna be in any, any higher education curriculum. This is a, this is a, Practitioner’s book, it’s fun. Obviously based judging by the title, right? I want folks to know this is a fun book, not an academic planned giving text. Well, none to worry. Thank you very much. That was Grandpa Martinetti. Thank you. We’ve got boou butt loads more time. Here’s the rest of Low lift donor retention with Chris Vaughn. Improvements. You you have some ideas for small improvements, like for the welcome stream. OK. 3 messages a week apart. The 3rd 1 is an actual, uh, uh, ask for a second gift. So, so, uh, another really important part of that campaign was targeted segmentation. So, um, these types of organizations have a bad habit of talking to everyone about everything they do, right? So we get really excited about all of the mission work we do and we should because we do such great work and we figure if we tell you about all of it, right, we’ll impress you. Something will stick. We’ll throw it all at the wall and something will stick and, and something is actually gonna stick. Well, actually the opposite is true. I, I can’t, I can’t see myself in that. So Lung Association, again, back to our example, uh, had 30 different segments, 30 that they thought about people and all the stuff that they did, right across their, and, and that’s. Completely unrealistic, right? uh, no staff can operate against 30 segments at the same time, right? You can’t accurately bucket people, even with the resources of an ALA. You can’t bucket people accurately, and you don’t have that much to say about 30 different things, I’m afraid. So we, we did the data analysis and we looked at all the millions of folks in the file and what they’d given to and what they cared about, and at the end of the day it was 3. There’s only 3 reasons why people give, right? It’s smoking cessation, it’s uh COPD and lung cancer, right? Those are the causes, and they seldom overlap, right? So maybe I care about cancer and smoking cessation, but by and large, I’m drawn to one of those things and not the other. What were the other, what, what were some of the other 27 different segments that had, these just things just evolved over time. For years and years and nobody looked holistically over time or, or should you talk to a cancer patient different than a cancer survivor, different than a cancer caretaker? No, not as, not as a fundraising organization, no, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they care about the condition and the good work that you were doing to help cure it. That was the message that we had to tell. OK, OK. So we were able to, because we were able to go through the file and identify previous donors. What they’ve given to when and why we could pretty accurately bucket them. Into one of these cause buckets that we cared about and that’s all we talked to them about. So if we know that you care about lung cancer, that’s all we’re gonna talk to you about. We’re not gonna try to convince you to care about some other issue. We’re gonna talk about all the great work that we’re doing to cure cancer and how you can personally help and how much difference your donation made to the millions of dollars that we raised for cancer research, etc. etc. etc. and now I’m speak your language, right? And, and for the new, for the newest donors, you have the survey results. You have, you have the quick, you have the quick survey from the 1st 3rd of the, of the welcome journey. Welcome stream, you call it welcome stream. Some folks call it a journey, but whatever, yeah, on, onboarding. But yeah, but you have the survey. Now, you, you had millions of donors who you had to categorize into 33 sort of programmatic areas, but, but for the newest donors, yet you, you do have the survey results at least. You, you do, and that’s, that’s 1000 times more than, than you had before, right? I have some, at least I have some idea. And then the next time you give, I’ve just confirmed it, right? That this is the kind of donor you are. These are your issues. These are the kinds of things that you respond to. And that’s part of why it was so transformational is they’ve never expressed themselves that clearly, right? To, to donors about why should you care? And, and what difference does it make that you’re here. It makes a huge difference. And let me tell you how. So that messaging on top of the urgency, right, on top of the inviting nature of the welcome stream was, was just a radically different experience than anyone had ever had from this organization before. Uh, and, and, you know, the end result was a massive increase in, in donor retention. Now what was that project like to get this down, get millions of records fit within 3. 