Flip the script on donor loss: the strategic shift every fundraiser needs

Margie Worrell: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar today. We’re so glad that you are joining us for “Flip the Script on Donor Loss: The Strategic Shift Every Fundraiser Needs” with the lovely and talented Kirst Wantland. If you would, please drop into the chat and tell us where you’re joining us from and what the weather is like. I’m Margie Worrell. I’m based in Indianapolis, where it is forty-three and rainy, and my dog does not want to go outside today. Hopefully she doesn’t chime in on the webinar and talk to us about that. Kirst, where are you located?

Kirst Wantland: I’m located in Colorado Springs.

Margie Worrell: Shout out to any folks in Colorado if you’re here. I actually have not made it outside yet, so I’m going to check what the weather is like.

Kirst Wantland: It is sunny, and it feels like sixty degrees. It’s fifty-five and sunny right now. We have this fluctuating Colorado early winter experience where it kind of feels like fake spring.

Margie Worrell: Colorado, a little piece of paradise. Right? I see we’ve got some other Coloradans in here today. And I’ve got a fellow Hoosier too, who’s surviving the cold rain. Thank you all for dropping in. We’re really glad that you’re here, no matter what the weather is like. It’s always really warm and cozy on our webinars.

Let’s run through some housekeeping items. We are going to email you the recording and the slides later today, so please don’t worry about that. You’ll be able to go back through this and share it with others. Any questions you have, please put those into the Q&A section so they don’t get lost if the chat really gets going. We want to make sure we’re able to answer your questions, and we will answer those at the end of the presentation. Don’t give up if we haven’t answered yours. We will get to it. And if you would like a copy of the slides, you can connect with us and we’ll make sure you get those.

Just in case you aren’t aware, most of you probably are, Bloomerang is software that is built for purpose. We do fundraising and donor management. We also have volunteer management pieces as well. We’re really here to help you meet your goals and accomplish your mission, whatever that may be. At the end of our session, we will have a poll where you can ask for more information about the different areas of Bloomerang. If you’re interested in learning more, please engage in our poll.

We also want to mention something very exciting. Pop into the chat and say yes if you’ve been to our GiveCon event in the past. We are announcing that GiveCon is going to be happening in Saint Louis, May seventeenth through twentieth. If you haven’t been, you really should go. Kirst presented there and did an amazing job. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about how to accomplish your mission through very strategic workshops and sessions. You can scan this QR code to learn more or visit our website. We’re really happy to be able to invite you to this amazing event.

Now it’s my pleasure to introduce Kirst Wantland, one of my favorite people. She’s a principal industry strategist here at Bloomerang. This is her LinkedIn profile if you want to learn more about her. I’m going to let her take it away because she has so much good stuff to share with you today. Thanks for being here, Kirst.

Kirst Wantland: Thank you. And I’ll just say that I unintentionally wore the same shirt as my headshot.

Margie Worrell: It’s your uniform. There we go.

Kirst Wantland: Thank you all for joining me today. I know the end of the year really does get busy. This is our most valuable time as fundraisers, so I want to take a moment and thank you all for being here, whether you’re watching live or retroactively. I’m sending that extra gratitude your way.

The really important takeaway I want you to leave with today is changing your strategic approach to retention. The strategic shift we want to make is from a reactive retention strategy to a proactive one. We’re going to talk about that concept, and we’re going to make a bit of a concept sandwich today, stacking a lot of concepts on top of one another. I’m going to encourage you to continue using the Q&A, and I’ll check in with Margie throughout to make sure you’re understanding these concepts.

Let me get to my table of contents. First, we’re going to discuss the problem, which is the current landscape for retention. Next, we’re going to have a visualization of reactive retention. I’m a visual learner, and I love including those aspects in my webinars to help correlate the underlying concept. The solution we’re going to talk about is a separate window of visibility. This is important whether you’re a Bloomerang customer or not, so you can take what you learn today and apply it to whatever system you’re using. Then we’re going to talk about the parallel between that concept and the product, which is where we get into the Bloomerang-specific part. Lastly, we’re going to pivot our strategy into the report. If you hang around toward the end, we are actually going to dive into my Bloomerang demo database and do a build-along report. We’ll spend at least ten minutes on this report, and it’s going to unlock a lot of visibility for you and help you see a lot of the behaviors around your donors who are about to lapse. I’m really excited to share this content with you. And then lastly, we’ll have Q&A.

