Advocacy Group Finds Alternative for People Who Don’t Want to Give Monthly

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, takes a sustainer-first approach to its small-dollar fundraising for the same reasons so many other nonprofits have flocked to monthly giving. Recurring donors give more money than one-time contributors and are more likely to keep giving over many years.

But HRC has also come up with an alternative for donors who decide against monthly giving that also has increased donor loyalty, Kristina Williams, the group’s senior manager for membership operations, told participants here at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. The meeting, which is organized by NTEN, drew more than 2,300 nonprofit professionals, foundation leaders, and consultants.

When HRC started its monthly giving program in the 1990s, roughly 2,000 people took advantage of the option. Today that number has grown to 83,000 donors, who contribute a total of $1.1 million each month. Street canvassing is the biggest source of monthly donors, but the organization also relies on email, direct mail, telemarketing, and text messaging.

But what about those donors who don’t want to give monthly?

In 2016, the organization started giving people who made a one-time gift online the option to automatically renew their contribution the following year. During the first year, 7,000 people agreed to auto-renew, and the average gift size was $48. HRC has since added the option to its telemarketing and direct-mail programs.

During some campaigns, the monthly giving option is preselected on giving pages, but the auto-renew option never is.

“That’s important,” Williams said. “We did not want to get those people doing it and not realizing it. So you do have to actively check the box.”

15,000 Renew Automatically

The first two years the option was available online, it was subtle — a checkbox that donors could select when they typed in their payment information. This past fall, HRC tested a pop-up box to call greater attention to the option. The box appeared as the one-time gift was being processed. The box tripled the number of people opting to auto-renew.

The group now has more than 15,000 donors who have elected to auto-renew their gifts. The retention rate is 70 percent, compared with less than 50 percent for other one-time donors. Auto-renew gifts will account for $500,000 in the next fiscal year.

HRC sometimes asks its monthly donors to make additional gifts — and some of them are taking advantage of the auto-renew option, too. Seven percent of donors in the group’s Partners program — for people who give $99 or less a month — also have an additional contribution that is set to auto-renew.