1 HOUR
Building the Foundation for Monthly Giving
This session focuses on the fundamentals — why monthly giving works, who makes a strong monthly donor, and how to confidently invite supporters to give monthly. You’ll explore key metrics, learn how to determine the right ask amount, and discover practical ways to communicate the impact of monthly giving to your donors.
**You’ll find the handout for the webinar here: https://softerware.my.salesforce-sites.com/handouts?id=a23Vq00000ExSuf
Categories: Training Webinars, Montly Giving Series, video
Building the Foundation for Monthly Giving Transcript
Print TranscriptHello everybody, welcome, welcome. Sorry for the slightly late start. There got a full week of webinars ahead of us, as always. These that we’re doing in the 1pm time slot. These are live. I, we do have recorded webinars that we broadcast at 3pm eastern. Not sure if we have one of those Read More
Hello everybody, welcome, welcome. Sorry for the slightly late start. There got a full week of webinars ahead of us, as always. These that we’re doing in the 1pm time slot. These are live. I, we do have recorded webinars that we broadcast at 3pm eastern. Not sure if we have one of those today, but because it’s the first webinar side of today. Live person. Hi, I’m Sean. It’s 1:01pm eastern on April 7, 2026 and we’re talking about the building the foundations for monthly giving, and I think out of all of the webinars I do, this one maybe has the potential to be the shortest, depending on how much the audience has to say, because, like with some foundational things can be a little basic at first, but I would like to talk to the audience today about everybody’s own ideas of monthly giving and get some feedback from everybody else. I certainly have some industry knowledge. I have a lot of anecdotal information that I’m happy to share. I talk a little too much. My name is Sean Botero. I’m a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. I’m often working one on one with people, right? Just teach them how to use DonorPerfect, the database, but this is my webinar week, so I get to use that talking too much capability for good use for once, and get to talk about donor perfect and monthly giving. Where disclaimer, anytime we see the phrase monthly giving, that is a branded phrase of sorts that we at DonorPerfect use, that is referring to the system’s capacity to charge things on a regular basis. You have annual as an option, it could be weekly, it could be daily, it could be quarterly. Monthly is the most common option, more often than not, but we do have options. Recurring is the key word, whether it is daily or annual. It would be nice if we’re treating these people differently. We should have different strategies of communication and engagement. Certainly, we’ll talk all about that today. Why monthly giving matters. There’s a lot of good data that supports this way of giving, the subscription model that a lot of people are familiar with. If you are new to monthly giving, and are maybe not sure where to send out specific appeals. We can look for certain groups of certain qualities. As always, donor perfect at its core is best when it is the digital representation of everything going on at your nonprofit. So, how can we then take that data and then find out who to ask exactly and what to ask for after we collect all of that data, even if it is the bare minimum of information of date and amount, you can still calculate averages to get a good idea of what a good ask amount should be based off of giving patterns that are already established in your system, and how and when to ask. I mean, I’ve volunteered at plenty of nonprofits, plenty of volunteer hours in. I am a training specialist for DonorPerfect. I teach about databases. I certainly work with a lot of executive directors and, like, database coordinators, but I’m not the one employed at an actual nonprofit. I, when we get there, I’d love to hear from all of all of you, what some of your thoughts are. Different groups of people need different tactics, and today we’re just talking about laying the internal foundation. Now, when we’ve done this specific webinar in the past, our marketing team would go out and they advertise it heavily. Today we might have at most like 30 people, so would love to hear from any of you as we’re going along about what everybody thinks, starting off with this specific graph.