The problem we’re looking at is a slow and steady decline in retention. When we look at retention rates over the last decade, they have fluctuated a bit, but ultimately they’re lower than where they were a decade ago. This data is from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project in partnership with the Association of Fundraising Professionals. This is not really a surprise to most fundraisers in the sector. We acknowledge that those numbers have been going down over time. But one of the underlying problems is the approach we take to looking at retention.

Let’s look at how most fundraisers think about retention right now. On the screen, we’ve got a calendar timeline, and this is where we start visualizing these concepts. We’re going to think about this as 2024. This blue box is our period in question. If we’re figuring out our retention rate for 2024, this highlights that period. Generally, where this red arrow is, that’s when people start thinking about retention rates for that year.

I have a question for our audience. Does your organization track retention on a rolling year, a fiscal year, or a calendar year? Throw that in the chat and I’ll watch for a second. I see some rolling. Perfect. A lot of you are rolling. Awesome. Both rolling and fiscal year. Calendar. Awesome.

This is the time of year where I tried to put that arrow close to today’s date, where we really start focusing on retention. We’re thinking about our end-of-year push. We’re reaching out to our lapsed donors for this year, on that calendar or fiscal year, and trying to recapture them. That’s one of the options. If we’re a little more proactive, we start thinking about that retention rate while we’re still in the period, so we can influence some change on that retention metric.

I’ve also got a 2025 mark in here, and I’m going to show a couple of other options for when we can start thinking about retention even though the period in question is 2024. I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations here at Bloomerang, and oftentimes we understand the concept of retention, but we don’t go very deep into the dates or the strategy around what we’re looking for. As I add more arrows to the screen, think of them as dots on the map for when organizations consider that time period for retention, even though the period itself is still 2024. If we’re considering 2024 retention at the time we’re reporting out on it for annual reports, for example, or when we’re looking at our 2025 timelines, we’re not really able to mitigate it. It’s more for awareness. So these are some of the options for when we see people doing that assessment.

Now let’s talk about how a donor moves through this timeline if that’s our strategy. We’re going to add one more year, so now we’ve got 2023, 2024, and 2025. This is the same example as the bottom half of what we just saw, and the period in question for retention is still highlighted with the blue box. This is your donor. This is any donor who gives a gift. I’d estimate this is somewhere around midyear, maybe May. If we have a donor who gives here and we’re monitoring retention on a rolling basis, then the donor actually lapses 365 days after that gift date. I’ve seen a couple of folks put in the chat that they do manage on that rolling time frame, and that’s fabulous to hear, because you’re going to get the most visibility when you manage your retention strategy that way.

Now let’s say this donor lapses and we don’t even think about assessing retention until this first red arrow toward the right of the screen. That puts us in what’s called the unknown zone. We don’t really know that donor has lapsed yet. If you’re using a rolling retention strategy, you’re going to have that awareness much sooner than if you’re focused on a calendar year retention strategy, or a fiscal year if it’s different from the calendar year. This arrow may be the first time a lot of organizations think about the 2024 retention period, but they could also be thinking about it for the first time at any one of those arrows. That can extend the unknown zone until we really dig deep and assess every donor’s most recent transaction. So we go through that unknown zone not really knowing that the donor has lapsed according to their gift dates and data.

Maybe you throw an annual gala every year in May, or you sell pies, or you send a particular appeal at the end of the school year. We go through a long period without noticing that some of those donors may be falling through the cracks. This is where we get into the advantage of what we’re going to learn today inside the product, which is that perfect window. Whether or not you’re using Bloomerang right now, we want to shift that awareness to even ninety days prior to when that donor actually lapses, so your reports become predictive rather than reactive. I’d love to hear if anyone is doing this kind of predictive reporting so far.

Margie Worrell: We do implement a lot of this in our quarterly strategy program. A big area of awareness is changing that strategy to make it more proactive.