3 programmatic areas. Uh, the actual analysis wasn’t hard. Convincing the organization was, as you might imagine. All right, so say some more, say, say some more. The analysis was pretty obvious, uh, but, you know, convincing the organization to, to think differently and, and, you know, people are, are attached to their own area and what they work on, but to convince them that we’re all gonna be better off. If we consolidate our messaging and communication around where the donors are at and not where we’re at, we’ll be much better off as an organization and ultimately we did. It’s human nature. But you know, but we have to talk to our, our, our daaf lung cancer donors differently than we talk to our online lung cancer donors. And you’re saying just talk to them about lung cancer. Just talk to them about lung cancer and, and how, how, and how you’re making a difference. And, and people give vehicles. What, what about, we have our vehicle and death lung donors. They are get, they need to get different messaging than our. Online and, and sustainer lung cancer donors. No, all right, so you’re, they don’t, it, it really, it really doesn’t matter. It, it, it really, really, really doesn’t matter. Up to a point, donation size doesn’t really matter. I mean, until you get to major gifts, right? It, it really doesn’t matter. Demographics don’t really matter. I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care where you live, right? I care what you care about. That’s, that’s the strategy here. I’m letting that sink in. I care what you care about. So, so know what folks care about, and then talk to them about that. And only that and that’s, that’s the hard discipline. I mean, part of the, part of this welcome stream was, uh, we call it the no fly zone, which is that’s the only thing the new member is going to hear from you, your new donor is going to hear from you during that 1st 90 days are welcome stream messages. No one else is allowed to communicate with them. Right? So we’re not gonna talk to them about every other program we’re gonna do. We’re not gonna talk to them about, you know, this campaign or this event or whatever we’re gonna do. We’re gonna get, we’re gonna welcome you and get you on board and we’re gonna get that second gift before we start talking to you about anything else, critical, critical, critical, because the noise that, you know, organizations like this can generate in their enthusiasm. Dilutes the message, right, and trains people to ignore them right out, right out of the bat. Oh my gosh, I gave a check and I’m getting 10 emails a day. And sometimes that’s not an exaggeration, um, but my, my welcome message is not gonna break through, right? So you have to stop, turn off everything else, no fly zone for 90 days, focus on that second donation, that’s the win. 90 days. OK. OK. That’s hard. Yeah, well, that’s discipline. All right, but you, you want, you’re, you’re imposing messaging discipline on, on any nonprofit that wants to talk about all the work they do because the, the, the person might be interested in something else. But, but we can get there. We can find that out, you know, we could find that out in year 2, maybe, or in, in 6, in, in, we can find that out maybe in 6 months. But initially, just talk to them, just like, just care about what they care about. For 90 days, for 90 days. And then we can, you know, there’s time. If you get the second gift, then, then, well, the, the second, the second gift means the third gift is more likely, and then the third gift means decades of giving or, or highly. So there’s time, there’s time. And just to be a little controversial about it, who cares if they’re interested in something else, if they’re consistently giving to this? Yeah, yeah, who cares? Who cares? Good. No, that’s not, yeah. All right. Um, that’s excellent. Well, what, so, uh, where, where should we, what would we talk about, um, trying to get some like decision making. We need leadership buy-in. Where, where do you want to go next? I, I just forget what I just suggested. Let’s talk about laps. Let’s talk about laps donors. Oh, the lapse donor. Oh yeah, no, that’s right. We’re capturing, we’re capturing the lap donors. Thank you. So you have a lackluster host. You need to, you need to keep me on track. Yes, the lapsed donor recovery. This is something that I’m, I’m, I’m passionate about because most of these organizations give up way too soon. Right, uh, uh, on, on, on campaigns, and we found over the years that organizations that are successful keep asking much longer than organizations that just sort of stop and give up and figure up they’re gone, right? Um, some of them never stop ever, right? If you were on the file, they will respectfully, right, but they will continue asking. We write them off and that’s where that 3% number comes from of us being able to reactivate, you know, some of our lab’s donors where it actually they should be your low hanging fruit. Why? Because you know something about them already, right? You know why they gave before, you know how much they gave, you know they when they gave before. You can reference all of that in these messaging and communications. They already know you. You don’t have to tell the story. They cared about you once enough that they were gonna give you some sort of money, so you’re, you, you should be way ahead of the game. Than you are versus a random acquisition person, but we give up on them as if we assume they’re mad at us, right? They left because they were upset. No, they left because they were indifferent. That’s a very different