If you ask the man in the street, you will get 1000 different answers to this question:
I am a regular donor:
because I donate my 1% once a year
twice a year I collect my child's winter and summer clothes and donate them to the needy
every month I drop some money in the church collection box
several times a year I donate to a charity, etc.
And they are right, because from their point of view they do think about others regularly, but as an NGO their regularity is pretty much irregular and unpredictable.
On the NGO side, a regular donor is defined as someone who makes a predictable and regular financial donation, and the reason for this can be easily understood.
Successful long-term strategies are based on a simple principle: we need to get the most out of our donors with the least amount of effort, so that we can devote the most money and capacity to the cause we care about. And we can achieve this if we have as many people as possible who are devoted to our cause and are willing to give to us not just once, but predictably and regularly, without us having to ask and watch to ask on time every time.
Building up a regular donor base is not a quick process, but it is undoubtedly the most secure. However, the first step is to determine who can be considered a regular donor by donation type.
Types of donations and measures of success from the NGO perspective:
1% donors
I get income from them once a year, but I can never be sure if I'm really getting it from the same people and if they are really going to give, and I can never know how much they are going to give. I have contact/data for very few of them, so for very few I can take any steps to ensure that we can secure this income, even at a minimal level. The 1% donation is therefore only half a success.
Donation box users
I have a good chance of getting a donation if I put the box in the right place at the right time, but I don't know how much I'll get, from whom exactly and whether they will give again when they see the box again. So the donation box's income is also a half-success.
One-time donors
People who honour us with donations from time to time by cheque, bank transfer or card payment. They have a pretty good chance of giving if I call them cleverly, and because I have some contact/information for them (email address, phone number, postal address) I can contact them and encourage them to donate more, but I can't be absolutely sure if they will actually give next time.
One-time donations that also generate data are therefore considered a medium success.
Regular behaving donors
People who can prove that they have given me money several times in a given year. Sometimes they give, sometimes they pay by cheque, sometimes they give or buy items from me, they may give their 1%, but I can link all these activities to one person and they can be proven to give money several times in a year, but they give in an unpredictable way. If, for example, someone asks for 12 cheques in January and promises to pay every month, I cannot consider that a predictable donation, because what if they abandon the cheque or forget to post it? What if they pay 2 cheques in a month and then nothing for 5 months?. It is precisely because of this uncertainty that, however "regular" someone has been, let's give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and call them a regular behaving donor instead. These donors are already very valuable and donations from them also fall into the medium success category, as I can communicate with them, they have shown commitment, but they are still quite unpredictable.
A real regular donor
A person who I know about that they give to me on a regular, predictable basis. I know because they have set up a monthly bank transfer, or maybe a bank group form. This is the person for whom I can say with the utmost confidence that I will receive a donation from, almost 100% of the time. That is total success! Of course, there is some doubt here as to when they will stop donating completely or suspend it temporarily, but these are the people who are most effective at getting donations: I no longer have to convince them to commit, I "just" have to keep them.
Fundraising is never going to be a simple process, but there will always be two parts: recruiting/acquiring donors and retaining donors. Of these two processes, acquisition is the bigger part of the work. We are at our most effective when we build our processes and campaigns with the mindset that, over time, we will get to the most effective donor version, where individuals are giving to us predictably and reliably.
Author/Source: Ágnes Romet-Balla