Kirst Wantland: Now that we understand that concept, I’d love to see how it aligns with the product. We’re going to look at the day range here, day one and day 365. I’ve removed the January start date and the December date from this timeline, so think of this gift cycle as just a cycle of 365 days. Tracy, I just saw your comment that you’re set up this way. Thank you so much. That caught my eye.

Think of this 365-day range as a rolling cycle. It does not need to start on January first. It doesn’t need to start on the first day of your fiscal year. It can start today, which would make day one Tuesday, November eighteenth, and day 365 would be November seventeenth of 2026. I want to show you some alignment with these concepts. This first chunk I labeled Q1. When we think of quarters in business reporting, or as they align with the calendar year, we’re talking about chunks of ninety days, those three-month chunks. Quarter one would be day one to day ninety, and notice none of these days overlap. Quarter two is day ninety-one to day 180. Quarter three is day 181 to day 275. And quarter four is the last chunk of ninety days, day 276 to day 365.

You’re probably thinking, Kirst, this is a ton of numbers. I want to talk about these number ranges so we can have that alignment within the product when you’re reporting. In Bloomerang, you have a lot of control over how you do the filtering and the date analysis. Oftentimes we don’t know that this option exists, which is “in the previous.” When we look at our date filters within Bloomerang, and don’t worry, we will go into the product and build a report, whenever you see a drop-down caret, that means you have room to be more specific or change what the filter is looking for.

Instead of a fixed period of time in the past, say you’re looking for people who lapsed last month. You could type in the first day of October to the last day of October of that year, but next month you’ll have to change it, and then again the month after, and again the month after that. Dynamic filters give you more of a dynamic workflow. They allow you to schedule the report and take the administrative burden off of that visibility in the future. That is the best tip here: make this report, and any report you use, as dynamic as possible, because I don’t want you spending your time on reporting. I want you doing that critical fundraising work.

That’s a visual of what this looks like inside a Bloomerang report. We’re going to draw one more alignment, and then we’re going to get into Bloomerang and start building out this report. We’ll spend a lot of time in there, and we’ll talk about some of the insights you’re going to get from it.

I want to draw a parallel. If you’re a Bloomerang customer, you’re going to be a little more familiar with this logic. In your reporting, you have an include section and an exclude section. What you’re telling your report to do in the include section is look for someone with this criteria. At Q1, Q4, Q3, Q2, and so on, I’m going to tell our report to look for anyone who has a transaction from day one in the past, so, say, yesterday, to day 365 in the past. It’s funny, because we’re talking about predictive reporting, but we’re actually looking at the past for just a moment. I want to see anyone who has contributed in the last 365 days.

I see a couple of people saying they’re not actually Bloomerang customers but are considering it. The reason I wanted to know is so you can see whether your systems can report like this. Whether you’re a Bloomerang customer today or you’re considering a switch, whether your system can do this kind of reporting is going to be critical to switching your strategy from reactive to proactive. I’ll talk about a lot of this logic as we build the report, and if you’re interested in building it with me, this is a good time to have that open on another screen so you can follow along.

So I’m looking for someone with a gift in this day range. Our exclude section is always more powerful than the include. I could say, look for someone whose first name is Kirst, but exclude someone whose last name is Wantland. The exclude always has a bit more power than the include, and that helps you narrow your results from an ocean to a small pool.

In our exclude section, what I’m telling the report to do is kick out anyone who has given a gift from yesterday to day 275 in the past. Does anybody know why? Feel free to throw into the chat if you have any inkling why I would want to kick those folks right back out. That’s because they are not retention risks right now. There we go. Perfect, Erin. They’re not lapsed.

I’m looking for people who gave in the last 365 days, but I’m kicking them out if it was in the last 275 days, because I want to be left with the folks whose most recent gift was 276 to 365 days ago. Erin noted that the donors in that first chunk, the orange group here, are not lapsed. Technically, this group is not lapsed either. These are not donors you’re going to reach out to and say, “Oh my gosh, I miss you so much. Come back.” These are donors you’re reaching out to because they are still current donors according to that rolling strategy. They gave something in the last 365 days, but we’re being proactive about monitoring who is going to lapse.

