Keep Your Donors

Written by fundraising experts Tom Ahern and Simone Joyaux, Keep Your Donors is a new, winning guide to making disappointing donor retention rates a thing of the past. This practical and provocative book will show you how to master the strategies and tactics that make fundraising communications profitable. Filled with case studies and based in part on the CFRE and AFP job analyses, Keep Your Donors is your definitive guide to getting new donorsand keeping themfor many years to come.

Written by fundraising experts Tom Ahern and Simone Joyaux, Keep Your Donors is a new, winning guide to making disappointing donor retention rates a thing of the past. This practical and provocative book will show you how to master the strategies and tactics that make fundraising communications profitable. Filled with case studies and based in part on the CFRE and AFP job analyses, Keep Your Donors is your definitive guide to getting new donors—and keeping them—for many years to come.

Finding new donors can easily be the most intimidating part of fundraising. This little book is designed to make that a little less scary and a little easier to understand.

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.

Building Donor Loyalty is a hands-on guide written for professional fundraisers that outlines the factors that drive donor retention, explains how to keep donors committed to an organization, and offers suggestions for developing donor value over time. It is based on data drawn from a research program which included more than 20,000 nonprofit organizations and was funded by the Aspen Foundation and the Indiana Fund through the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Building Donor Loyalty contains a variety of illustrative case studies that demonstrate the power of effective donor retention strategies and clearly explains each of the factors that can build donor retention. It includes tools and techniques that have proven successful when growing long-term relationships with donors and offers practical advice for fundraisers who want to integrate this knowledge into their own thinking, planning, and practice.

"Working from research conducted over six years with hundreds of charities and donors, 'Donor-Centered Fundraising' paints a candid picture of why donors stop giving to charities they once supported, and what it will take to preserve their loyalty in the future. In clear language and backed by statistical evidence, Penelope Burk explores the pitfalls of our traditional approaches to donor communication and recognition and articulates what donors want but seldom get from the charities they support. The book features straightforward and accessible calculations that show how much money charities are failing to raise, and offers a step-by-step procedure for testing a donor-centered alternative and gaining its acceptance in any organization."--From publisher description.

The most important word in all of fundraising has just four letters: CARE. Not give, not help, not work. CARE is the emotional, rational superglue that attracts donors and keeps them close. John Haydon's legacy with this book is telling nonprofits that they must care about the donors they have and have had in the past. He explains how to care for donors with simplicity as well as urgency. Anyone who likes your organization enough to give to it, to help, to work for you - they care most about your cause. Care back or you will lose them.

This book has the insightful and cost-effective techniques you can use today that will deliver tremendous returns for years to come.