Giving Tuesday fundraising: Why regular giving & retention are important

GivingTuesday is a significant event for many non-profits and has become a cornerstone of year-end giving and fundraising efforts. GivingTuesday occurs on the Tuesday after American Thanksgiving (Tuesday 28 November in 2023). For many organisations, GivingTuesday generates an outpouring of donor support and initiates their crucial end-of-year fundraising campaigns, which generate between 20 – 40% of annual fundraising revenue for the typical non-profit. Now in its 11th year, the 2022 GivingTuesday campaign raised over $3.1 billion in the US in just 24 hours and £20m in the UK!

These GivingTuesday statistics demonstrate that GivingTuesday is a vital fundraising opportunity for many non-profits, enabling them to capitalise on a global movement dedicated to generosity and charitable giving. Therefore, investing in a GivingTuesday campaign is a sound strategy for non-profits to kick-start their end-of-year fundraising and finish the year strong.

However, achieving fundraising success on GivingTuesday is only half the equation… retaining donors and converting them into long-term supporters of your cause is equally important. Non-profits that adopt a longer-term and more strategic view of the GivingTuesday opportunity will be the ones to reap the biggest rewards.

In this blog, we’ll explore actionable strategies and tactics for non-profits looking to maximise the impact of their GivingTuesday fundraising efforts and explain why regular giving and donor retention are key to year-end fundraising success and the long-term sustainability of your non-profit.

1. Shift your focus from one-off to regular giving

Historically, the focus on GivingTuesday has been on one-off cash donations, not regular gifts.

However, regular giving continues to be one of the best investments a non-profit can make to engage donors as lifetime supporters and create a stable and predictable source of annual revenue. And despite the impacts of rising inflation and economic uncertainty, the popularity of regular giving programmes continues to surge, with 66% of non-profits seeing an increase in monthly giving in 2022, according to Dataro’s 2022 Fundraising Benchmark Report.

Your donors are passionate about making a lasting impact beyond one moment, like GivingTuesday. Plus, the convenience and ease of regular giving appeals to many donors because they know their support will continue without any additional effort on their part.

Tactic #1 – Make regular giving an easy option for your donors on GivingTuesday

To encourage more donors to support your cause long-term, you’ll need to optimise your GivingTuesday donation forms for monthly giving and prioritise regular giving in your social media posts, emails, text message solicitations and direct mailouts (if you plan to use DM). Ensure your donors know that monthly giving is an option and is a more impactful and sustainable way of giving to support your organisation and help you achieve your mission.

Tactic #2 – Use AI to find the best monthly donor prospects

At Dataro, we’ve found that charities often overlook an obvious source of potential new regular givers – their existing one-off donors. Using new AI technologies like machine learning, Dataro has helped hundreds of organisations like Greenpeace, UNICEF and The Wilderness Society to identify their best monthly donor prospects and grow their regular giving programmes through better conversion campaign targeting.

Non-profits who focus on converting existing cash donors (including previous GivingTuesday donors) to monthly donors stand to grow income, increase fundraising ROI and maximise the lifetime value of their supporter base. Converted donors are retained at 2.6x the rate of newly acquired monthly donors and have 9x the lifetime value because they continue giving single gifts on top of their monthly contribution (Dataro Fundraising Benchmark Report – 2022).

Using AI to identify your best monthly prospects and including a compelling narrative about the impact of regular giving is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to grow your regular giving programme and achieve your GivingTuesday goals.

2. Invest in donor retention

The immediate success of GivingTuesday is undoubtedly donor acquisition. While this is crucial to achieving your campaign goals, the secret to long-term GivingTuesday success lies in retaining these newly acquired donors.

By investing in regular giving this GivingTuesday, you’re already building a more stable source of funding for your non-profit and will benefit from better donor retention. But that’s no excuse to rest on your laurels. Good donor retention strategies are still required to help grow donor loyalty and ensure a higher return on your acquisition efforts.

