A Third of Charities Don’t Let Monthly Donors Pay Directly From Their Banks

Title: “The Nonprofit Recurring Giving Benchmark Study”

Organization: NextAfter, sponsored by Salesforce.org

Summary: Although donors who make automatic donations at regular intervals, such as monthly, are often more valuable to a charity than other donors, many nonprofits make it difficult to set up such regular gifts and don’t do enough to treat those donors as valuable supporters.

The survey found that by the third month of a regular donor’s giving, only one in 10 charities still acknowledged the donations each month. Organizations also did little to go after donors who had quit: Forty-seven percent of charities made no attempt to keep a monthly donor giving after a credit card attached to the account was canceled.

NextAfter, a digital-fundraising consulting company, teamed up with Salesforce.org to test the experience for donors at 115 charities that offer giving opportunities monthly or at other regular intervals. Starting in February, each organization received support from three types of donors: one-time supporters, donors who switched from being one-time donors to giving at regular intervals, and those who had a regular habit of giving that way.

Among the findings:

• Only 14 percent of charities attempted to solicit one-time donors to give more regularly.
• One organization in 10 did not offer a monthly giving or similar option online. Seventy-five percent didn’t have a separate promotion on their home page to spur donors to give regularly.
• Only 33 percent of charities that accepted recurring donations online offered electronic funds transfer from bank accounts as an option. Only 22 percent accepted PayPal.