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Why do Donors Stop Giving?

As fundraisers, we spend a lot of time thinking about reasons why a supporter would donate to our cause. Hundreds of hours of love, care and attention are poured into passionately expressing your charities vision, creating powerful adverts and compelling campaign appeals. Focusing on the core messages of your charity and how they relate to your target donors is the best way of securing new support. However, in order to secure that crucial second donation, or to convert ad hoc supporters into regular donors, we need to understand the reasons why donors stop giving.

These are some of the most common explanations given for why a donor stops supporting a charity:

I can't really afford it

I wanted to support another charity/cause

I don't agree with what your charity is doing at the moment

I'm not sure what you do

I will donate again some point in the future, when I can afford to

I support a lot of charities and like to vary which ones I donate to

I was cutting down on a lot of my direct debits (!!)

I forgot I was donating to you (!!)

Many of these reasons will be familiar to professional fundraisers. As diverse as they appear at first, however, they all boil down to one underlying reason:

Your donor has stopped giving because your cause has ceased to engage them on a personal level.

In other words, your charity is no longer relevant enough to your donor's life for them to continue giving. How do you avoid this happening? The most successful means of keeping those donations flowing is to build a meaningful, two-way relationship between your charity and your supporters. And the way you build a relationship is by communicating in a meaningful way.

The bad publicity that the sector has experienced over the last year has made some fundraisers reticent about keeping in touch, even with their proven supporters. This is an unnecessary and potentially extremely damaging trend. It is a misplaced concern also, for a simple reason: people only become irritated with irrelevant, excessive or impersonal communication.

If you make your charity communications targeted, relevant and personal, then your supporters are likely to become more engaged with your cause, rather than alienated.

It's all about the segments

Here is where charity CRM software can be of real assistance. Instead of a 'one size fits all' outreach program for all of your supporters, a CRM allows you to break down your supporter base into an unlimited number of 'segments', or donor types.

This allows you to set up a unique donor communication program for each type of supporter, linked in with your strategic goals. So each supporter will only receive relevant content based on their donor behaviour, preferences and interests. Not only does a personalised communication program increase the chances of regular donations from your supporters, but your supporters will actually look forward to receiving communications from you.

Without the right software, such a complex marketing and fundraising program can seem intimidating, but a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) application, such as our SubscriberCRM, makes it a matter of child’s play. By linking into Microsoft Office mail merges, email marketing applications and accounting software, you can use your CRM to build a comprehensive view of a donor's relationship with your charity, and use this strategic information to build a communication program that deepens your connection.