Tactic #1 – Prioritise new donor journeys for ongoing support

Nurturing GivingTuesday donors into long-term supporters is a process that requires strategic communications and good stewardship. The process begins with a timely and heartfelt thank you message to donors in the days following GivingTuesday. Good supporter journeys are crucial to donor retention. They should continue to engage donors at various touch points by reporting back on the impact of their gift, providing regular updates on your charity’s activities and sharing other ways for them to engage with your cause.

If you don’t have your GivingTuesday donor journeys planned out for your new one-off and monthly donors, then you are wasting your chance to build enduring support.

With advancements in generative AI in 2023, fundraisers can easily scale their donor stewardship efforts and reduce the time and effort it takes to write donor communications. It can also help you to quickly build donor journeys.

Dataro’s AI Assist is a generative AI fundraising content assistant built with GPT technology to help fundraisers create effective fundraising content and donor communications – fast! Whether you need to write a direct mail appeal letter, a GivingTuesday campaign email or reach out to a lapsed donor, AI Assist will find the right fundraising words to say and generate an entire letter or email for you in seconds. It even generates email subject lines, text messages and phone conversation scripts plus entire donor journeys to welcome new donors for instance.

The first draft communications generated by AI Assist serve as ‘inspiration’ or a launchpad to your creative writing process and will always be improved with your human touch and careful revisions. It’s not about creating perfection at first click. It’s simply a way to get you off the starting block (no more staring at blank screens!) and give you a really good draft that uses fundraising-specific language and best-practice fundraising tactics. Certainly, it’s possible to use ChatGPT to generate GivingTuesday communications, but creating something half-good will take a lot more effort and time because fundraisers need to learn how to prompt effectively and will often make these common mistakes when using ChatGPT.

With Dataro’s AI Assist you can build entire new donor welcome journeys from scratch in just minutes. By leveraging this tool, fundraisers can save time and enhance their productivity during a really busy period. Plus, because AI Assist has been built specifically for non-profit fundraising, the content generated is highly donor-centric and effective for fundraising communications (unlike ChatGPT).

Tactic #2 – Use AI to prevent churn and proactively improve monthly donor retention

The next step in improving the retention of your newly acquired and converted monthly donors is proactively tackling churn.

A donor churns or lapses out of your giving programme when they stop giving. Churn must be avoided and actively combated to achieve healthy donor retention. It is far more cost-effective to retain your monthly donors than constantly acquiring new ones.

But, our 2023 Interim Benchmarking Report found that only 62% of monthly donors acquired at any point in 2022 are still actively giving six months later.

That’s where AI technologies like machine learning can help. At Dataro, we recommend a three-step monthly donor retention strategy:

1. Use AI-powered propensity modelling to predict which donors are most likely to churn

2. Engage your most ‘at risk’ donors with a thank you call or impact update

3. Measure and repeat

Machine learning propensity models can predict which of your existing monthly donors are at risk of cancelling their gift, with a very high degree of accuracy. By identifying donors most likely to churn from monthly giving programmes, non-profits can take proactive steps to prevent this from happening. This improves donor retention, increases donor lifetime value and maximises the ROI of regular giving programmes.

Historically, predicting churn has been a significant challenge for non-profits. The traditional approach requires complex segmentation strategies, close data analysis, personal follow-up with lapsed donors to learn why they left, and more. It’s not very effective, and it only gives you broad assumptions about the types of donors likely to churn rather than specific individuals who need re-engaging.

Predictive AI technologies like machine learning offer a more direct solution to predict churn. AI propensity models can accurately and quickly predict and rank the individual monthly donors who are most likely to churn out of your programme, making it easy for fundraisers to find at-risk donors, generate accurate contact lists, and get started re-engaging them in just minutes. AI takes all the guesswork out of Step 1, meaning you can boost retention in a sustainable, scalable way (that won’t waste your time and resources).

Armed with the knowledge of who will likely cancel their gift, charities can proactively engage these donors. One of the most effective ways to retain monthly donors and make them feel valued for their support is with a thank-you call. The objective is to save your relationship with the donor by putting your mission back on their mind, making them feel valued and reminding them of the impact of their giving.