problem to solve. So, number one is don’t give up on your lab’s file. In our ALA case, right, they had millions of folks who’d given in the past who’d never given again, and we put them all back on the target list from as old as 5 years ago. So if you’d given within the last 5 years. You, you were, um, you know, you were in this, we called it the winback campaign, and it operated very similarly to the welcome stream. It was targeted. It was segmented. It was based on data that we had about you. Um, it went out in a multi-part stream, um, and it was phenomenally successful. They more than doubled their recapture rate. They recaptured 7%. Uh, of their file, um, over the, over the next year. So between onboarding and this lapsed member campaign, same philosophical right fiber to them, they added 300,000 members to their donor file. Net of acquisition. So simply by reactivating lapsed numbers and activating new donors, they were able to accomplish that kind of growth in their file. So when, when people write off their lapsed donor, they kind of pull my hair out a little bit and say, you know, that’s the money that you’re leaving on the table. All right, let’s go into a little more detail about the Winback campaign. So, it’s also 3, is it also 3 messages over 3 weeks? Or is it long or what, what did you do? I think the winback campaign probably went a little longer because I think we had to, we felt like we had to walk them back into it a little bit more, right? But part of it was acknowledging that you’ve given in the past, right? And, and being very specific about that. Like, we know exactly what you did and exactly when you did it. Thank you again, right? We really appreciate you doing that. Here’s, here’s something new. Tell us about you, right? Again, you know, the survey, you gave them, you, you give, you give them the survey. Yeah, absolutely, right. People want to be asked about that. Tell us about you. Here’s some new opportunities for you. It’s been a while, right? Maybe you didn’t know we were working on this, this, this, and this. Here’s some more impact messaging. Uh, you know, you may have been wondering what happened with your gift, but this is what we’ve done. In the last year, in the last 2 years with, with these gifts to, you know, cure COPD or, or whatever, and then we ask again. I mean, that, that was the stream, uh, and we would continue to, it wasn’t one and done. I mean, we would continue to keep them in this winback campaign pretty much indefinitely. Um, we would communicate less frequently, right? We don’t want to be obnoxious about it, but the philosophy essentially is never give up. And why would you give up, you know, and, and we were successful. The, the, the longer lapse they are, the harder they are to get back, but we were successful, up to 5 years out, bringing people back in as active donors who had been inactive for that long. And this was digital. Did you say this was an email campaign, to win back? It was all email. It was all email, no print, right? There’s no, there’s no print. Print it’s too expensive, yeah. For the, for the low likelihood, uh, of, of, uh, regaining somebody. OK. OK. So, so, you know, they had Salesforce, right? Big expensive, you know, data and email tool, which was overkill for this, right? You don’t need all that. I mean, any, any donor system that you’re running has the capabilities, or you can very easily bolt them on to do this kind of, you know, triggered campaign email that I’m talking about. You know, any organization has the ability to segment their file. Uh, especially now, you know, using AI, it’s actually very easy and very quick to do the kind of segmentation that I’m talking about and put it back in your donor file. So technology is not the obstacle, uh, anymore. I, I think it’s, it’s, uh, right, strategic framing, right? Sort of thinking first, A, the retention is important, right? Uh, and, and B, that it, it, it’s a program, right? It’s not something that happens, it’s something that we have to intentionally design, uh, and activate around. You have, um, some thoughts about, uh, leadership and structural decisions, creating the churn that we’re talking about. What’s your thinking there? The first was one we’ve talked about already, which is prioritizing acquisition over retention as, as, as an, as an organization. Um, well, another one would be dismissing your lapsed donors, dismissing your lapsed donors, uh, for, for whatever, for whatever reason. And again, I think there’s maybe this sort of sense of learned futility, which we haven’t been successful in the past, therefore, we’ll never be successful in the future, even if we do something differently, which our experience says is completely untrue. Um, but I do think there’s just sort of the kind of the ingrained ways of thinking in these organizations that, um, they stop them from even trying, you know, to do things differently. I don’t know. Do you agree with that? Oh, yeah. Uh, well, I said earlier, it’s self-fulfilling, you know, we, we never have in the past gotten lapsed donors back in, in, in decent numbers. So why, why keep trying? But, how about trying