We set a lot of people welcoming 20,000 new monthly dollars. For giving Tuesday, just on that one day, we saw over $50,000 in New York. And that was over $1,300 in monthly donors. Number 5 20,000. So when we do this step back and really talk about how the impact that these new donors are going to have on our community, we're calculating over $6 billion there, which would account for multiple responses and activations and preparedness for us around the world.
SPEAKER_01Before I introduce all of our really exciting speakers and myself today, is the Monthly Giving Summit had its third annual in February. And we love coming together. Like that event just creates such a strong momentum. There's energy, there's inspiration, there's accountability, I think, as being a part of it. And then we realized, well, we have to wait a whole year to hang out together again. That's not cool. So therefore, this state of recurring giving and so much happens in a year, too, right? So we wanted to come together every quarter and bring in partners of ours that are really on the state of the trends, understanding what's happening in a micro basis, and then bring you a really compelling, great case study. And so we're very thankful for Charity Engine for making this quarter's state of recurring giving webinar possible. And then you're gonna hear incredible, brand new, like hot off the press stats and data benchmarks from Giving Tuesday Data Commons team, and then a very inspirational, compelling case study from World Central Kitchen from Matt in just a little bit. So again, thank you all so much for being here. Bring out your notebooks or your notes app on your phone. We're gonna dive in. If this is the first time that we are meeting, I'm Dana Snyder and the host for today's series. And I host the Missions to Movements podcast that I've been running for four years. So if you are looking for conversations, insights, if you are someone who loves to learn via audio, there are plenty of great conversations on the podcast. And I just have to say, I just got this is very relevant. I got an email yesterday from someone who's been a listener of the podcast. And I had given a recommendation case study about fundraising recurring gifts at events. And instead of doing like a paddle raise, doing a like a hand raise for recurring giving. And she said she was very nervous. And I don't know if you're here, if you're like part of this series today of this story that I'm sharing, but she's like, you know what? We were hoping we would get like five and they increased their ARR, their annual recurring revenue that night by seven thousand dollars by doing that. And so it's just testament to people like they listen to the podcast episode and they put in, yes, all the confetti, that's the best, right? Like put it into practice. They shied away from the nerves, and look what happened. So I host the Monthly Giving Summit. I wrote a book all about monthly giving, and then just at the Monthly Giving Summit this year debuted the Monthly Giving Builder tool. It is our monthly giving strategy companion tool. It makes it extremely accessible to start building out and creating a plan for your monthly giving program. So if you've needed something that gives you a little bit of accountability, it's our $49 a month option to get you started. And it's kind of like me having you in your back pocket a little bit, going through each of the steps. So I live and breathe this work. I am a monthly donor to all the organizations that you see here on the screen. Dress Sumber, I've talked about a lot. It's my longest standing monthly subscription that I have been giving to you for over six years. I have no plan in stopping. And so, again, truly and appreciate what you do. And I love supporting in this way. Also, I have to acknowledge Happy Monthly Giving Awareness Week. So we are in the middle of
this amazing week that was put together by our KD group, myself, and Giving Tuesday. Last year was the first inaugural, and we just realized how can we give monthly giving a moment? Like it needs a moment. It's so incredibly important to our missions to drive predictable sustainable revenue. Let's put together a full week that provides resources and education and the monthlies. So if you go to monthlygivingweek.com, you will be able to see every single day there's a podcast episode like today, we had our webinar. You'll be able to see the Giving Tuesday blog that came out with fresh research. There is the opportunity to apply for the monthlies. It's like our Webies or our Oscars, where we want to highlight a small, medium, and large size organization and give you some fun things for that to highlight your monthly giving program. So join us. Join us this week. Check out what's around for you to join tomorrow. And I saw Dave is in here. I have a podcast episode with Dave Rayleigh talking all about the next future. What is the future for monthly giving and a very exciting announcement that he's sharing with everybody? And with that, I want to go ahead and bring up Seth to the stage. Hi, Seth.
SPEAKER_03Hello, hello. Good morning, everybody.
