The Bell Curve of Giving A Toss

The most important metrics in regular giving are retention percentages.  They determine ROI, income, donor numbers and pretty therefore pretty much what your organisation is going to be able to achieve in the next few years.   The biggest single influence on attrition rates is recruitment source.  Sadly, a lot of internal NGO conversation seems to stop there.  However F2F teams and agencies the world over, have spent enormous amounts of time and resourcing trying to work out why this is.  The main answer that they seem to come up with is that source reflects and/or influences donors engagement with the organisaion.  

Ability and Desire… again

You may have read in a previous post that a bit too much attention is paid towards demographics of the donors being recruited. Income, age and location do carry some weight. But the reality of the situation is the number of people who cancelling because they really cannot afford to give any donation to you is very small.  What’s much more important is how much they care about the work you do. 

Giving a Toss

It’s the amount of love, not the amount of money that a donor is giving that determines their how long they’re likely to give for.  If they really care about what you do then when they decide to start saving for a home, they’ll make room for the $25 a month in their budget.  If they loose their job then they’ll reduce or put their donation on hold while they look around for a new position if they value their donation to your organisation highly enough.

Bellcurve

Everyone is an individual and so everyone who responds to recruitment ask will therefore respond in a different way.  This means that every recruitment methodology is likely to recruit a cohort of donors whose engagement with your organisation looks a little like a bell.  There will be a small amount who care a lot, a small amount who hardly care at all (I have no idea why these people sign up, but they always seem to) and a big chunk of people in the middle.  The exact contours of your bell curve will vary depending on source, but they will probably all take a similar shape.

Prove It

I can’t.  And this is the most difficult thing basing a concept on something as unmeasureable as emotion.  Like a black whole, you can see the effects of it (on retention rather than gravitational pull), but you can’t actually see the thing itself. If demonstrating it to yourself is impossible, then imagine how hard it’s going to be to the board.

So why bother with it at all.

Because even if you can’t base budgets around it, it gives you a framework for strategies to retain people.   If you know source a (green) has better retention than source b (blue) you can start to work out where along the bell curve you want to focus your attention.  Do you want to focus your communications streams on the less engaged donors, the very engaged donors or somewhere in the middle (hint, its the latter answer, the question is where in the middle).  We’ll look at the bell curve again in the near future as were only scrapping the surface of what it can tell you.