I did see some comments in the chat about membership as well. A lot of organizations do really proactive membership renewal reporting. Think of this in the same way: they haven’t lapsed yet, but they’re going to lapse soon. Some of the questions we’ll be able to answer with the report in Bloomerang are: Are these folks loyal? Are they first-time donors? Have they received any valuable interactions? Do they have good contact information? We can even pull in fields like that. Conceptually, we’re looking for folks whose most recent transaction falls in this period, day 276 to day 365 in the past.

This is the exciting part. We’re going to go build this in my demo database. I’m going to walk through it very slowly and talk logic with you as well.

Ali, that’s a great question. Oftentimes I want to see that full picture of who has given in the last 365 days. I’ll talk about some options for looking at that, depending on your team size and your preferred workflow. We can look at just that Q4 in the past, but this also gives you options if you want more visibility and want to change those date ranges. Let’s head into our demo.

I’m going to go into reporting. On the left-hand side, you’ve got that pie chart icon, and we’re going to build a new report. I’m going to zoom in on my screen a touch, and then we’ll start the report from scratch.

I like to pause here and talk about the logic. When we look for donors in this time period, I’m not looking for one specific transaction. I’m looking for timed behavior, and that behavior requires visibility into multiple transactions. I want a cumulative accounting of their information, so I’m going to do that in a constituent-based report. I want a list of people who are going to lapse soon.

Once we click on that, we’re brought to our brand-new report from scratch. The first thing we’re going to do is switch the constituent option to the household option. Keep in mind, you will still see organizations. You can kick them out if you don’t want them, but I’m going to leave them in. The biggest difference with household is that the report now considers whether either member of the household has given a gift, rather than just one individual. Let’s say I’m in a household with my husband, and I gave a gift last December and my husband gave a gift last month. On the constituent view, I may show up on this list because my giving is within the time range we’re looking for. But as a household, which is how most organizations consider a single giving unit, we are technically not lapsed, because my husband just gave last month. As you work through Bloomerang reports, consider whether you want to look at behavior for the whole household or just the individual person. That’s the first piece of logic.

Now we’re going to add a filter, and the words we’re looking for are “has transactions.” You’ll see two of them. We’ve got a little visual bug. The important thing to remember is that “has” is your magic word. Whenever you’re looking for any kind of behavior or cumulative information, “has” gives you a lot of options: has addresses, has email addresses, has interactions, notes, phone numbers. You can get very specific with these filters. We’re looking for transaction criteria, so we’re going to look for has transactions.

Kimberly just asked a fabulous question: what’s the difference between the two “has transactions” selections? There’s literally no difference. They operate exactly the same. It’s just a visual bug that the developers are working on. You can select either one.

We have “has any” and then “transactions.” Remember we talked about the drop-down caret? This is where you can change all of these options. I think I could have a whole sixty-minute webinar on just these options. We’re going to leave it on “has any.”

Our “transactions” has a drop-down too, which means we can get more specific. I want to show you what happens if we don’t. This will pull up anyone with any kind of transaction over any amount of time. That’s as specific as that would get. But I want to look for that perfect window of time, so I’m going to reopen that filter, use the drop-down, and select specific transactions, because I’m looking for that specific window.

You’ll notice we’re in a people report, which I also call a constituent report. But now we have transaction filters. We can say, look for people who have transactions that match the criteria we’re about to add. When I add this filter, the first thing I’m going to look for is date. You have so many options with date filters, and they all have that dynamic flexibility. One of my favorite things about Bloomerang reporting is that if you want to get specific, you can definitely do it. I’m going to click on the general date, which references the date field on the transaction. Keep in mind that if you track check date or created date differently, created will reference when the system or a user created the transaction. We’re going to use the date of the actual transaction.

We can say this is a specific period of time. If we want to do the calendar math, we could look for someone between November and January of ‘25, and those would probably be the people about to lapse soon. That would be true. There are options in Bloomerang where it’s six in one hand and half a dozen in the other. It’s really a preference of your workflow and what makes sense to your brain.