SPEAKER_01Good morning. Seth and I just got to meet in person at AFP Icon, which was super fun. He's the VP of sales at Charity Engine. And Seth, I'm gonna take it over to you to be able to share a little bit more about what Charity Engine is and some of the macro stats and data trends that you are seeing on the platform with your customers. And as everyone that's here thinks about how do we improve and scale our programs, I always like to think about not only the strategies, but what's the technology backbone of your organizations to get you to that next stage. So with that, terrific.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, Dana. Yeah, and I had the pleasure of meeting Dana and her team in San Diego and just a thrilled to see you guys again and be a part of this. And so, yeah, a little bit about Charity Engine. I'll just, you know, pull out a couple minutes of this thing. We are a CRM, we are a software company, yes, but we believe in powering the good to be great. We believe that as nonprofits and the level of sophistication needed to run an impactful nonprofit changes over time, it shouldn't be technology that keeps them from being successful and from furthering their mission. And so we have a platform that covers pretty much anything that you would need to have a complete 360-degree view of your donor. It's completely scalable, whether it's P2P grants, advocacy, monthly giving, or anything else, it all is native within our platform. So you're not having to go to multiple places to do the same thing. So rather than technology working against you, we believe in working it for you and helping you impact your mission. We are privately funded and owned. And so we're not an organization that's dictated by the needs of a private equity firm. We are dictated strictly by the needs of the nonprofits that we serve and take that charge very seriously. So, why monthly giving for charity engines? So we believe that monthly giving is a growth engine. Retention beats acquisition, as it says here. Dana said a little bit earlier, predictable, sustainable revenue. And one thing that we really strive to take pride in is helping out with the predictable and the sustainable. A lot of folks just think about sustainable, but making sure that money is coming in. And so when you see something like payment failures or silent revenue killers, all of us participate in the scripture economy, whether that's with Netflix or whatever else, and you are going to, as an organization, at best case retain and collect 85% of your monthly payments. Within our platform, we're able to get you north of 90%. And so making sure that the money that is coming in, the fundraising that is coming in via monthly, you're collecting on and you're not having to worry about that falling off. And so, like I looked at the stats for 2025 for our customer base, and we're at north of 97% collection. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So it's a really like when you think about making sure you're not having to chase those dollars down again and resell someone on the mission, it's quite impactful. So within our benchmarks, and so this is what I was speaking to earlier, average recurring gift size is $26, average credit card donation is $43. Dana does a really good job of making you jump when you hear something, and she did this when we were in San Diego a few weeks ago. Average ACH donation, $115. I mean, what like when someone is going straight to their pocket and donating to a cause to see that sort of a lift in their monthly participation? It just warms our hearts. 97% or more collection rate within our customer base, and 90% of our customer base uses our monthly giving program. So Dave Rayleigh did a study via uh rooted software, and they've poked and prodded and made sure that what we're saying was actually true. And in fact, it is. Like there is not another platform that can compare to our monthly giving percentages and those collection rates. Matter of fact, he said that we're the only CRM that's certified as best CRM for monthly giving. Thank you for the minutes, Dana, and the opportunity to say hi to everybody and crash the party. Appreciate it very much.
SPEAKER_01Yes, of course. So ACH, Lisa was just wondering what ACH is.
SPEAKER_03ACH is just like tying into your checking accounts.
SPEAKER_01Your debit checking account, yeah, versus a credit card donation. And these amounts, I would say it'll be interesting to see other shift happens because there's been a also big shift in micro donations. Seth, this is amazing. Thank you so much. Oh, are you available in Canada?
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_01Very applicable since I'm in Canada right now.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01So thank you, Charity Engines, so much for what you do for Dave for the third-party recognition. That is incredibly powerful, also when it comes to just like the trust of our platform. So, up next, I'm going to bring up to the stage James. James is a senior data scientist at Giving Tuesday. I have been fascinated, James, by your work. So, James is going to present some recent recurring giving data that came out from the fundraising effectiveness project. And I won't give too much away. With that, I will bring your presentation to screen and let you take it away.
SPEAKER_02Great, thank you. Yes, so like Dana mentioned, I'm going to talk through some new research that we've done into recurring giving in the nonprofit sector. So this is using data from the fundraising effectiveness project. And we've just published a kind of blog post highlighting some of the key findings from that research. So I think a link to that might be shared in the chat. For those of you who aren't familiar with the fundraising effectiveness project, I'll just give a little bit of background so you can understand the data that we're
using here. So FEP is a collaborative project between Giving Tuesday Data Commons AFP and a group of platforms providing donor management software and online fundraising tools. They provide us with transaction level data on donations to nonprofit organizations. And we use that to analyze sector-wide trends in giving. So particularly publishing quarterly, year-over-year trends in dollars-raised, donor participation, and retention. So that's built on a data set now spanning billions of dollars in donations across millions of donors and tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations. And we publish our quarterly reports at fedreports.org. What's new and kind of exciting about some of this new research is we've kind of built a new way for detecting recurring donations in the FEP data. So that was necessary because in the past the data providers hadn't all given us information on which transactions were recurring donations. And also, even when they do provide us that flag, sometimes even the donor management systems themselves can't tag everything as recurring just because, for example, sometimes if there's an integration between like a third-party online donation tool, those recurring donations which are initiated there don't always get flagged as such in the system. All that's just to say that this approach means that we now kind of for the first time with this data are able to measure patterns in recurring donations across thousands of organizations. We've detected or kind of looked at eight different schedule types, everything from weekly to annual. However, within that monthly is by far the most prominent, and we'll kind of see a bit more about that later. And for the purposes of this blog post, we focused on two main opportunities for growth. So, in terms of headline from our findings, I guess kind of cautiously optimistic, recurring giving is growing but slowly. So across the organizations we analyzed from 2021 to 2025, each year just over 90% of organizations had at least one recurring donor. So it's quite prevalent across the sector. From 2021 to 25, the share of donors on recurring schedules increased from around 6.6% to 7.9%. However, the median organization, so kind of like the middle organization, only 4% of donors were on recurring schedules. And what that means in combination with this number here is that essentially a relatively small number of organizations are kind of disproportionately pushing the sector along in terms of driving kind of recurring donor engagement.
