(8 min read)
 

If you’re just starting your sustaining revenue program, it’s helpful to think about building it like you would a layer cake. You want to start small, with just one layer that’s easy to measure and see your ROI. Then, as you keep building on those layers over time, you’ll see the impact this fundraising stream makes on your bottom line.

The first layer of the sustainer “cake” you’re building should be getting a sustainer ask in for all new donors by optimizing your forms and Targeted Emails in the way we’ve already discussed in our previous Success Guide.

Read our Success Guide on setting goals and launching your sustainer program

When you are ready to take the next steps, you can think about how to target donors who can give a little more and the best ways to make sure your program continues to thrive over the long term.

Inviting sustainer upgrades

Once you’ve had some success optimizing your sustainer asks for new donors, you can think about adding that next layer of success by approaching your existing one-time donors to ask them to convert to a monthly gift.

The data you’ve already collected on these donors can help you with deciding on the timing and amount. The audience you choose will depend on your goals but you can start simply. Maybe you include everyone who has given at least $100 in the last year. You can show that $100 donor how converting their gift to a $10/month donation will provide ongoing support for your efforts without being a hugely bigger ask than you’ve made before.

This is a good point at which you can start to build some Automations to help you out. Once you’ve identified your audience using some saved searches and created your email messages, it’s easy to move that into an Automation workflow. As your searches run each evening to find new contacts who qualify for the outreach, the Automation will keep your sustainer outreach program rolling without needing a lot of interaction from you.

Read more about creating an email series

Watch our feature workshop on using Automation to increase renewal income

After you’ve converted some one-time donors into sustainers, you can start thinking about asking for a little bit more from them - adding that next layer. If you’ve done a good job of stewardship so far, your sustainers are the people who should be really excited to give more to your organization. This step is a little more advanced in that it requires that you have a good finger on the pulse of how your donors are feeling about your organization.

The Fundraising Optimization Guide can help you forecast how much upgrading your donors will make on your bottom line. If you also have our add-on predictive analytics tool, DonorTrends, you’ll see Action Steps that will help you build target lists of donors who are likely to respond to your sustainer asks. 

Read more about the Fundraising Optimization Guide

You can also create custom lists and reports using DonorTrends' Sustainer Conversion model to find more sustainer prospects and add them to your Automations or targeted outreach campaigns.

Read more about DonorTrends

Ongoing retention

One of the nice things about a sustainer program is that you no longer have to wait a year to see if someone is going to give again. You can look and see every month how many folks you are retaining and get instant feedback if things are starting to drop off for some reason. And, you can do a cost-benefit analysis over a shorter timeline and estimate your ROI on what it costs to acquire your sustainers and how long you’re retaining them.

Sometimes, however, retention is more about keeping an eye on your program. One of the practical hurdles a sustainer program faces is keeping up with changes in payment methods as credit cards expire or making sure you can still reach them if they change their address or email. Many of our tools can help you manage this part of your recurring payment processing by:

• Updating credit card details through our payment processor

Many payment processors provide a Credit Card Account Updater service that will automatically update the numbers or expiration dates whenever someone gets a new credit card (maybe because their old one expired or was lost). When this is enabled, your recurring payments can continue to be processed even if your donor forgot to notify you of the change. If you use Bonterra Payments or NGP VAN Payments, you automatically received this service when you set up your account at no extra charge. If you use Paragon Payment Solutions, you may contact them to add it to your account at an additional charge.

• Allowing donors to update their information on your self-service pages

Most donors these days expect you to provide them with a self-service portal they can use to update their contact or payment information. You can create your own Self-Service pages and customize a portal for your sustainers that will give them the power to review their commitment level and make changes to their payment method, amount, or payment schedule. Remind your supporters that they can update their information at any time by adding the self-service link to your monthly Thank Yous.

Self-service pages can also be really useful when you are ready to launch a sustainer upgrade campaign. Design a page that you can share with your sustainers that will show the impact of their giving history and encourage them to adjust the amount of their gift.

Read more about self-service pages

• Responding automatically to payment failures with Triggered Emails

You can create an autoresponder, called a Triggered Email, to automatically alert your donors when their gift fails and to help them fix it. These messages can be sent to any email address regardless of their subscription status since it is a direct response to an action attempted by your donor (an attempt at a payment completion). These emails should always link to your self-service page so donors can correct their payment method themselves.

Read more on using Triggered Emails for Recurring Commitments

• Automatically follow up with donors who are not responding to failing payment notices

After 3 months of failing payments, we automatically cancel the recurring commitment. You can use our Lapsed Sustainer automation template to recapture these sustainers, by thanking them for their prior recurring gift and encouraging them to start a new one.

Read more about using Automation templates

Thanking your donors

A great example of a sustainer follow-up would be an email response a within a few days of receiving the initial donation that thanks the donor for being a sustainer. You can even include that they are part of a special group and share videos, stories, and other information that shows how their gift is impacting the organization. These small actions are all it takes to help sustainers feel great about giving.

You also have the opportunity to contact some of your strongest supporters to talk about why their monthly gift is important each time a payment is processed. Our Online Actions forms make it easy to set up this payment confirmation message using conditional content to personalize the message.

But, if you are concerned about donors getting the same email every month, you can start using Automation to create more personalized thank-you journeys or to limit your payment confirmations to a quarterly or semi-annual thank you.

Read more about creating Automations

Reporting on your progress

The first place to track your success is from the Fundraising Management dashboard. The Monthly Giving section will give you a daily look at how well your program is doing and let you keep tabs on any failing gifts you may be missing.

 

To get another view of your program, you can also Create a List of sustainers based on criteria like length of commitment, current status, payment failures, and so on. This can be a great way to quickly see if you have many downgrades or cancellations happening or to identify sustainers who have given steadily but never been asked to increase their gift. You can then save these searches to include in Automations that can help you improve your overall retention of these donors.

When you want to filter your data more granularly, you can use the reports available in the Report Manager:

• Recurring Commitment Report

You can use this report to get a broad overview of your program, but you can also filter it to get some detailed data on your program, such as who responded to your Recurring Upsell Lightbox or which donors have failing payments.
Read more about tracking recurring commitments

• Recurring Commitment Processing Report

You can use this report to get details on all the payments you’ve processed to better understand any failure rate you’re seeing with your sustainers. Once you use the recommended actions we’ve already discussed to counteract those failures, you can use this report to monitor that failure rate over time to see if it’s improving.

If you Group by > Outcome, you can see what percentage of payments are failing. To see which donors have failing payments, Group by the contact name.
Read more about tracking payments on recurring commitments

• Recurring Commitment Changes Report

This report is the easiest way to see upgrade and downgrade changes in your recurring commitments. You can see changes that were made manually, any automatic updates by your payment processors, or any changes made by donors themselves using your self-service page.
Read more about changing or ending a recurring commitment