What I’m going to show you now is the “during” filter. We’re going to change “last week” to “the previous number of days,” and that’s where we put the 365-day timeline. That will show us a list of anybody who has given a transaction in the last 365 days. I clicked without verbalizing. Once we’ve got 365 in there, we press OK, and we’re back on this transaction filter page.

One additional step: I’m going to put a revenue requirement in here. Revenue transactions within Bloomerang are a one-time donation, a pledge payment, and a recurring donation payment, as well as memberships if you have the membership option. Think of revenue as delivered dollars. I do these clicks on autopilot sometimes. We’re going to click this green “and” button, and then I’m going to search for revenue. You have two options: projected revenue and revenue amount. I’m going to choose revenue amount because I want to see delivered dollars. I won’t specify an amount right now. I’ll put 0.01, so they have to have given us a penny within the last 365 days.

Now that we have this filter in here, I’ll say OK, and OK again, and close that filter. This report now gives me a list of people who have given at least a penny in the last 365 days. Next, we’re going to add the chunk of time in our exclude section that we want to kick people out for. But I want to explain one more thing first.

I’ve got a question from Christine that popped up in the chat: why filter on the amount instead of the type of transaction, such as pledge or schedule? I could technically search for the type if I didn’t want to specify revenue amount. But I think it’s easier to correlate in reports this way, because otherwise you’d have to know, looking at the list, which transaction types are revenue transactions. A pledge is just a promise. I could say, Christine, I’m going to give you a million dollars. We know this is recorded, but as an example, that does not mean I will actually do it. A pledge is a promise. Circumstances change. So I don’t necessarily want that point of visibility in this report. I want delivered dollars. When I think of revenue, I think of delivered dollars. Your revenue transactions from this list are donation, pledge payment, recurring donation payment, and those payments. As long as you remember the payments and the donation, those are your revenue. I just have a preference for the revenue filter because it’s cleaner for my brain to understand. So I’m going to look for revenue and put 0.01 in there.

The last thing I want to say about these filters is that the two filters are now connected. When we added that revenue filter through the “and” button, it means both things need to be true for somebody to populate on this list. I’ll say OK here. Now we’ll do the exclude for the chunk of time we’re not worried about yet.

In the exclude section, we click add filter and look for that same exact filter. We build it the same way: has transactions. I do see a couple of questions about revenue amount and soft credits. I’m going to address that in a copied report, which will also account for donor advised fund considerations. All of this, keep in mind, is a baseline for now. You have a lot of flexibility to change the parameters. If you want to see in-kind or soft credits, we’ll talk about those options.

In our exclude section, same thing: we’re going to exclude someone who has any transaction in those specific transactions. Then we add a filter with that green button, and then date. We’ve got “during last week,” and we’re going to change that to “the previous number of days.” Instead of 365, because that would negate our whole list, we’re going to do the three-quarter cumulative, so 275 days. What we’re telling the report now is to kick out people if they’ve given a gift in the last 275 days and that gift was also revenue. It really is your preference how you want to cultivate donors who are doing pledges and whether you want to look at it from this revenue perspective. Again, we’ll have multiple points of visibility. I’ll put 0.01 in that revenue and say OK.

I want to talk about one more piece of logic before we look at results and add some columns. Notice that when we built this in the exclude section, our filters live inside our include within the transaction. Think of the logic this way: I want people in the report who have given a gift in the last 365 days. However, I don’t want to see them if this part is true. I think of the green as being “true” when we put it in the exclude section. We’re saying, I don’t want to see someone if they’ve given a gift in the most recent nine months and it was a revenue transaction. I’ll say OK.

It looks like a funny, simple report, where the filters look exactly the same, but we’re just giving visibility into time.

Now we’re going to edit the columns so we can see more information about these donors. We’ll add some columns to sort and organize them so we can understand priority. I’m going to look for type, which references the type of account. And here’s another fun trick: if you want to add more than one column at a time, you can check the box at the beginning, and that will allow you to add multiple columns at once. But I actually want to click on the word “type,” because that allows you to group the report. I want to see this report grouped by the type of account, so individuals, households, and organizations are all separate. I’ll say OK. Now we’ve got one household here, and the individuals here. That’s the first one I like to put in.