SPEAKER_01I'd love to see if I can hop in here. Like how what James is presenting, how does this feel to all of you on here listening and watching this? Like for what you are seeing at your organizations. Like, does this seem in line with where you're at as far as do we know the number, like your percentage of recurring donations versus like total revenue? Yes, I see Anna saying so true. Share an inline, yes. I thought that this was so fascinating. We are not seeing an increase with a slow but high impact. Yes. Okay. Awesome. Sorry, James. I was just really, yeah, very reassuring.
SPEAKER_02No, no, thank you. No, this is that's great. So, kind of one of the things you were interested then was kind of digging down a bit deeper and understanding kind of where that change or that kind of slow change is coming from. So, what this chart shows is that in each year, looking at the proportion of organizations based on what percent of their new donors in that year joined as recurring. So, meaning that first donation was a recurring donation. And what we can see is that in the blue here, this is the percentage of organizations for whom 0%, so none of their new donors in that year joined as recurring. So nearly half of organizations each year have no new donors join as recurring. The red shows organizations where kind of 0 to 5% of donors joined as recurring. So think anything from maybe one recurring donor to up to one in 20 of their new donors joining as recurring. And then a kind of relatively small percentage for whom that percentage is actually quite high. So these are the outliers, but maybe reflect that what I said before about like a relatively small number of organizations kind of driving change in the sector. And what this means is that kind of the recurring donor base is very much kind of made up of donors acquired in previous years. So what this chart then shows is that within each year of all recurring
donors across organizations, when were they acquired? So the blue at the bottom again showing the percent of donors who were new this year relative to those acquired in the previous year, two to three years ago, or four plus years ago.
SPEAKER_01This is really interesting. Sorry, James, I was just gonna say, like, and going back to your previous slide, so I I've mentioned this to some of you that I've seen since I spoke in Virginia. I was in Norfolk, Virginia, and I asked a room about like 145 nonprofit professionals. And I was like asking, thinking about, and maybe you all can think about this too, like thinking about your average calendar year of asks that go out. One, there is just like people organically going to your site and is recurring easily accessible, is it the default option? Like aside from that, in fundraising asked throughout the year, is there a monthly specific and or only ask? And out of like 145 people, not one rose their hand. And I thought that was really telling, and it kind of aligns with if that if that's just like a small sample size of what this is obviously looking at on a much larger scale, that's kind of right in line with what the data is showing us.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And you thanks for pointing that out as well, because I think that kind of nicely sums up the character of this opportunity, right? Is that we know that based on the prevalence, like 90% of organizations have at least one recurring donor. So it's not that they are completely not engaging with recurring as a kind of method to build relationships with donors. It's just that maybe they're not making that kind of recurring first ask when they're engaging their new donors or kind of relying on either converting existing donors or just depending on donors acquired in previous years. I would say just kind of to summarize this chart as well. I mean, this pattern isn't necessarily a bad thing. It is kind of what we'd expect is over time you're kind of building that recurring donor base, you're gonna kind of slowly over time the percent of donors required new this year is gonna go down. But in combination with the previous chart, it does uh suggest that there's kind of scope for growth in how kind of we're engaging new donors and maybe trying to encourage them to join on a recurring schedule.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I like people starting to do the math, like Sophie just said, just did the math, 15% of our donors are recurring. Like I would say if there's top five data points to always know and have at your fingertips is the percentage of donors that are recurring, the lifetime value number of an average recurring donor, because sometimes, and I I've talked about this on a LinkedIn post recently, but like we think about a monthly donor as a $25 donor, not the fact of 25 times 12 times how X many years your average is, the MRR, so monthly recurring revenue, ARR, annual recurring revenue, and then your average retention rate slash churn per month. So you could look at retention like year one, year two, year three, et cetera. So I love all the if you're a fellow math person, yeah. Hey, yes, Lucy, I love it. 5.5 times the average monthly. Yes, that's huge. And if you have these data points, charity engines team, we just had our monthly giving retreat, and charity engines spoke about if you know these numbers, making sure that you're presenting them and making them a part of like every board meeting, every internal team meeting. Therefore, it becomes more of a higher priority.