The Single Biggest Growth Opportunity Available to Your Nonprofit

Do you know how many of your current donors increased their giving last year? If not, you’re missing out on the single biggest growth opportunity available to your nonprofit.

Before I break down what this means, let me make a distinction between tracking donor increases and donor retention. Most nonprofits already do a good job tracking whether a donor is giving to their organization again each year - the retention rate. I’ve written before about the very real danger that having an average retention rate can be to your organization.

Though most organizations monitor retention pretty well, they miss the important next step of tracking whether their donors are increasing their giving over time.

Here’s the thing: if you don’t track donor increases, you will most definitely miss huge opportunities to rapidly grow and scale your organization.

In fact, improving this single metric can impact the bottom line of your organization more than anything else.

Having just a few key conversations with your major donors and inspiring them to increase their giving can dramatically grow your revenue as much as 50 percent.

Let me repeat that. You can double your existing budget just by focusing on your current donors.

Here’s the thing. You can more likely than not double your revenue just by focusing on your top 12 donors.

Most of us are guilty of getting so caught up thinking of ways to find brand new donors to increase our revenue that we completely forget about the donors we already have.

Moving up your current donor giving will always be a more effective strategy for increasing your revenue than bringing in new donors.

Why? Because you already have their buy-in - literally and figuratively. They already believe in your nonprofit’s vision and values and many of them have the capacity to give more. You just need to ask.

Your top donors are your single biggest opportunity for rapid growth. Focus your energy on building strong partnerships with existing major donors instead of chasing new donors.

Tracking donor increases allows you to have perspective on how strong partnerships are between your nonprofit and your major donors. Assessing your major donor increases provides critical insight as to how well your development shop is doing with nurturing and growing the partnerships you have with donors year over year. It will also allow you and your development team to identify real-time opportunities for bringing donors into a more invested partnership and increase your nonprofit revenue faster and more consistently.

If you don’t know your major donor gift increases already, start tracking it today.

The baseline for renewing donors is ⅓ will give more, 1/3rd will give less and ⅓ will stay the same.  But when you track this and focus on getting more than a ⅓ of renewing donors to give more, you see dramatic growth.

Most organizations can track this info using a simple spreadsheet. Once you can see which of your major donors have or have not increased their giving from previous years, make a list of the top 12 who give the most and start there. Set up a renewal meeting with each of these 12 donors - we refer to them in the workshop as your “Dynamic Dozen” - and ask them to increase their giving.

Remember, a few conversations with your top donors can dramatically increase your budget. Meeting with your top donors to lay out a compelling vision and asking them to double their gift can dramatically increase your revenue. When I take folks through this process in the 7-Figure Fundraising workshop, it’s always a massive “aha” moment for them. But it’s not just a nice theory -  it works.  

I was able to grow my organization from 6 million dollars a year to more than 12 million dollars a year just by leveraging our existing donors and inspiring more from our top donors.

Not a bad return for a few meetings with donors we already knew and who already love our nonprofit.

But this information will do nothing for you if you don’t act on it. At your upcoming renewal meetings with your top donors, be intentional and inspire them with a big vision and a big ask to double their annual gift.

Try it out, see how it works for your organization, and let me know your results.

Did you find this helpful? You can read more about our fundraising approach and learn the complete 7-Figure Fundraising system by attending our live workshop. It’s an intimate and intensive two-day training for nonprofit leaders looking to grow their organization through 5, 6, and 7-figure donations.