something different? Yeah. And, and I think it’s the way that board and leadership measure things, right? So we’re looking at new donors, whereas if the, the key metric was just the total size of the file, we would look at it very differently, right? So it’s, it’s not how many new donors, it’s, you said it yourself earlier, how many of them are we keeping? Are we seeing year over year growth in the total file and the total revenue is a very different way of looking at kind of cultivating your, your total donor base. Uh, many organizations don’t, you know, we, we see this, and we see this in membership too, you know, the acquisition rate is really strong. It’s really great, and no 1 may ever look at the retention number. They may not be able to tell you what their retention number is because they assume all this acquisition activity means that everything is fine, uh, and everything is going OK. So I do think there’s a kind of institutional blind spot around retention for a lot of these organizations, but I don’t know why. Well, I, I think a big part of it is, as you said earlier, uh, nobody, nobody’s, nobody’s measuring it. I mean, no, not you, we said nobody owns it, nobody’s accountable to it, but, you know, the, so the things you don’t measure are just gonna languish. That’s right. But when you start measuring and you start benchmarking and you start setting goals, you can, you can move the needle. I mean, it’s not guaranteed, but at least you’re paying attention to the problem. Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think there’s a structural lack of, uh, urgency that we talked about before around, you know, it can wait, it can wait till the next campaign, right? I just, I think there’s a lack of appreciation for how quickly human beings make decisions like this about what they want to be affiliated with when their expectations are, are not met. Um, it’s true across a lot of organizations. I think people feel like, well, We got you in the door. That was the hard part, right? And we’ll let the rest take care of itself. Yeah, but it doesn’t. Uh, and, and we know that it’s not taking care of itself. All right. Um, you’ve got some ideas, uh, uh, practical, low-cost ways. For small and mid-size, I, I, I appreciated you, you shouting out our small and mid-size nonprofits. Those are our listeners. Uh, American Lung Association probably is not listening. Although I, I think they could, they, they could learn a thing or two from, uh, from our guests, but, uh, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re produced for the small and mid-size nonprofits. So you’ve got some like small things, low lift, but maybe, uh, outsized impact ideas. Yeah, I, I think, I, I really do think that nothing that we’ve talked about is beyond the reach of, of, of, but perhaps the very, very smallest, you know, organizations who, who have no staff whatsoever. The, the technology has really changed the game, uh, in terms of the ease of lift around these kinds of things. The, the, the first thing I would do would be to pull my lapsed donor file. Uh, and, and really, really understand it. I mean, how many are out there and how long have they been out there and what have we done to try to get them back? I mean, what, what would it mean to try to segment them? Have we, have we ever thought about that before? I mean, I would spend some serious time with that file and ask myself, um, why haven’t we taken another swing at this and what would it mean if we did it? I think that would be step one. OK. Do you have a step 2? I, I think step two would be to start. Thinking about the right way to segment your members and some small organizations may be single cause organizations, and that’s actually great, right? Because that, that solves that problem for you, but other organizations communicate about a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and, and being able to consolidate that to manageable high impact segments is really important. I think I would start giving some. First, be honest about that. I mean, are we overcommunicating? Are we diluting our own message? You know, are we talking about what the donors care about? are we talking about what we care about? Have that conversation with yourself that’s free, uh, for you to do as an organization, and then, uh, think about what you can do in terms of a highly effective. Welcome stream, even if you can’t do multi-part email, and I think you probably can, right? Even if you can’t do targeted segmentation, and I think you probably can, what can you do immediately for a first-time donor to bring them back into the welcome stream and get them to that second gift, right? Using whatever tools that you have, it’s, I, I don’t know that it has to be sophisticated because anything you do is probably better than what you’ve been doing, right, up until now, or your retention numbers would be better than they are. That survey that goes with the, the 1st, 1st message in the welcome stream or in the, in the, in the windback for trying to recapture lapsed, lapsed donors. Um, I, I imagine that that’s, well, I think you said 10 seconds, but it was like a 3 