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. So now kind of moving on to setting up the next opportunity we looked at. So, like I mentioned before, we looked at everything from weekly recurring schedules to annual ones. And what we found is that monthly is kind of by far the most common schedule type. So two-thirds of all the recurring schedules we found across the period from 21 to 25 were monthly, and the share of schedules that were monthly was growing over time. So from 21 to 25, the share of total recurring revenue that came from monthly donors grew from 73% to 84%, seemingly the kind of shifting towards that relative to these other types of schedules. And another key stat we found as well was that monthly donors compared to other schedule types had the highest median annual value of all the schedules. And that value was $275 compared to $100 of annual value for non-recurring donors. So nearly a three times lift there. And the way we kind of calculated that value wasn't just to look at recurring transactions, but to look at the extra one-off supplemental gifts that recurring donors make, right? Because that's part of the whole relationship that you're building. It's not just about kind of set and forget, it's about then how do you cultivate that relationship over time? So in this next chart, what we looked at was breaking down the median gift amount by different schedule type, by kind of recurring frequency, and breaking it down into the recurring gifts and the one-time gifts. So what we can see is that for monthly, the median gift amount on the actual recurring schedule was around $26, if I remember correctly. But the extra supplemental one-time gifts for monthly donors was around $77 median gift amount, which is by far, as you can see, kind of stand out across the different schedule types. However, we kind of think this kind of represents a opportunity. So when we then looked at okay, the percent of recurring donors making those additional one-time gifts, only about 30% of monthly donors were doing that. So, kind of taken in combination with the previous slides,
actually, that high median one-time gift amount could, in a way, kind of reflect something that's not necessarily working that great across the sector at the moment, which is that are recurring donors being invited to participate in other ways to kind of give to kind of other programs, which maybe the organization is being involved with. Because what we might expect to see if we were to engage monthly donors differently was actually that this percentage would go up. So more monthly donors would make extra supplemental gifts. And what that will probably do is bring down this median gift amount over time, right? Because you're broadening that participation, and maybe people kind of start chipping in slightly lower amounts as you broaden that giving. So we kind of think that that seems to represent an interesting opportunity that we'd like to kind of keep analyzing and thinking about, which is how are you engaging with your monthly givers once they're on that schedule? Are you kind of frequently getting in touch, asking for potentially extra supplemental gifts depending on what extra programs might be running? So, in closing, just one thing I want to emphasize is that these patterns are kind of drawn out across thousands of organizations, right? And within this, there's always a lot of variation at that organizational level. So some are doing it much better to others, and we think there's going to be a lot to learn from those who are kind of further ahead and driving things along. Recurring giving is one of the highest value things a nonprofit can build, but what we're seeing in the data is that many organizations aren't actively growing it, and that's both in terms of acquiring new donors as recurring, but also then thinking about how you're cultivating that relationship over time after that. And from our side of the kind of data commons, we're hoping to build on this work. So this is our first piece of research into like the broad state of recurring using FVP data, and in future, kind of we're hoping to maybe be able to publish metrics more relevant or specific to recurring in our quarterly reports as well, so we can kind of see how things are evolving over time.
SPEAKER_01Which you know I love to hear.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And I'm sure everybody here does too. James, this was phenomenal and so helpful. I did want to add one thing, and then James, if you have anything to wrap, please add. I'm in Toronto working with the Canadian Red Cross right now. And what actually stemmed their entire investment in their sustainer program was looking at benchmark data. They're one of the organizations that's a part of the MR benchmarks report, and they realized in their org size that they were significantly far behind on recurring giving growth. And that data, a very specific graph that they got shown in benchmarking, was like a light bulb moment. It was like, whoa, like we have to do something. So I'm so grateful to partners like Giving Tuesday Data Commons and the Fundraising Effectiveness Project that provide these insights. Because I think hopefully for all of you, that maybe you're like, I want so does really to work on our monthly giving, that this is so beneficial to making the case that it's important. So, James, again, if you have anything to wrap with, I think this was so great.
SPEAKER_02Uh no, no, just yeah, we'll always kind of welcome feedback as well on those kind of metrics as we look to develop them. So if you have any kind of thoughts or ways in which you found using data really helpful, like always feel free to get in touch because we'd really value that kind of feedback.
SPEAKER_01Amazing. James, appreciate you so much.
SPEAKER_05Thank you.