That we got from MNR benchmark some of the data and big trends don’t come out always as quickly as we would like, from 2023 to 2024 though we are starting to see certain trends in giving when it comes to one time versus monthly, one time donations hasn’t changed really all that much, but there is a positive trend towards monthly giving, just a little bit, and this is a little different from one nonprofit segment sector to another, and this is where, as we’re going through these different segments, if you’re represented in here, I’d like to hear if any of this is ringing true for people, because, right, I mean, personally, my nonprofits are more local, local animal and local environment is really where I am personally invested in as a donor, and also public media, public media as well, a little bit more recently on a subscription basis, personally, but breaking these down line by line culturally, certainly that makes up a large amount of who we are, who we interact with, what we support, and later on we’ll see that overall, while these people do tend to have a higher retention, well, our culture is not really changing all that much often, so it would make sense to have donations on a subscription basis. Angela, you’re a food bank, have seen a decrease from 23 to 24 but it is trending up again. Okay, and we are going to look at some reports that actually, time permitting, there’s maybe some other trend reports since you mentioned the previous years that might show some of this Your monthly donors increased, and now I’m curious, Angela, if that was a result of changed efforts, changed strategies. What was going on that was different? Did something change in the community? If you’re not sure, I might have some reports that’ll show us, but hunger, poverty, which also kind of like in the disaster international, you can see these numbers and almost go, ah, well, this is a this is a good thing, surely? Right? If donations to food banks and poverty services are down, surely both of those social problems are also dealt with accordingly. Not always. We created a giving society harvest circle. I like that, defining the monthly givers. I love that, and it’s branded as well. Okay, Angela, I do want to hear more from you, because you’re talking to some very specific strategies. Oh man, this is great. This is great. Having having a specific branding for this group is good, and yeah, we’ll, we’ll visit all these topics more. I’m wondering if you’re communicating with them regularly, but hold those thoughts, Angela. Hold those thoughts as you because I have more to say about that, and I’m curious, if anybody else has anything to say. If you’re working at your environmental cleanup agency, I love Mother Nature. I was born here, not to brag, care about it a little bit, not a big fan of littering, like seeing this, love seeing that on the uptick health as well. Now, these M and R benchmarks, these do include both the US and Canada specifically, and yeah, sometimes health bills rack up pretty big, and sometimes we look to the community to fill in some of the gaps. Public media down a little bit, certainly some public government funding is down. How much can the public step up to help out? Rights, very little change in rights between 2023 and 2024 Work with a lot of passionate folks in the right sector. Be curious what they see about that, and why wildlife and animal welfare. My goodness, the national parks.. I’m not, I’m lightly on social media, but I can’t speak to social media strategies for fundraising, but my goodness, some of these national parks are really putting the word out there for themselves. In general, recurring donors give 42% more per year than those one-time donors coming from our friends at double the donation, again supported by MNR Benchmarks. Often revenue from monthly giving programs has increased by 11% in the past year alone, accounting for 28% of all online gifts. Boy, overall 40% of millennial donors are enrolled in a monthly giving program. Gosh, I’m a millennial. Guilty, I know a lot of my friends are. I sometimes refer to this as the subscription model.
Millennials don’t have any ownership on having too many subscriptions, surely, but it is interesting to see that that rings true sometimes with my social circles. Angela and other people, 90% donor retention. This is, I see this very often when we go into my database and we start running reports, which is more for later, later in the series, not so much today. We’re running reports today, for sure. But I’m curious, if Angela or anybody else that has a monthly recurring giving program, if this is true, a donor retention of 90% I just realized I forgot to put the word donor retention there. Industry average is about 42% It’s hovered through there, even through the pandemic, with all those financial shifts, pretty much stayed there. But if you are on a monthly giving model, it’s a little bit closer to 90% not a little bit, a lot closer. That is what the data is showing us. And who are these people that are typically enrolled in these? These are typically supporters who give smaller gifts and people who believe in your mission, and we can determine what a good ask amount might be by figuring out what our average gift amounts are. This is going to be the first report that we run, the gift range report. It’s not a favorited one, and I’d like to talk about it in like all of my reporting webinars, I think this one is very helpful, and if we’re analyzing a specific field called the average gift amount for your whole database, we can see everybody whose average gift amount for all of those gifts is between one and $9 The screenshot we have eight people, 10 to 24 getting a little higher, even more in the 25 to $50 range, and then peaking around 50 to 99 And I’m glad, boy, howdy, am I glad that we have this screenshot, because the webinar database that I’m about to go into is a little bit unrealistic. To have a system full of fake information that constantly updates is