For the purpose of this report, I want to analyze more of their fundraising pattern, more of their behavior. For the time being, I’m going to remove these address columns. You can remove any column by clicking on the column header and then deleting. To minimize the screen a little so we don’t have as far to scroll, I’ll leave the name, but remove the address. We can always add that back in later.

Some of the columns that will give us visibility: I want to add the latest transaction date and amount. I’ll add the largest, just as an FYI, date and amount for that transaction. I’d like to add lifetime revenue. I’ll add those columns there.

Now we’ve got a couple of points of visibility. Generally, when we start with a constituent report, it’s sorted by name. We see these little arrows in each column. Instead of sorting by name, I want to sort by latest transaction date so we can see who is going to lapse soonest in each category. In our individual section, I have Shirley Bennett here, 11/19/2024. Think of that date as the goal date to get another transaction from that particular donor. Her most recent transaction was November nineteenth of 2024, so technically we have today or tomorrow to get another gift from her before she lapses according to that rolling strategy. Troy, for example, most recently gave on January first of 2025, so technically we have until January first, 2026, to get another transaction from Troy. But the reason we’re showing them in this report is that these are all current donors who will lapse in the next ninety days. And Richard here actually lapses on February first, so we have even more time to cultivate Richard.

Now I want to show you how to get even more specific about the information and patterns you’re seeing in the columns. We’re going to add a column, using this gray button above the right-hand side of the report results. Remember how we looked for the filter “has transactions”? We’re going to look for has transactions again. Just as we can define the audience with filters, we can ask the columns to show us more information, and that can be very particular as well.

I’m going to open up this “has transactions.” I’ll show you the number of all transactions first, but for this particular report, I have a preference today for seeing revenue amount. So we’re going to change “transactions” to specific and search for revenue, and that’s a penny. I’m not going to put a date parameter on this, because I want to see if anyone is a first-time donor. It looks like Willow Carlson’s household is a first-time donor. This is just the number of revenue transactions over time. You can edit the column header, so I’m going to put “rev transaction” so I know for myself.

Another trick: if we open up that column header and copy it, it will carry over whatever parameter we have in there. I don’t need two columns that show me the count of donations. I’m going to ask it to show me the sum of donations in the last 365 days. Let me cancel that and show you. In this transaction filter, we click the green “and” button and choose date. Then we change this to the dynamic parameter of 365. I don’t want you to have to come into this report every week. We’ll make this 365. What this results in is the sum total of their transactions in the last 365 days. Every record on this report is going to show you a revenue amount in this column. I’m going to rename this column “365 to 1,” because this shows days in the past. One note on how the “previous” filter operates: it does not actually include today’s date. There’s one filter we can add to make sure that’s accounted for. I’ll say OK, and that’s just the date range.

Talking about visibility points in relation to fundraising patterns and behaviors: the number of revenue transactions gives you visibility into whether that individual, household, or organization is a first-time donor. We know, statistically, that first-time donors are retained at lower rates. That can give you a priority assessment. If I’ve got a very loyal donor and a first-time donor, I like to call the first-time donor lower-hanging fruit. But statistically, the donor you’re most likely to get another transaction from is the one with more transactions.

I love to see loyalty patterns. Consecutive year-over-year loyalty is really going to strengthen the foundation and sustainability of your organization’s fundraising. Just like we used that copy column, we’re going to copy here, and then make this the next 365-day chunk behind it. I’m going to rename the column title: 730 to 366. I don’t want overlapping dates. Another fun fact about Bloomerang reporting is that you can click and drag within a filter. The date is in the previous 365 days, and we’re going to exclude it. Then back up in the “and,” I’ll add one more date of visibility: “during the previous number of days,” and that’s going to be 730. I’ll say OK. This is what the filter looks like. Again, think of it as “I’m looking for this, but not that time period.” Keep in mind this is my demo database, so I don’t update these transactions very regularly. You are going to have a lot more interesting results than what I’ve got on the screen here.