SPEAKER_01And with that, I'm gonna bring up Matt to the stage. Matt is the director of community fundraising at World Central Kitchen. And how this all came to be, my husband and I used to live in Los Angeles. And when the Los Angeles fires took place, we immediately donated to World Central Kitchen. And they had this wonderful email funnel that we were on in our donor journey. And my husband was the one who had his email address. And so he, knowing what I do for work, when the email came in preparation for Giving Tuesday, that they had this amazing goal to acquire 20,000 monthly donors. They had rebranded their monthly giving program. Of course, Daniel forwarded it to me. I posted it on LinkedIn, it became like this massive conversation on LinkedIn. And so, anyways, I was like, wait, and I talked to Matt and and their team at the time, but it's been obviously months. And so this is the like inside scoop. I love breaking down like what actually happened. So I think it's so beneficial to everybody to hear. So, with that, Matt, I'll go ahead and bring your slides up and let you take it away. So, thank you, one, for all that you do. We love supporting you. I think Kat, actually on our team, is a monthly donor as well. So you have some super fans.
SPEAKER_04Well, thank you. That's so kind of you. And also just want to at the top thank you for highlighting our work and starting that conversation on LinkedIn. It's it's been so beneficial to us. So thank you. So excited to be with you all today. Just really briefly want to cover off on who we are at World Central Kitchen before we dive into our monthly giving program and what we did for Giving Tuesday. So, briefly, uh World Central Kitchen was founded in 2010, and we are first on the front lines for community, humanitarian or climate disasters, providing meals to folks affected by said disasters and crisis. And since 2010, we've been able to distribute over 600 million meals across the world. So, so much of that is powered by our communities and folks that support our work. So, really excited to be talking to you about our monthly giving program. And then just one again before diving in, I have the honor of sharing all of this fabulous work and sharing the progress from the conversation around rebranding our monthly program to where we are now. But this was not done in a silo. There are so many hands and individuals who supported this work and just want to send kudos and honor those folks as well, because it certainly takes a village. So, quickly, as you can imagine at World Central Kitchen, so much of our work is around disasters and these crises. And these crises are also, we see large spikes in giving, because folks who are moved by, like Dana said, the LA wildfires
and our presence there or somewhere else around the world are moved to give. And that frontline, that need never stops. But what we are also realizing, especially as these crises continue and get even more complex, is that we need sustainable funds to be able to not only have disaster reaction, but readiness as well. So there was a tension there where we needed to, we were having these big donor spikes when crises were happening. In between crises, especially around our monthly giving donor acquisition, it went kind of quiet or flatlined a little bit. And we saw a need for reliable revenue for this said readiness. Again, what we needed was revenue that doesn't wait for the next disaster, a community with a defined role and understanding of how they were supporting our work, and that consistent and predictable revenue for again being able to prepare for the next disaster. So with that came the rebrand of our monthly giving program called Kitchen Core. So Kitchen Core came from a few things here. So we say that it's many hands, one kitchen. And that's very that resonates with our work on the ground as well. But the chef light the fires on the ground to feed our communities and our kitchen core keep them burning. And there are four pillars there that came into this rebrand. So a sense of belonging. This positions our donors as the steady critical energy behind our work, clarity of their role so reflects our collaborative kitchen model, but that everybody is a part of feeding these communities. Alignment, brand alignment, internally and externally, we have both a volunteer core and a chef core, which is a community of chefs around the world. So there was familiarity in the WCK community with what this new core was going to be. And then finally, global reach. So this term and the idea of thinking about kitchen and everybody coming together really translates, especially as we think about expanding our international donor base. So diving in quickly to how we then ingrain this into our Giving Tuesday strategy. So we had three goals here. One was to launch Kitchen Course, so officially introduce this new brand to not only our current monthly giving community, but then also to invite new donors into the community as well. We set a lofty goal of welcoming 20,000 new monthly donors. We then made this public and tailored that communication across 10 different emails, not only Giving Tuesday, but end of year, and then also made eight distinct segments based on giving history, whether they were already part of our monthly giving program. We continued the conversation with urgency-driven language, specifically talking about the urgency around readiness and the need for that. And then finally, we had an omni-channel approach where we utilized email, paid media, and web marketing. And then finally, we also had a major match opportunity where folks who were new to the monthly giving community, we added $50, which was about the average gift size for our monthly giving community. And then towards year end, we extended that to $100 per new monthly gift or monthly giving plan. So quickly, the results here, and then I will dive into some of the learnings because I think those are so important as well. So for Giving Tuesday, just on that one day, we saw over $60,000 in new recurring commitments. And that was equal to just over 1,300 new monthly donors. And that day alone accounted for about 52% of our total campaign. And then finally, when you look at the full campaign, you'll see those number breakdowns as well. And I think the glaring thing here, or the number that stands out, is that 2800 number is not 20,000, right? So that was certainly something that we a challenge for us trying to track towards that goal throughout the entire campaign. But when we took a step back and really thought about the impact that these new donors are going to have on our community and on our ability to be ready at a moment's notice, and thinking about five-year lifetime value over about an 8% annual churn, we're calculating over $6 million there, which would account for multiple responses and activations and preparedness for us around the world. So when you take a step back and think about that lifetime value, this is a truly significant campaign for us. And just briefly, some honest takeaways here. We saw that that urgency-driven messaging around framing around crisis readiness, night just crisis reaction really resonated with our community. The email segmentation, so giving areas of support, giving tears, their donor status, having that tailored messaging allows to have a more personalized conversation. And then folks really responded well to the Kitchen
