Customer Rating: Summary: Transformational Comment: This is a must-read book for serious fundraisers -- and maybe a watershed book for many. Once you've read the well-documented findings in Building Donor Loyalty, you might well view your existing fundraising program with dismay. It turned my thinking inside out.
Poor donor retention is the skeleton in the closet for many, maybe most, fundraising programs. Maybe 70% of first-time donors never make a second gift. There are excellent reasons why new donors aren't especially loyal, as this book reveals with original research.
Charities invest huge amounts of money in their acquisition machines; but almost nothing in keeping those donors once they've been acquired. The waste is incalculable. Not just because of needless overspending on acquisition, but because charities lose the LTV (the lifetime value) of so many donors who might have been retained with a bit more effort.
Raise more money. Read Building Donor Loyalty as soon as possible.
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.
