Progressive organizations that saw a big increase in donations after the 2016 election — a.k.a. the Trump Bump — are now faced with the perennial fundraising challenge of how to persuade new contributors to keep giving. A big part of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (No. 100, down 22 percent) strategy is data analysis.
To get an idea of the challenge the ACLU faced: In late January 2017, after President Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven countries from traveling to the United States, the group gained an estimated 400,000 new donors in just one weekend.
The giving was transformational. With the influx of money, the ACLU hired more staff and bolstered its program and advocacy work. But fundraisers couldn’t be sure that donors would continue to give. First-time supporters who gave to the ACLU in response to the travel ban, for example, made second gifts at a rate of just 16 percent. Mark Wier, chief development officer at the ACLU, says this is on par with retention rates among emergency-response donors.
Donors made a repeat contribution to the ACLU’s advocacy and charitable funds at a rate of 37 percent. But monthly donors continued their support at much higher rates. After 12 months of giving, 80 percent of recurring donors were making tax-deductible charitable donations and nondeductible advocacy donations each month, according to Wier.
The nonprofit has tried several strategies to boost donor retention, including an effort to push recurring contributions using its online-donation forms. Studies have found that monthly donors are more loyal than other donors, and their gifts form strong foundations for fundraising programs.
Donors responded. The group now has 250,000 monthly donors, compared with 40,000 before the 2016 election. Their gifts total $5 million a month for the ACLU’s advocacy arm, according to Wier.
Crunching the Numbers
But even as more donors joined the “sustainer” program, others let their monthly gifts lapse. Wier’s team turned to the data for a solution.
The charity has 12 in-house data scientists who support communications, fundraising, and program and advocacy work. Their research revealed that lapsed sustainers are most likely to renew recurring gifts within the first three months after they lapsed. So fundraisers began tracking how well they reached those donors during that window.
“It seems so obvious,” Wier says. “But when you don’t have the data in front of you, it’s hard to really have enough focus to structure your program that way.”
Sometimes ACLU data scientists approach Wier and his team with a research idea based on trends in the fundraising data. For example, the data scientists noticed demographic differences in donor retention among people who made their first gift to the ACLU after the 2016 presidential election: Older donors were making a second gift, but younger donors weren’t.
While Wier’s team hasn’t yet determined how to respond to this trend, he says these analytics have deepened their understanding of their donors. “We don’t always know what the right intervention is, but at least knowing for sure what the trends are and what the problems might be gives us a better chance to focus on some kind of intervention that might be effective.”
Emily Haynes has covered fundraising on social media, Giving USA’s annual report on giving trends, and how the ALS Association found success with the ice-bucket challenge. Email Emily or follow her on Twitter.