Core brand, creating that unity around identity and community is so much of our organization's ethos. And it really stood, really was highlighted here as well as folks who joined. As I mentioned, what we didn't see work maybe on the surface is that we had a goal of 20,000 new donors and we acquired about 2,800. So, first of all, was that goal realistic? I think, in hindsight, what we would have done differently is create a tiered public goal approach where we were slowly creating a more realistic flow for our team as well as external benchmarks that we could hit and surpass. I am personally a big proponent of that transparency and creating goals for your public to work, for your donors to come together and work towards. I think even though we might not hit our lofty goal, tracking towards something was really important for us. And then we had a contingency plan where though we didn't necessarily hit that 20,000 number, we were still able to extend our match into the end of year, driving even more plans throughout tracking until the new year. And then another takeaway just to highlight is that there was a lot of goals that we had going on at that time. This was our first introduction to a new monthly giving program as a community. Up until this point, our monthly donors and sustainers were coming to us fairly organically. There wasn't really a push or a lot of conversation around driving those folks. They may not have necessarily received the communication or have been brought into the community enough to feel connected to our goal. And so we took all of those lessons, and Kitchen Core Today has built on a lot of those lessons and the momentum from Giving Tuesday. So we now have a full welcome series, which is a three-part welcome series with a personalized video from Jose Andres, our founder, really inviting those people and thanking them for being a part of that community. We have another spring acquisition campaign, which is happening now, using that omni-channel approach and using a lot of the messaging components that we found really were strong during Giving Tuesday and end of year. We're attempting to reduce churn by the ongoing gratitude-focused campaign through email and paid media, just truly thanking folks who are in the community for what they do and what they make possible. And then looking to increase retention through a monthly newsletter, which actually launches in a couple days, as well as a webinar series just specifically for this community, so that they can get more connected to our work, the folks on the ground, et cetera. And just quickly, I think a lesson for us that could be applied to other monthly giving programs is that we really found that this brand belonging, creating a brand and identity around our giving community was a conversion lever and really was effective. We still are proponents of setting goals and setting goals that you can own publicly, I think is so important and telling your whole story, whether you surpass it, whether you are working towards it. Everyone that contributed to that goal has a significant role in our community and our work. The launch is not just the beginning, right? So we shared that we did the launch, but then there's that important onboarding and welcoming and the newsletter and a really thoughtful retention strategy. And I also would like to highlight that lifetime value is such an important part of the conversation and should really be highlighted with leadership because what could be seen as potentially even a modest campaign, when reframed in that lifetime value, really shows some incredible results and transformational giving over a period of time. So that is what I have for you all for Kitchen Core. And I appreciate you all listening. I saw a lot of questions. So I apologize.
SPEAKER_01No, yes, Matt, that was incredible. And so many people were saying thank you so much for the honesty and transparency. And this is why we're doing these, is because I think sometimes like we only see, which, okay, first of all, can we also just give you a huge congratulations and applause for like running that campaign for having the goal? Like, I don't think we celebrate that enough. Like, sure, it didn't get to the number you wanted, but six million dollars in lifetime value, having a new brand, sending it. I'm sure that campaign started the conversations for what now is a spring act. Okay, all the confetti is coming, all the love. I love it, all the high fives. Yeah. 2800 donors is amazing. Like, I don't want anybody to feel this is such a great example of this. Like, I'm sure that created so much more conversations internally about leading to the retention, about what we want to do for spring, about what we could do for Giving Tuesday next year. And if you hadn't led with the monthly giving request, like would that impact have even happened?
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01Probably not.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. And it has really made us think about even in activation-based, like more of a moment in time-based campaigning, how we leverage monthly giving over and
how we're optimizing our giving pages now moving forward to be optimized towards monthly giving because we see that value over time.
SPEAKER_01Yes, this is incredible. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna bring everyone on, and then I am gonna do QA. So I'm gonna bring James back on, I'm gonna bring Seth back on. We have open kind of dialogue here. So there were so many amazing questions. I'm gonna start with one that was asked around preventing churn. So, Chelsea, what are you doing? This is Matt related, what are you doing with this gratitude-focused campaign to prevent churn?