question, 34 question survey. Maybe 5, sort of 5 very, very quick, welcoming kinds of questions. Hey, we’d like to learn a little bit more about you, right? You know, how did you hear about us? What moved you to give this time, right? You know, what, why is it, you know, why is smoking cessation personally important to you? Uh, those kinds of questions. Um, you can take free form answers to, those are easier to process now than they used to be. It doesn’t have to be checkboxes. That’s actually the most important stuff. Uh, we learned that lesson too from some research that we did with, uh, World Wildlife Fund, who does something very similar to this, but their survey responses are open-ended. So I don’t have to do check boxes and, you know, again, the technology is not that fancy now, but to figure out, you know, in Tony’s own words, this is what he cares about, and then they feed your own words back to you. So they will literally communicate with you in your own words that they collected from that upfront server, which I thought was brilliant. All right, that’s a great use of technology. Capturing, capturing their words and inserting them into messages back. Yeah, and it, and it really, really works. I mean, it’s like hugely effective and it a couple of years ago that would have been like Star Trek stuff, right? Like, you know, that’s impossible on their own. It’s not with the AI AI powered tools and a lot of them are built into these donor management systems now, that kind of stuff is becoming more and more automatic. Uh, so I encourage all of our clients, it’s like, look at the technology you already have. I don’t, you, you probably do not have to go out and spend thousands of dollars to buy some new tool. These capabilities are either built into what you’re already paying for or they will be next year. So have that conversation with your vendor. What capabilities are you not using that are right there at your fingertips. OK, Chris Vaughn, you feel OK? Is there anything you want to leave our donors with that, uh, We, we haven’t talked about that you want to. Uh, uh, uh, encouragement, right? I, I would wanna encourage. Did I just say leave our donors? I think I just said leave our donors with. I’m so focused on donor retention. Yeah, you’re donors right now. Leave our listeners. Leave our listeners donor. Well, we’re donor-focused. No, we’re listener-focused. It’s a podcast. It’s not a, it’s not a nonprofit. So leave our listeners. I, I would And it’s gonna sound obvious, but take, take retention seriously, right? Elevate it to a strategic priority. It is far and away your fastest path to revenue growth is to bring that retention number up. That that’d be the most have this conversation. Your board should be talking about this. You should have this conversation. They should know these numbers, the benchmarks as well as your own, and understand the compounding arithmetic. Of repeat donors and bringing them up and, and I think a lot of boards really, really don’t. I mean, so, uh. The problem is solvable, and, and I feel like a lot of folks coming into this conversation feel like that’s just the way it is, right? Donors just don’t come back. I think that’s not true. I think donors that aren’t, aren’t managed well, aren’t welcomed the right way, right? Aren’t asked to come back the right way, don’t come back. But our experience shows and, and, and the example that I’ve been talking about shows that it, it, it can be different. So, um, part of it is encouragement, which is take this seriously, and part of it encourage it, it’s solvable, right? This is not a problem that can’t be solved. It’s not a problem that you can’t solve as a, uh, a small organization, I mean we. Um, you know, this is, this is our mission as a firm is to help organizations grow, right, to grow membership and, and to grow revenue, and we’ve been, we’ve been at it for 25 years, and nothing makes us happier than to see these organizations succeed. I, I think the things that I’ve been talking about today, um, are not complicated, and, and maybe they sound complicated to a small staff organization, um, but it, I. Having done it for all these years, it’s, it’s not, I think, you know, I think what’s hard is to make the mental shift in the first place, that this is important, uh, and that, you know, we need to be more urgent about it. I think once you turn that corner and elevate this to the strategic priority, the, the how and the what becomes, uh, uh, an awful lot easier. Um, so I, I would leave that with your listeners as well as you don’t be intimidated and don’t be afraid to take this on. I think these are, these things are all well within your reach. The company is Sequence Consulting at sequence Consulting.com. Uh, it’s co-founder and chief strategy officer is Chris Vaughn. Chris, thank you very much. Pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for sharing all this. My pleasure. Next week, grants fundraising before you start writing. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you, find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martinetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.