Scaling Multi-Year Giving Strategies to Solve Donor Retention

By Adam Martel, Founder and CEO of Givzey
The state of fundraising tells us we need a better solution to reignite mid-level donors. Lear more about the best way to solve retention, increase revenue and build pipeline.

Nonprofit fundraisers and leadership have abundant information, analysis, and opinions. New reports, stats, and findings can sometimes be forgotten as quickly as they're released. However, a trend that began about a generation ago seems to have the most relevance in our work as fundraisers today – donors are disappearing.

The numbers don’t lie. Giving USA reports that overall giving was down $17B in 2022, a drop of 10% when adjusted for inflation. At this same time, individual giving dropped 13.4% – which benchmarked an all-time low for donor retention of 42.6%, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

As the economy has a K-shaped recovery, what we see is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. In the context of fundraising, this means our mid-level donors are disappearing – which means nonprofits’ major and planned giving pipelines are drying up quickly.

In an effort to counteract this reality, many nonprofit organizations have committed to taking huge swings and pursuing mega-donors like MacKenzie Scott. While landing a mega-donor is transformative, it does not address the issue of building sustainable and predictable giving pipelines that will serve your organization for decades to come.

The best way to solve retention, increase revenue, and build pipeline is to secure multi-year giving. When organizations can keep a donor for five years, the retention rate skyrockets above 90%, creating donors for life. This is precisely where the major gift pipeline is built – in donor retention. While only some donors will become traditional major donors, many more will commit to the one major gift of their life via planned giving.

Multi-Year Giving

Traditionally, executing a meaningful multi-year giving strategy has been an exercise for only major donors. Multi-year gifts revolve around pledges and gift agreements that require paper or PDF processes, lawyers, rounds of review – all elements that prevent organizations from scaling multi-year giving strategies to mid-level donors. This is why you see that many organizations don’t accept pledge agreements under a certain threshold, often set at $50,000 - $100,000.

The state of fundraising tells us we need a better solution to reignite mid-level donors. That’s why Givzey introduced fundraising’s first and only Retention & Digital Gift Agreement Platform.

William & Mary, the No. 1 public university in the U.S. for eight consecutive years in annual undergraduate alumni giving, has elevated its philanthropic efforts to new heights with Digital Gift Agreements. In just three months, the university secured more than $500,000 in giving using this modern approach.

So what exactly is a Digital Gift Agreement and how does it work?

Digital Gift Agreements empower frontline fundraisers to secure more multi-year pledges at every level of giving. Advancement teams can create, send, and track gift agreements as they sit across the table from a donor, speak on a phone or video call, or engage with a donor at an event.

As leaders create a strategy around multi-year giving below the standard major gift threshold and simplify and scale the process using Digital Gift Agreements, they're seeing a ripple effect that goes epochs beyond replacing a paper or outdated pledge process. Leaders are quick to realize that when Digital Gift Agreements empower fundraisers to solicit multi-year pledges at scale, fundraisers can suddenly expand their work in amazing ways:

Break the Solicitation & Resolicitation Cycle

Frontline fundraisers know their donors, and they may know that some donors give like clockwork on a certain date and a certain time. However, nothing is really “certain” until that gift comes in the door. This causes frontline fundraisers to constantly check in with even their most dependable donors to ensure a gift will be made. Imagine letting Digital Gift Agreements take on that responsibility, empowering your fundraisers to establish touchpoints that are actually stewardship – not a thinly veiled solicitation.

Givzey’s Digital Gift Agreement Platform includes solutions for donor invoices, mid-level pledges, major gifts, bequests, and more – each with automated pledge reminders that remind donors when gifts are due, delivered directly to their inbox.

Additionally, Givzey delivers all of an organization’s payment methods directly to a donor’s inbox – including credit card, ACH, stock, DAFs.

Develop Pipeline and Reach More Donors

When a frontline fundraiser has donors in her portfolio who are in active commitments, she can spend more of her time focused on developing relationships that lead to major gift opportunities, and securing gifts from the prospects who have yet to give.

Follow-Up and Follow-Through Happens In Real Time

Donors are most likely to follow through on a gift commitment when it’s formalized quickly. When fundraisers travel, attend events, and make rounds of calls or donor visits, they often come away from these meetings with a mountain of CRM and spreadsheet updates, meaning it could take hours or even days before following up with donors to close gifts. However, Digital Gift Agreements are designed so frontline fundraisers can create, send, and track multi-year gift commitments, as they engage with a donor in real time.

As the first fundraising solution to address retention and digitizing gift agreements, Givzey has definitively proven that nonprofits can address the alarming decades-long decline in donor retention, increase bookable revenue, and sustainably build pipeline with multi-year giving efficiencies that weren’t possible just a year ago.

If you are looking to scale your multi-year giving strategy and show measurable and immediate results, see how Givzey’s modern approach to fundraising can help.