SPEAKER_04You kind of talked about a little bit with the retention strategy, but I think we have the maybe the strategic perception that bringing people more into the conversation, engaging them with more folks on the ground who are actually doing the work is leading towards helping to prevent churn. Again, prior to the launch of this rebrand and all of the welcome series, the webinar, et cetera, we were not engaging this population directly, fairly indirectly. So I think this will be a strong test for us this year, but we are confident that this enhanced engagement through a number of these different areas is going to help reduce churn because they'll feel closer to the community in the work.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Just having something that is intentional. Marissa asked specifically about the welcome series once that deployed. Is it right after the first gift or is it more than 30 days after joining?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's about three days after the first gift is we send that welcome. And so it's it's fairly automated. We've created a really wonderful automated system, but once the gift is processed in our CRM, it then triggers that email to be sent. Perfect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I normally agree in a similar time frame of something that's sent pretty immediately after. And then that follows them and then turns into, like you said, you have webinar experiences, you have the newsletter that's specifically for them. So creating a more curated, like personalized experience for the kitchen core community. Sure. Heather had a great question around urgency-driven messaging. So how to add it when it's not urgent? We had a recent crisis that spiked giving, but how do we maintain?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, a question that so many of us in urgent spaces or organizations that focus on this type of work are constantly pushing or challenged with. And I would say that we utilize a lot of what we were able to do with sustained revenue. So, for example, and I think it's very timely, some of the messaging that we have now as we're preparing for hurricane season, it allows us to do have kitchens ready to be deployed at a moment's notice when the hurricane is about to approach. We're able to be able to pay contractors and chefs immediately to be on the ground. So, what we're, I think, framing what we're able to do at a moment's notice with proper funding and preparation is how we've approached the conversation.
SPEAKER_01I was just gonna say, you are positioning them to be the team that allows you to be prepared.
SPEAKER_04Exactly.
SPEAKER_01So when we know these things are going to happen at some point, and we are now prepared because of your gift, because of you being in this community with us. Yeah, love that. James, this is a question for you from Madeline. Any data on the giving patterns for people who give to multiple organizations? So, me as an example, I shared the pattern of number of orgs received monthly gifts. How many people are inclined to give to multiple organizations on a monthly basis?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a great question. I think I mentioned in the chat that unfortunately it's not something we can track in FEP at the moment because we have unique donor IDs kind of per organization. So, yeah, it's not something we've been able to analyze directly, but yeah, certainly like with maybe data sources in the future be really interested in that. Because, you know, one of the things which we might be interested in being able to identify is, for example, people giving monthly to one organization, but maybe who don't give to others, like they could be really good candidates to you know convert to recurring if you know that they are interested in that. So yeah, unfortunately, not something directly we can analyze in the data right now. But that's a really good question.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love that too. There's always so much that we can find out. There has been some more data released around the dollar amount going down, but there being more transactions. So I feel like anecdotally, you could think about us being multi-passionate, just how we think about. So I'm just curious for everybody in the room. I don't know if you know this, but how many subscriptions do you have? And likely, like from if I think about me, like I'm wearing, I rent a clothing subscription newly to be a more like green and recycled with my clothing. So I'm not buying fast fashion as much. And it curbs my shopping habit. But like HelloFresh, our entertainment subscriptions, my Claude subscription, my doorbell subscription for security. Like our, if you just think about that, I would imagine that's kind of similar to our multi-passionate affinity for causes. And then that could be a reason why we're seeing dollar amounts going lower, is just because we are giving across to more. So it'd
be really interesting to see when data is available around that to track some of that. This is a question from Stacey that I thought was interesting, and I'll kind of float it up to the group, and maybe this is Matt, but anybody could take it. What's the maximum number of recurring supporters one staff person can manage if the majority are local supporters?
SPEAKER_04I can't necessarily speak to the specific about local supporters. However, I'll I'll speak more specifically to our team and what they're managing right now. So just for context, following Giving Tuesday, we were able to hire for a manager of monthly giving. So her name is amazing to be able to have someone who is just solely focused on this work. And we recognize like that is a privilege as well. So I want to also highlight that work. But she right now we are she is managing about 75,000 individuals who have recurring giving campaigns and communicating with them. I recognize that is a number of people, but however, there is so much partnership with our communications team to create thoughtful automations for a lot of this communication, working with paper marketing to help to reach out and steward folks as well as creating these moments like webinars and whatnot that are bringing these folks together all at once.
SPEAKER_01Amazing. Yeah, agreed. And as much as you can automate too, there's so many ways that you can do really personalized automation these days with AI as well. I think this is going to be a Seth question. So, Seth, this question is we launched a small monthly giving campaign in February. Congratulations. What messaging do you use to get these donors back without knowing why their payments failed?