extraordinarily difficult, so my, my numbers might be a little unrealistic compared to real data, and if anybody’s following along in your own DonorPerfect database, I’d be curious what everybody else is seeing. Here we are, DonorPerfect on the home screen, and when we look at one of these profiles. Do you know that a lot of the stuff in DonorPerfect is customizable? I’ll pull up my buddy Roberto here, where we can identify some data points for the report that we’re about to run, even if we weren’t at any report, really starts at the data entry screen. Here which data do we have available to us that we can then see in a report. Well, we’re not concerned with the basics of Roberto being an individual person or who a solicitor is or where he lives. For big picture reports like the one we’re about to run, we want to go down to the giving and engagement profile, and if you, if you’ve been using DonorPerfect for, I’d say, over five years, if you started with us five years or longer, you might not have a neat, tidy section called giving an engagement profile, it might be called system calculated fields. There’s even a chance those fields are hidden. Hey, you could have had donor perfect for decades. All of this stuff is hideable and rearrangeable, but these fields are available to everybody. If you’re not seeing it, hit up the support department when you get a chance. They’ll, there’s an article that they can help you out with from the help drop down menu. If you didn’t know, there is chat support Monday through Friday, the instant message option, chat support right there. They’ll help reveal it, and even if these fields were hidden, we could still run reports on it, but I just think being aware of them is the very first step, and then using this information as actionable intelligence, we have all of Roberto’s gifts over on the gift screen. That’s important, but we don’t even need to look at them to know what his giving history is like. We can see cumulative totals, how recently they gave all very good, but we’re not talking about lapsed donors today. We’re talking about average amounts, which is a field we all have, or should have doctor support if you’re not saying it. Average gift amount. Okay.
Well, what is everybody’s average gift amount? We can find out in this next report, and I’m going to leave Roberto open here, which is a tip in general for just running reports. Uh, there’s hundreds of fields that make up Roberto. There’s only a couple dozen, we’re really ever going to be concerned with in the report center, and it’s helpful to be reminded about that. So, we’ll leave him open here as we go to the white ribbon at the very top, the pie chart report option as our report center that we will go to next, and now I’m logged in as myself, and each user has their own favorited reports, that being a report that has a yellow star next to it, and I was running these reports in preparation for this webinar, and because I favorited it, and because I just ran it, it’s showing up right at the top, last run april 7, there it is, but you’re not Sean, you might have my name, hold on, Sean, check, not today, just me, we all have our own user IDs, if you don’t have it favorited, what you can do is go into the financial reports, where all the favorited ones are financial. You just scroll by those, you can tell I’m a bit of a Donor Perfect fan, everything’s a favorite for me. But eventually you’ll get to the gray starred ones, and then alphabetically you’ll be able to find the one called Gift Range Report. Alternatively, there is that search box on the top right, Gift Range Report, and right now it has the wrong field selected. It has maximum gift amount selected. We are going to switch that to our average gift amount field, and we can see the ranges that are here between one and 1010, and 25 This should be filled in for you already. Feel free to switch these up if you think you have higher amounts or smaller amounts that you want to focus in on, but let’s see what our output is, not principal or Excel, just screen to run it in DonorPerfect, and this is where I say perhaps sort of realistic, sort of realistic. Roberto is a real person. I, we had to remove all the celebrities. I put celebrities all up in this database, but got in trouble for it. Either way, that I.. we have.. let’s see. Eight, yeah, an average gift amount between one and $10 Tamron Hall, Sam, yeah. Oh, lapsed as well. Also lapsed a last gift date that could also be a well, I’m not sure, for monthly, if we’re looking to reengage people for monthly, that’s that’s a bit of a big ask for someone we haven’t seen since 2014 but still good to see that we only have two people in those smaller averages, getting a little bigger average amounts between 10 and 25 and then between 25 and 49 that makes up 14% of all of the gifts in the whole database, or I’m sorry, all of the, yeah, all of the gifts and their profiles result in an average of that out of the 215 that we have in these results, but if we look over to the right, you know, those averages between 25 to 49 they make up, you know, less than a percent of our grand total. Yes, the 10,000 plus amounts, which these are probably, you know, these are likely to be, yeah, maybe major individual donors, but could be organizations make up a much larger chunk. We can say reliably, though, that in this data set that the average gift amount is actually fairly generous. I would say between 205 $100 I would feel so blessed if that was the average amount, but I don’t know. I’m a, I’m a normal guy. I get, I get excited at when I see people getting $20 donations, so like the 20,000 or 200,000 are also big, but curious, anybody else, because usually we see averages maybe a little bit lower. Average amount is one way that we could do that. We could also consider how big people are giving. The field that was originally selected here was the maximum gift amount field. Hey, okay. Angela, highest average is 10 to 2499 with 35.33% Uh, perfect.
