Article

3 Strategies to Keep Your Recurring Donors

Updated:

September 3, 2025

Fundraising

3 Strategies to Keep Your Recurring Donors

Updated:

June 2, 2026

Fundraising

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Monthly or recurring donors are crucial to your fundraising.

As the retention rate goes up, so does the only fundraising metric that really matters: lifetime value.

So, how can you move your monthly giving retention from good to great?

3 Ways to Keep More of Your Recurring Donors

1. Keep them happy and engaged

In our study, we saw that only 38% of organizations changed their email strategy for recurring donors. And only 9 organizations were sending a gift acknowledgement of any kind — email or in print — by the third month.

One strategy to try to keep your recurring donors happy and engaged is to simply thank and acknowledge their gift more often, maybe even every month.

Key Point: Treat your recurring donors well, better, and differently to keep them around longer.

2. Don’t let them expire

Even happy recurring donors may lapse simply because their Credit Card is expired, lost, or cancelled. 68% of organizations were able to automatically update a lost Credit Card through their payment provider.

Key Point: Use payment methods that make it more likely donors won’t lapse.

3. Get them back

When the best attempts to keep recurring donors happy fail, you have to try and win donors back. Quickly. And personally.

For organizations who did not automatically update the lost card, 75% did not reach out to us at all to get an updated card.

Key Point: Quickly identify lapsed payments and reach out in personal ways to win them back.

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Brady Josephson

Brady is a charity nerd, entrepreneur, digital marketer, professor, and writer. He’s the Vice President of Innovation and Optimization at NextAfter — a fundraising research lab and consultancy on a mission to unleash the most generous generation in the history of the world. Brady works with nonprofits, thought leaders, and philanthropic partners to develop research and create content that can help organizations reach more people, acquire more donors, and generate more dollars to fund their world-changing work. He’s spent his entire career in the nonprofit world working for nonprofits, in technology, and as a consultant. He’s an international speaker whose work and writing have been featured in The Huffington Post, Christianity Today, NPR, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Brady lives just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with his wife Liz, dog Melly, and cat Thor.