How to retain your donors – and why you should prioritise this over attracting new donors

5 May 2025  |  Stuart Palmer

How would an 18% increase in yearly active giving benefit your charity and the cause you support? 

According to the 2024 Virtuous Nonprofit Benchmark Report, that is the potential reward for successfully persuading your existing donors to give a bit more – by increasing either the amount or frequency of their gifts.

Before we look at some strategies for achieving this, let’s explore why you should prioritise reaching out to existing donors rather than bringing in new ones.

Motivating existing donors is cost efficient

You will be aware of how much investment is needed to attract new donors to your cause. 

Attracting new donors involves carrying out various activities such as conducting research to understand your audience, creating marketing campaigns, collecting assets such as article content and photographs, sharing content on social media, analysing performance data and tweaking future campaigns, etc.

All of these actions consume time and money, and the conversion rate tends to be low – between 1 and 4 donations per 100 visitors according to some sources.

In contrast, you won’t need to spend money on researching your existing donors, and with upselling campaigns (see below), your costs are already being partially offset by your donors’ existing contributions.

In short, motivating existing donors is easier and more cost-effective than bringing in new ones.

3 key strategies for retaining donors

It may be easier to engage with existing donors than finding new ones, but that doesn’t mean you can simply send out a generic email asking for more support.

For a more strategic approach, divide your campaigns into three types: retention, reactivation and upselling.

Retention

The goal of retention campaigns is simply to ensure your recurring donors stick with their plan and your occasional givers don’t forget you. Your aim should be to ensure your donors feel appreciated and empowered. Make sure you thank your donors frequently and tie the success of your campaigns specifically to their support (e.g., “We re-housed over 150 cats last month thanks to your generous gifts. Thank you so much for your ongoing support.”)

Reactivation

Reactivation campaigns are aimed at lapsed donors. It can be effective to link these campaigns to the triggers that previously motivated the donor to give (e.g., “Your support during the devastating wildfires in California was invaluable in supporting homeless residents. Sadly, South Koreans are now experiencing the tragic loss of their homes and possessions through unprecedented fires.”)

Upselling

Upselling campaigns are focused on increasing the value or frequency of donations. For example, your campaign might explain how a one off donor can support your most ambitious projects by committing to a monthly plan. Give the donor the active hero role for greater impact (e.g., “Your monthly gift will play a vital part in ensuring we can provide aid whenever and wherever it’s needed.”)

Some specific tactics for bumping up donations include:

• Focusing your campaigns by using demographics to identify donors with the financial ability to up their gifts.
• Using personalisation tools, including AI, to customise campaigns using donor-specific impact targets.
• Designing your ‘dynamic gift arrays’ (aka suggested gift amounts) to subtly encourage higher amounts (e.g., if you want the donor to give £10 a month, giving options of £5, £10 and £30 might be more effective than £2, £5 and £10.
• Creating ‘special gift ask’ campaigns to coincide with awareness days or your charity’s anniversary, etc.
  

How to monitor campaign success

As with all marketing campaigns, you will need to pay attention to some key metrics to maximise return on investment (ROI).

The two areas to focus on are ‘net donor retention’ and ‘donation expansion’. 

The easiest way to work out donor retention is to first calculate your churn rate using the formula: Churn rate = (L / (C1 + C2)) x 100, where C1 is your donor count at the start of the period, L is the number of donors you lost during that period and C2 is the number you gained.

So if you started with 50, lost 10 and gained 30 donors in a year, your churn rate would be 10/(50+30) x 100 = 12.5% 

Your retention rate is then 100 minus your churn rate (87.5%)

To calculate annual donation expansion, you will need to separate out those donors who were active over a two year period, calculate the overall difference in donation value between year one and year two and then work out the percentage change.

So if your active donors donated £4,500 in one year and £5,200 the next, that is a difference of £700 or a donation expansion rate of 15.6% 

We would love to hear about the results from your retention, reactivation and upselling campaigns. Did you see an improvement in donor retention? Did your donation expansion rate reach double figures? Let us know which campaigns were particularly successful.