We’re gonna get a good starting ask defaults from that number, we’ll do the math a little later, and then later on this week we’ll integrate it online, so that people will have a way to become a part of this group, perhaps a harvest circle member here, looking at a different data point. Instead of the average gift amounts, we might also want to analyze what our maximum gift amount is. What is the largest single donation that folks are giving? And let’s see, oh yeah, okay, we have a lot of 1000 plus donors in here, but again, for monthly one, and that’s that’s shooting the moon a little bit if we’re asking for those high amounts, people that we might be looking for outside of just knowing the ranges of amounts, finding certain groups, so we can communicate with them, or just analyze them, is all about knowing what values they have, so if we want to focus in on the 10 to 2499 average amount group. Hey, that is one field that we can use to run a report for an appeal for a constant contact list, where we then send them to an online donation portal that they then fill out to become monthly, but before we get there, certainly we will look later at in the week about how to just have these options out there and in the open, but for targeted communications, there’s different ways that we can look for people, have they given online before, we have a few different ways to give online. If they’ve given online once, they definitely have a payment method that could be stored for future use on a recurring basis. Known donor interest, getting a little niche here. If you do know people well and. And they are affiliated in some way, you might have them flagged with some type of affiliation. There’s also a comprehensive volunteer section that has interests, really, really, you see a lot of volunteer focus groups leaning into interests. Folks who have given in the past, certainly those averages are a reflection of who I’ve given in the past. Shawna, who I looked at, certainly is worthy and a potential person to be reengaged, but the one example I saw was from 2420 2014 and hey, yeah, actually, if her amounts were low enough, perhaps, perhaps that last gift date range is what we’re looking for, and as, as I’m going through all of these bullet points, what I’m doing with my words, or trying to do, is translating common English into the donor perfect language that we know and love. Well, okay, well, they’re affiliated with us in some way or another. That is likely going to be our flag field, which is how I would recommend using flags. They’re affiliated in some way, they’re a board member, they were a sponsor at some point, maybe they’re a prospect or a pet lover, because we do a lot of animal shelter related examples, recency recency. If we’re looking for folks that gave recently or who have not given recently, then we’re going to be using the last gift date field, and we’ll see why in a minute. We’re going to run another report. Um, maybe we’re looking for one-time donors. This person certainly isn’t. Their number of gifts is 35 five. These fields also very, very helpful. We can also look at perhaps I was just doing this the other day. I was helping somebody pull a list for a for spring appeal 2026 so what they wanted to do was they wanted to look for everybody who had given to Spring Appeal 2025 This particular example is an unsolicited donation, but it’s all about the data. If we want to find people that gave to that certain mailing, well, which field is it did we use to record that information? We have these requests in English that we’re looking for. Younger donors prefer to give online, yes, but this is there is a birth date field. Yes, but not everybody has that info. Boy, is that a great data point. I don’t think I have many birth dates in my fake system, and other ideas. And Angela, I’m not going to pick on you, you just have opinions, and I like people with opinions that like to share them, but yeah, I’m curious if there’s any, any other groups.
