Donor Retention Success Resources

Donor retention is the practice of engaging donors in your nonprofit community so that they continue to give to your organization year after year. When you connect with a donor who gave to your organization last year by any method (phone, email, direct mail, at an event, through your website, etc.), and they choose to give to you again this year, you’ve successfully retained that donor.

Donor retention is vitally important to the sustainability and growth of your organization. DonorPerfect’s 2020 Fundraising Benchmarks Report revealed that organizations with higher donor retention rates achieved better fundraising results overall in a year when many nonprofits struggled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortunately, there are many ways to keep your valued donors committed to your cause. They include sending timely thank-yous, communicating donors’ impact, and launching a monthly giving program. Not sure where to start? DonorPerfect offers lots of content to help you succeed at all three of these initiatives.

Benchmarking your donor retention against the average metrics for the nonprofit sector overall can help you understand how your organization is performing in terms of keeping donors engaged. The average donor retention rate across the nonprofit sector is 45%, so your organization should aim to ensure that half of the donors who supported your cause last year give again this year.

You don’t need to be a numbers wiz to keep tabs on your nonprofit’s donor retention rate. In fact, donor retention is very easy to calculate. For example, if you have 1,000 donors in year 1 but only 400 of those give again in year 2, your donor retention rate would be 400/1000, or 40 percent.