How to Build and Keep the Support of 1,000 Members

14 Apr How to Build and Keep the Support of 1,000 Members

15 April 2024

By David Allen, Development for Conservation

If you have an organizational goal of reaching 1,000 donors but don’t know how to get there, this post is for you. Some of it you will already know. Some of it will be intuitively obvious. And some of it will be completely new. Your comments and feedback are most welcome.

Step 1 – How to think about where you are now

In several of my training sessions, I have used a graphic of a pond that I borrowed from Jeff Brooks. Jeff is a marketing consultant in Seattle who has written more about nonprofit marketing than anyone I know.

In Jeff’s pond, there is an inflow stream and an outflow stream. The concept is pretty simple from there. When the volume of water entering the pond is greater than the volume leaving, the pond grows larger. When it’s less, it shrinks.

When the number of donors you have coming in new (or returning after having lapsed) is greater than the number leaving, the donor pond grows larger. When it’s less, it shrinks.

Theoretically, you could pinch off the donor outflow completely, and the donor pond would just grow and grow and grow. In fact, this never happens. Water has an uncanny knack for finding ways to leave and so do donors. The national average attrition is around 50%. Land trusts more or less following the advice in my renewal posts are regularly reducing their attrition rates to 25-30% (70-75% renewal), and a few are getting down to 20% or less.

In theory, you should do what you can to pinch off the attrition, but the bigger factor will always be how many new donors are coming in.

So then the question is “Where are my donors coming from now?” If you’re like most land trusts, your donor sources are not infinite. Donors pretty much come from snail mail marketing, electronic marketing, events, and happenstance. And within each category, there are several different variations.

The point is you should TRACK where donors are coming from as well as simply counting them.

As an aside, “online giving” is NOT a source because it doesn’t tell you how that person got interested in the first place. A new donor might have gotten inspired by an event, a piece of mail, or a Facebook ad – before deciding to make a gift online.

When you understand where your donors are coming from, you will also be able to see that some sources are more effective than others in fostering loyalty – and high renewal rates. Will these new households be one-and-done donors, or will they become lifetime friends who leave the land trust in their wills on their passing?

Step 2 – Budget for Marketing

For most land trusts that I have met, marketing work is folded into the annual operating budget. Postage, printing, online creation software, photography, event venues, food, and beverage are just generally included, as opposed to being called out specifically for marketing. Much less subject to evaluation metrics.

So here’s what you want to know.

• How much did we SPEND on marketing last year? (Use an educated guess if you must)
• How many new members were recruited as a result?
• How much, expressed as an average, did each one cost us to recruit?

As you will see in a moment, your answers to these questions should not be evaluated against some arbitrary standard. I’ve seen values as low as $50 and as high as $350. What matters is that your answer will give YOU a baseline against which to measure future progress.

Let’s say, for my examples below, that YOUR number is $100. That means that, on average, you spend $100 on marketing for every new donor you recruit.

For the next fiscal year budget, include some specific line item for marketing – in addition to all the other expenses you already budget. Let’s say $10,000. This is a three-year program, meaning that you will be asking the decision-makers on the Board and staff to spend $10,000 on marketing – over and above what is already being spent – every year for three years.

Regardless of the outcome in year one.

If your calculus was that every new member cost $100, then you might predict initially that your new marketing budget would recruit 100 MORE new members than your baseline before you started spending this new budget. If your baseline was 80 new members per year, your prediction would be 180 this year.

Now, take your $10,000 and spend it on activities you think will work. What YOU end up doing will be a little different for each land trust. Over the first three years, the general idea is to keep doing more and more of those activities that work and less and less of those activities that don’t. Just keep trying to recruit as many new members as possible for $10,000.

You will want to keep track of the cost for recruiting a member as well as your overall renewal rate. Hopefully, you will be able to show that the cost of recruiting new members is coming down from your baseline, both because:

1. recruitment activities tend to get better results over time and
2. because you will be doing more and more of what seems to be working and less and less of what isn’t.

You will want to know these two numbers and their general trendline over these first three years before proceeding to Step 3.

I would also encourage you to track these two numbers for each activity. If you are spending money on direct mail letters, engagement events, Facebook ads, or whatever, calculate these two numbers for each one separately. That’s the only way you will know what is working.

Step 3 – Plan for Success

You plan for success by assuming success and working backward. So if our goal is 1,000 members, we start by assuming that we already have 1,000 members. What’s our attrition rate? $25%? OK, now we need to recruit 250 new members – every year – to maintain that level of support – you might say to “tread water” in the pond.

And what will that cost? $100 per member recruited? OK, we need to budget at least $25,000 per year for marketing – every year – just to maintain that level of annual support.

Your number might be a little as $15,000 or as much as $60,000 to recruit 250 new members.

Every year.

Because once we’ve established a certain level of inflow, we will need to keep that flow going lest our pond shrink right back down to where it was.

Cheers and Have a Good Week!

-da

PS: Your comments on these posts are welcomed and warmly requested. If you have not posted a comment before, or if you are using a new email address, please know that there may be a delay in seeing your posted comment. That’s my SPAM defense at work. I approve all comments as soon as I am able during the day.

Photo by Nowaja courtesy of Pixabay