Some, some I talked to someone recently, really wanted to get their, their volunteers for them. Their volunteers were semi engaged, the nature of their nonprofit was seasonal in nature, let’s say, so for them it made sense to look for perhaps folks that have a flag of volunteer, not the case for everybody, though. If anybody has other thoughts on groups, would love to hear it. We’re going to go through a few examples now, going back to the report center, but leaving Roberto here for the inevitability that I have to re-reference data entry. Miranda event and program attendees, yeah. You’re a historic theater, and moviegoers are our biggest monthly donors. Yeah, love it. Now, my correct.. now my question for you, Miranda, is then how do you record that information within donor perfect? Everybody does things a little bit differently, I Oh, your birthday cards. Oh, I love that. I love the birthday card idea. Yeah, when you have that information, there’s also a donor bursaries. That have seen people be successful with just get getting sidetracked here, but yeah, donor bursaries based off of somebody’s initial gift date, we can find everybody whose first gift was one year ago, and oh yeah, okay, so for Miranda, they have a separate campaign that they log gifts under. And going back to Roberto, I’m positive that we’ve had Roberto in event attendance. Yep, he’s been to our golf tournament, he’s bought some tickets and maybe some sponsorships. Now I am almost certain, Miranda. My data entry might be a little different from you, because you have a campaign for events. I’m not sure if we have that here. Yeah, we have like a generic annual campaign, but we also have a monthly giving campaign, which we use to keep track of all all of the recurrings, which for data entry itself is very helpful, but yeah, so Miranda, for you, you would be finding a campaign, which I see all the time, a campaign of like event attendance or something to that effect, and then maybe the solicitation is that specific event, and then from there you might use sub solicitation to differentiate one from another. For me, I’m going to use solicitation just because we don’t have campaign, but Miranda, what you would do is very similar. Now, if we’re looking to interact with these groups, ultimately it will be underneath mailings and Constant Contact email, our friends for email, they do it. What they do, it perfect. And then there is mail merge, if you’re doing it yourself, if you’re getting an Excel file, or if you are merging the letters. But regardless of whatever tool you’re using, you’re going to need to make that list first. Anywhere you go on DonorPerfect, it’s all about taking that data, finding a certain group, and when looking for perhaps people to solicit or appeal to. When we go to Report Center, the listings folder is a really good place to go in general. This is going to give us a list of constituents. They’re not going to be listed more than once, and I like the constituent summary, specifically the constituent summary will show their name, some of their contact info, it’ll also show a little bit of their giving history, and it’ll give you a rough idea when you go over to do that mail merge or to make that email list, Who exactly is going to be included and as with all reporting, half of my job is done. We haven’t seen it yet, but I have selected the correct report because I have remembered that constituent summary shows information in a certain way. That’s the difficult part about reporting. These are essentially Excel files. We have to remember what columns of information show in them, but trust me, constituent summary. I’m using this one with people all the time. And now we have the left-hand side to give instructions. You might have a handful of fields here to give instructions, but this is the 1pm webinar we’re doing the advanced option of selection filters all over donor perfect mailing lists, emails, automations, scheduled reports. DonorPerfect has to be told who, how much, what time frame exactly. Who are we including? What gifts are we including here? And if we’re looking for event attendance based off of your data entry, could be campaign for me.
It is going to be my solicitation field, and my selection filters are going to be there to do that, so like Roberto, let’s find somebody that gave in the golf tournament 2026 Now we’re seeing selection filters here already, perhaps Amanda built this folder already. Roberto, I think, has his own folder. We might have that golf filter in here already. That’s the beauty of these things, is you only need to build them once, and then they’re just in there. I mean, if I do, if I add top right, if I do a search for the word golf, yeah, 300 plus to golf 2026 not exactly what I’m looking for. Let’s make a new one, as we often are at the top, we’re going to click on add new filter, and now this is why we always start at data entry, because now in order to select a certain group, I am having the structure of the profile mirrored back at me. We have the main and bio screen, the gift and pledge screen, the contact screen. And the link screen, other info for maybe volunteer info, and all right, just fell over. Windy day, not on any of those, we’re on the gift screen, we’re on the gift screen, and of all the areas that make up the different profiles on the gift pledge screen, if we’re looking for event attendance, let’s go back to Roberto. Roberto gift screen, and out of all the fields in this system, I am using solicitation golf tournament 2026 We’ll then find our field that gives that instruction solicitation, and it is going to be the first option in box number three, equal to if it’s one, not equal to if we’re excluding. We could also include multiple years, I could include multiple golf years if we’re looking for everybody that came to that event recently, but equal to just for one, really. Most of box three is going to be for dates and amounts greater than, less than, between. We just want, just like Roberto had, solicitation is equal to, uh, let’s go back in time. Yeah, of course, we have