Book Description

There are eight main reasons why donors stop supporting organizations. Do you know them? You will after reading Retention Fundraising: The New Art and Science of Keeping Your Donors for Life. For three years, pioneering fundraiser Roger Craver immersed himself in a study of nonprofits in the U.S. and the U.K. His singular aim was to uncover why donors quit an organization and what can be done to make them stay. Some quick figures show why Craver's book on donor retention is timely: -If yours is a typical organization, you have a 60 to 70 percent chance of obtaining an additional gift from an existing donor. -You have a 20 to 40 percent chance of obtaining an additional gift from a recently lapsed donor. -But you have less than a 2 percent chance of obtaining a gift from a prospect. That bears repeating: The average organization has less than a 2 percent chance of securing a gift from a prospect. So one thing is glaringly obvious. The bulk of an organization's fundraising expenditures should be aimed at strengthening relationships with existing donors, not in acquiring new givers (though there's still a role for that, of course). Through painstaking research, Craver has singled out the exact ways an organization can deepen donor commitment. There are, he learned, seven key "drivers" that matter most to donors. These "drivers" - ranging from meaningful appreciation to opportunities for authentic involvement - have a direct cause-and- effect relationship. Move your donors from low to high commitment, and their giving will increase dramatically. Best of all, responding to what your donors want isn't costly, as Craver shows in real-life examples. There's gold in your current donors waiting to be mined. And in Retention Fundraising, Roger Craver has drawn a detailed map to those riches.