April 7, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes
David Preston, membership director at Twin Cities Public Television, says the station is focused on making the most of a fundraising trend: securing monthly donors. Signing up more donors to make automatic monthly gifts, he says, has enabled the station to make strides in increasing the number of people who make repeat gifts, an area of growing priority in fundraising.
“We believe that sustainers are the future of philanthropy,” Mr. Preston says, “and that you have to get in now because people are only going to have maybe four sustaining gifts going on at a time, and we want to be one of those four.”
Last summer, PBS required its member stations to include information about recurring gifts in all pledge materials, something the Twin Cities station had already been doing for a couple of years. In the station’s pledge drive that ended last month, about 35 percent of donors were so-called sustainers, up from about 25 percent in previous years. And in last year’s door-to-door canvassing, about one third of donors signed up to make recurrent gifts. The station now has about 28,000 monthly donors, up from 12,300 in 2011.
An added benefit of its growing sustainers program, says Mr. Preston, is that the station has more time to focus on its other donors, which can avert lapses in giving and lead to bigger contributions.
“We have more time for more data analysis, and we can make basic things more efficient when we don’t have as many leaks we are always needing to plug,” he says. “We’re just not leaking donors the way we were before.”
Share of donors in the year ending June 30, 2012, who gave again the following year: 79%, up from 76% the previous year
Share of new donors in the year ending June 30, 2012, who gave again the following year: 48%, up from 41% the previous year
Behind the increase: More monthly donors