golf 2026 but last year we had 2025 and then we deactivated it at the top. Let’s show those inactive codes. Here we go, golf 2025 We’ll select that and continue, so and many, many other selection filters, really, no limit. I would love to do a birthday one. I just know that we don’t record any birthdays in here. And what should our ask be? Well, based off of our averages, and eventually we will be putting this information online 1/3 based off of lots of industry average collected in a book by our friend of the industry, Erica Wasdorp, monthly giving the sleeping giant, not this is not a sale, this is not a sale, this is not a sale. Never here to sell you anything, but that is, that is a very informative book about giving trends when it comes to monthly giving. So let’s see if we have a $50 average, are asking about would be 17 a month, or maybe it’s $25 times that by point three three. Now we could maybe round this up a little higher to nine, but that’s sadly more than I give to PBS. Could always be more, but what are the averages selling us, I matter what you ask, just remember to tell the donor how their money will be used. For example, and we’ll see this when we go online, a $10 a month will rescue a dozen puppies, or $20 a month will help feed 50 children, and gosh, there are there’s not in the suburbs where I live, there’s not enough local art institutions really do have to get out of my way, so I’m not really on any recurring art donations presently, but I’m curious, for anybody who’s had anybody have success sharing the story and sharing the impact of where their donation is going. I was working with somebody on a, on an appeal recently, and they were working with an outside contractor who was helping them with the ever-going issue of unrestricted versus restricted funds. I, they’re, they’re at a community.
Organization, and there’s several neighborhoods that they’re concerned with the revitalization of those are restricted funds for certain organizations, that’s what they need the money for, and in a lot of this messaging they’re telling, they’re telling that story, like, hey, we are raising money, we need monthly giving donations to keep the lights on to continue to do the things that we are doing, such as the community center, that, with you know, as long as our monthly givers, our sustainers, our harvest circle is helping support us. This is the outcome that we’ve been able to deliver to the community, thanks to the help of people like you. Personal call to action is always nice. Psychologically, psychologically, there is something to be said about it, having just $1 amount versus having an impact statement. There’s definitely a higher return rate on that. Forget what the exact numbers are. Yeah, donors who just gave are more likely to give again or join your monthly giving program. All of these people are lapsed, but yeah, I was unfortunately a little quick, just to, you know, suicide the 2014 lapsed donor. That’s been a while. Have we really not been doing anything since 2014 till now that hasn’t reached this person in some way or another, at any time of year, or maybe around certain holidays, definitely around the holidays, people are more likely to give, and hey, based off feedback for Ramadan. We’ve even added a daily option, not just for Ramadan, for everybody, but by request, we have a daily option for recurring giving. Somebody could set that up if they would like. And curious, if anybody else had any ideas or limitations or restrictions. I had one client who, you know, a lot of nonprofits, they go through mergers, things change, finances change, and people combine, combine resources, maybe there’s a lot of overlap in those programs, and you combine to become a bigger and better nonprofit. Sometimes it goes the other way, and people split up. Haven’t really figured out the resolution for this one client recently, but I did have one client that their nonprofit split up into two separate ones, and she lost a lot of the children’s programs and the camps, and therefore the networks of family that were giving to their organization, and a lot of those people were monthly. It was sad to see for them they were switching more towards institutional giving. Other ideas to consider breaking overall fundraising success down into micro goals. One of our marketing team is the fundraising coordinator at their synagogue, and they’re going green in southeast Pennsylvania, where we live a lot of coal for energy, so you know they’re putting up some, putting up some not cheap solar panels, and they were breaking it down one solar panel at a time to achieve their goal of cutting down their electric bill with Philadelphia Power by a significant amount by a certain date, bringing it down to not the entire solar system for the entire roof, but breaking it down to different solar panels was a good way to go for them. They also got to, oh gosh, they had great names. I’m drawing a blank on them, but they had, they allowed the top donors to pick the name of the solar panels, that was a good idea, and we also, we also see that occasionally with some animal-based shelters. If you are an animal rescue and you have the new otter that you’ve brought in, people will throw money at you to name that thing, that thing, that lovely creature. That were helping. Oh gosh, I did not have enough caffeine today. How else, you know? Not, not monetarily, but the last time I did this webinar, one of the housing associations, their breakdown of the macro project was into micro projects was the new building onto their shelter and their food bank, they wanted to add x amount of rooms to house so many families, and that’s that’s a big project started off laying the foundation that’s extraordinarily expensive, just putting cement onto the ground, but they started there. Yes, they needed everything up to the tiles and all of the furniture in between, but breaking it down that way, they had a lot of success, and that also overflowed for them into in-kind donations as well, because they needed to then fill all those rooms up with donations.