SPEAKER_03It's a great question. In terms of messaging narrative, I mean, really making them the hero. And I would just frame it that way, and not really pointing to the specifics as to why the payment would fail, is where I would go. Mechanically, there are different ways that your software can work for you on that front. And so, like there's some organizations that'll have certain routes and methods around payment retries, and then others have a different way of doing it. Like ours is very AI heavy and just will kind of push through and punch through those as much as they possibly can to really mitigate that number. But yeah, definitely it's two-parter. Number one, where are you, what is the payment retry method and mechanism you have in place right now? And then what is the messaging to those folks?
SPEAKER_01I literally am a prime example of this. So one of my credit cards just expired and it's on multiple of my monthly donations. And you know what's actually interesting now that I say that, I think I've only maybe it's just I've only seen two organizations that have, and it's taken me at least email two or three before I've actually taken the action to change my credit card just because I'm busy. Like I saw it and then I forget, and then like the next week, the next one happens. So, Seth, to your point, like making sure you know what the credit card retry is and what that communication is is really important. This is one of those, like maybe you mean, okay, I'm gonna take a note and audit this in our existing tool, is a really great leave behind.
SPEAKER_03One thing you want to look at is how many steps inside of those retries, like what are the the company, like there's a like most people are gonna have at least four different touch points along that behind the curtain. And so you want to really understand essentially what are those touch points. And if anybody is having that issue, just shoot me a message and I can, I don't want to get into the weeds to it here, but we can walk through it.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. I guess the best. Okay, last question, and then I have a few announcements related to Monthly Giving Awareness Week. Sophie, I saw yours and Matt, I might send this one to you. How do you handle messaging around a monthly giving brand without alienating major donors who give annually or in larger one-time gifts? How do you make sure they don't feel overlooked or deprioritized?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this is a wonderful question. So this is where I think that segmentation really comes into play here. You look at some of the value of these populations and we'll exclude major donors, for example, asking them to become a monthly part of this program, recognizing that their contribution comes in a different way. We utilize some propensity tools to help us recognize, for example, grassroots donors who are giving, you know, maybe one or a couple times at lower levels who might have a propensity to become a monthly donor. So I think for that, it's so much about digging into your data and creating those communication segments because not every message or every ask is going to be appropriate for every donor or everyone in your community. So that's certainly recognized that.
That's right. Amazing. I want to thank, I'll leave you all on here for a minute, but thank you all so much for joining today. Our time flies by. We do, I mentioned the LTV calculator. Somebody else mentioned it in their program as well that they use. We have an LTV calculator on our monthly Giving Builder website that you can use and input your amounts or some dream amounts and see what LTV could look like. And it'll show you what the value is and also how much you can look to spend to acquire new monthly donors based on the LTV. I get asked all the time, like, what's a good cost for acquisition? And it's like, well, what's the lifetime value of your monthly donor community? Because a lot of times we think about, oh, it has to be $10, it has to be $2. And like that is just not reality. And so by you looking at the lifetime value, it allows you to be able to calculate that. So this is a free forecast that you can jump into and utilize. And then we did share this with you. But if you are looking to take like your first step in growing, building a plan for your monthly giving program, having a tracker tool, writing landing page copy, doing the branding work, putting together an acquisition plan, retention strategy, that's what the builder's for is to guide you through a personalized curated tool to do that for $49 to make it extremely accessible. And then I cannot state this enough. Apply, apply, apply to highlight your program for the monthlies. So the monthlies, again, it's like our webbies, it's our version. I hope that World Central Kitchen applies. You will get highlighted on the Missions Movements podcast and a bunch of other goodies. But truly, like I was just with Shanda from Cat Adoption and she shared, she won the medium-sized organization, I believe. And she said, by just going through the application process, it created so many ideas for our team of brainstorms that we never would have thought of if we didn't go through the application process. Yes, Karen already applied. Amazing. So there's a ton more resources coming to you for monthly giving awareness week. And then we also have the Q3 and Q4 state, this exact recurring giving series coming up on August 18th and November 17th. So it'll be the same structure. We will have data, some new trends, and then we will have a curated case study for you to be able to learn and ask questions and learn from your peers. So, Seth, James, Matt, everyone who's here today, thank you so much. Happy Monthly Giving Awareness Week, and we hope to see you in August.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Missions Devement. If you enjoyed our conversation and found it helpful, I would love for you to take a moment to leave a review where everyone is. Your feedback helps us create more change makers, like you, and continue bringing impactful stories and strategies to the show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button too so you'll never miss an episode of this. And until next time, keep turning your mission.