The Sustainer Ask You’re Skipping

Your file has plenty of repeat donors making one-time gifts. They’re reliable; you know they aren’t going to lapse, but they’re also infrequent. While everyone wants to acquire new donors as sustainers, there are plenty of people who would be willing to give more often if only you asked. One of the best ways to retain these donors is to ask them to shift from occasional one-time gifts to monthly giving, but how you make that ask is just as important.

Upgrade the Donors Already Giving

Converting a donor who has given several times into a sustainer takes a specific kind of ask. Yes, you could just ask them to become a monthly donor, but offering incentives has better outcomes. Treat it as the start of a monthly giving program, not a single transaction.

Make the Ask Feel Like an Invitation

A well-timed ask paired with a reason to give can move donors who are already engaged. Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA) targeted donors who had given three or more gifts in the past 12 months and invited them to a dedicated Heroes Circle mailing list. This list contained a certificate, a letter, and a gift for anyone who pledged $19 per month or more.

This wasn’t a generic appeal; it was a targeted audience, timely, and focused on upgrading one-time donors into sustainers. From this, PVA added 171 new monthly donors, who gave an average of $15.50 per month. They also received an additional 5,687 continued one-time gifts from the same audience segment.

Recognize Reliability

Donor recognition is a powerful lever. The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) modeled their sustainer file and added a secret ingredient: public recognition. A “Sustaining Supporters” honor at their annual convention turned donors into advocates when they shared their mentions on social media.

Since then, DAR’s sustainer file has more than doubled, growing 106%. Sustainers make up 21% of their total active donor file at 97% retention.

Repeat Gifts Are a Tell, but Not the Whole Story

How you ask matters because many nonprofits aren’t asking at all. Research from GivingTuesday found that about half of all donors surveyed can’t remember being asked to donate to a nonprofit, but of those 9% say they would give if they were asked. The signal of who to ask is already in your donor file. As the PVA found, a donor who has given multiple times is a strong candidate for becoming a sustainer.

Reliability isn’t the same as capacity. A donor who gives $20 five times a year and a donor who give $100 five times a year are both repeat givers, but only modeling tells you which has the capacity to give more. That’s where donor segmentation tools like SimioAudience and SimioAccelerate come in by using the world’s largest donor data co-op to analyze thousands of giving signals to help you identify not only those who give regularly, but those who have the ability to give more.

Turn the Signals Into an Ask

Once you’ve flagged donors who’ve given several times in the past year and modeled their capacity, there’s one more step to creating a lasting monthly donor program: make the ask itself specific. Use different suggested donation amounts based on what a donor can give, tie your call to action to their specific reason for giving, and offer an incentive for becoming a sustainer. Segment your donors and send this ask separately from your standard outreach.

Upgrading Donors Starts in Your File, Not Your Funnel

Some of your donors have given multiple times this year but have never been asked to switch over to monthly. Some who are giving monthly would give more if they were asked or given an incentive. The challenge is knowing which is which.

SimioAudience builds bespoke models using the largest nonprofit donor data co-op in the world to identify which repeat donors ready to upgrade to monthly giving and which to keep asking for one-time gifts. For organizations with smaller donor files, SimioAccelerate uses the same co-op to identify these donors and send the personalized ask directly. Using these tools, the donor who has already proven they are reliable gets a specific invitation, not another generic appeal.

Contact us to learn more about SimioAudience or sign up for a free trial of SimioAccelerate today.