They definitely feel like they have a bigger impact if that smaller donation is going towards a bigger goal, and as always, they want to feel that they were the reason that they were the project that they were the reason that this big project was successful, as always in this communications we want to have language of togetherness and inclusivity, that as a team we’re communicating that with their participation we can get these goals completed, not seeing some of these different methods today, necessarily, but after we find different groups, certainly having the online form is a good way to go. You hopefully have a donation platform already that has one time or monthly donation options, but if we are creating a special group for people, we would benefit from maybe an online page that is fixed just for monthly donations. We have a special monthly donation form sent to them. This certainly could be manual, though. Not everybody’s online. You could be in person. You could even be on the free Donor Perfect mobile app. That’s why am I.. why am I sounding so sarcastic today? I don’t know. Download the Donor Perfect map mobile app, though. It’s free, and if you’re in person with someone, you can get a monthly.. you can get a pledge set up right there. Scan the card, off you go. Get people involved after first ask, ask them to join, and as always, make sure that you’re using the donor perfect options, because those tools are there, and if you’re using those specific tools for mail merging and for emails, all of that is just going to be logged directly in DonorPerfect by virtue of you using it. You may be doing those things already. Let’s make sure that we also log it, and now.. and now this is this is where Angela, I was like, oh, this is Angela’s slide when you were talking earlier about about big picture strategy. Someone needs to own it. Angela, in your case, I wonder if that was you that owned it. Was was it somebody else? Because you’ve already answered question number two, you’ve named the program, certainly Circle of Harvest, that is, or I’m sorry, Harvest Circle, that is on brand, and certainly distinguishes somebody from being give yourself a pat on the back, then that is a well, well done to have that go through and see those increases over the years. Provide a monthly donation process. Yeah, we’ll talk about the inner workings of these mechanisms later on. I’m sure whatever you’re doing is a okay, but Angela, while, while you’re here, in case I don’t get you back later on, because we’re not talking about the mechanisms of it today. Do you thank your monthly donors? Do you thank them, or do you only send it at the end of the year? Different strategies for different people, honestly, some people don’t want to be bothered by it. In the US, at least in Canada, you are likely sending a consolidated one. Yeah, a welcome letter upon sign up, and then an annual report. Okay, I like it. I like it. Yeah, the, you know, it’s very subjective. It’s very subjective. I would say most people don’t send emails, although if you are, I mean, if DonorPerfect is processing it for you, you could just be sending them automatic emails, and maybe that kind of serves as a newsletter, but hey, as long as you are proactively reaching out to them and letting them know about the long-term success of it, that’s good to hear. And moving on to the last bit here before we wrap up. Thank you, everybody, for bringing all these great thoughts in here. I am Angela. Sorry to put you on the spot, or Miranda, if you had anything to add to, or anybody else that’s here. This is your hour. You don’t have to talk to me. It’s okay. It’s okay. I know you’re listening. Yeah, if you have any tips for staying organized, and any tips about your monthly giving process that you might want to share and encourage other folks that like you revamped or started fresh their monthly giving program
trending up again, yeah. Yeah, ah, it’s a need of a revamp. Curious, Miranda, what specifically? And if you got a head out, that’s okay. Wasn’t sure if that was a thank you. Goodbye. See you tomorrow, because you will see me tomorrow, but it’s a need of a revamp, Miranda. I’m curious, and Angela, you call on your lapsed donors, call them, call them. Yeah, really. For talk about subjective, some people don’t have the capacity to be calling people, but my gosh, it’s a nice touch to get a phone call. Hey, you’ve given in the past, and oh, you have to, I reckon Angela’s system is well taken care of. I bet if we’re calling people, we might even see some of those phone calls on the contact screen, records of those conversations, and then yes, send them an email if we don’t get a hold of them, and system for providing benefits to our theater goers who are monthly members. It’s not super integrated with our operations team, so looking to streamline that. Okay, do yeah, calling labs donors. Ah, well, if you like that one, we’re coming to a close here anyway. Here’s another report that if you are going to be calling a number of people that this following report might be helpful. It’s in the listings folder. It is called Giving History with complete donor profile. This one shows an abundance of information, we could have multiple donors per page or one person per page, and then we get to decide how much or how little information is going into it, and because of just the sheer amount of data, we run one of these, we disseminate it, maybe we print it out, and then there’s all their history in one spot, so as you’re calling people, yeah, maybe we’re also opening up their contact screen and leaving a log, and okay, so we don’t get them, then we go to the main screen, and we might shoot them an email from here. What I’ll caution you with, though, is your selection filter, we have to be selective with who we want. We don’t want the whole database, and with the sheer amount of data that this report pulls, it could take a minute or two or three, if there’s 1000s and 1000s that you’re looking at. This report takes a while, and while I’m streaming a webinar, the cheap internet I pay for can’t handle it, so I’m leaving this one alone. But giving history with complete owner profile is great for something like this. Yes, be super specific, rule of thumb with all of the reports. Is now the selection filter followed me over like a lost puppy, like they’re one to do, and yeah, that’s helpful here. If I’m, say, looking for that same group, and maybe I’m calling, you know, maybe the sponsors from last year and soliciting them for one thing or another. This particular one, though, the more dense our reports get, the more restrictive they are about the selection filters you put on, and this particular one lets you use a donor filter, that is to say a field from the main screen, a filter for state, a filter for area code, a filter for donor type, maybe a filter for the lifetime giving total, that’s one option for a selection filter, or it could be gifts, general ledger solicitation, and that is actually what I would want to do here, I would want to use a gift filter, since my selection filter has a gift field, and yeah, as always, the support department, if you’re unsure of how that filter goes, they’ll, they’ll help you out, and Esmeralda going to launch DP in August, and new to a donor database, also new to this organization. Way to get paired up and get a list of other similar organizations using Donor Perfect that we can use as a mentor. Unfortunately, no, the only person I talk to the support department, and they’ll get you in touch with your account manager, but honestly, what? All right, there’s a caveat to what I said earlier about not here to sell you anything. That is my job.
I am a training specialist, and if you talk to that same person, your account manager, they can also set you up with some one on one time with somebody that can teach you all about all of this, and I was humble in the beginning by saying that I have not done this. They send me to a lot of college courses, and this job is kind of my personality, for better or worse, and we work with a lot of great fundraising professionals. There’s a lot of people here that we can get you in touch with, but your account manager would ultimately be the person to talk to. You’re welcome. I can’t tell who that is, though, but Chad Support will, Chad Support Ray. right there from the help menu. Lastly, I have a link for what we call the monthly giving calculator, if we were looking to grow our number of active donors by a certain amount based off of our average pledge asking amount we can calculate estimated monthly giving revenue into the future and I’ll do that in our final moments here as I recap and put that link into the chat. Monthly donors, they’re your loyalty club. Maybe we have a branded name for them. Donorperf can help you identify them and manage them all in house, and get yourself a copy of the monthly given guide, which which, oh, all those reports I ran earlier to prep for this, I did not open up our resources, which I am going to quickly share, and then hop off, because I have back to back meetings today, but you’re going to see me tomorrow. Here we go. There’s our monthly giving hub. Right from there, you can download the guide, and posting that into chat has a lot of those statistics, has some webinars from people that aren’t me, Dana Snyder, Josh Bloomfield, some industry experts, and my other resource is the monthly giving calculator, which is also linked, you know, what that is also linked on the monthly giving page, where essentially be an Excel file that you download, there’s. Bunch of formulas in it that will automatically calculate that, and if I see a lot of these names again tomorrow, no pressure, I’ll do a full run through of this, but that is our time for today. Thank you for listening to me talk for an hour about monthly giving. Spin the foundations. I have been Sean Patero, and you have been a great audience. Thanks for being here. Catch you all tomorrow, and the day after too. Thanks, Angela, and thanks everybody else. Take care. See you later.
Bye.
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