You can click and drag those columns. I like to have the most recent period on the right, going back in time as we move left in the report. I’m going to do this part pretty quickly, but it’s the exact same steps I just took. I’m going to copy this column and add a couple more years of visibility. We’ll change this to 1095, 731, rename the column header, and say OK. I’m just shifting back in chunks of 365 days. I love to see five-year loyalty, so that’s where I’m going to go right now. I’ll copy that and copy that and just rename and adjust my filters in each column. You will also receive a recording, so I know this part is going to go a little quickly. I want to make sure we have time to talk about the overall assessment, but as you revisit this afterward, definitely add some additional columns for visibility.

This one is 1096. And I promise you, I’m really not that good at math. I just memorized these numbers a long time ago. You don’t have to think about the math very often. Write a little sticky note for yourself if this is a report mechanism you enjoy. Then this one, we’re going to do 1825, and we’re going to kick out 1460. Let me check that and make sure I got that one right. Perfect.

I’m going to quickly reorganize these columns and then we’ll let them refresh. Again, you’re going to have more interesting results than I have. When we look at these numbers, think of them as days in the past. Say you have a record here with dollar amounts in all of these columns. That means the donor on that list has given in five consecutive rolling years. Keep in mind this aligns to that perfect 365-day report strategy. You can play with these time frames if you want to give your donors a little more time. But the advantage of this rolling retention strategy is that the less time that passes between gifts, the more likely that donor is to continue giving. We want to encourage that loyalty. If we see any gaps in here, we want to make sure those donors are retained.

I want to talk quickly about the big picture, now that we’ve gotten so specific and so technical. Each record on this list is going to lapse in the next ninety days. We grouped it by type, which you don’t have to do, but you can, and we sorted by latest transaction date. Remember, your latest transaction, regardless of what your largest is, is the driver for assessing whether they’re a current donor or about to lapse. So when you’re looking at each section, your priority is going to be toward the top of that section.

I’m going to save this report. I’m going to call it “Soon to Be Lapsed Donors,” and save it. Now we see that report title. My best advice, whether you’re a team or a team of one, is to get this report scheduled. Because it’s a dynamic parameter, my preference would be weekly, on a Monday morning, so I know who I’m starting to think about. A couple of the results in my list right now are going to lapse very soon, but you actually have ninety days of visibility. You have ninety days to start getting people on your radar, whether those are individuals, or businesses for sponsorships, or grants that you have to make sure you reapply to, any kind of contribution. I’m going to have this come to me at four in the morning. I’m going to require login. It will go to my email, and my subject is going to be “Retention Risks.” And if there are no results, I don’t want to send an email. That means if nobody is going to lapse in the next ninety days, this email will not show up in your inbox. Now I’m going to save and schedule.

Now you’ve got that rolling retention visibility in that perfect window, ninety days before donors are going to lapse.

I want to address the donor advised fund questions and show you another awesome trick. In your report view list, in the report section of our database, we go to the actions of the report I just scheduled and copy it. We built a lot of filters and put in a lot of columns, and the only difference we’re going to make in this version is accounting for donor advised funds. I’ll open the copied report. I’ll keep “soon to be lapsed” in the name, and we’re going to include soft credits. This is important if you’re considering matching gifts from employers, donor advised fund contributions, family foundation contributions, and so on. Our best practice, to make sure you’re in alignment with IRS tax reporting, is to put the hard credit transaction on the donor advised fund’s account and then soft credit the donor.

The only adjustments we’re going to make, opening up this household, is to get back to what one of our attendees mentioned before. We’re going to use the type filter, and we’re going to look for donations, pledge payments, recurring donation payments, and soft credit, so all four of those transaction types. The only caveat is that we’re going to exclude a soft-credited amount. It sounds very counterintuitive, but this is where we put in 0.01. I’m going to close this filter and talk about why it operates this way. When you have a hard credit donation and you’re giving the soft credit to somebody else, that hard credit donation has a soft-credited amount on it. What this filter does as an operator is say, don’t double count donations that have a soft credit. So instead of seeing Fidelity and Kirst Wantland on that report, if I only gave through my donor advised fund, you would see me and not that donor advised fund, provided there are no other contributions from it that haven’t had that responsibility given away. I’ll say OK, and I’m going to adjust my exclude filter the same way. I’ll remove that, look for type, and do this part a little quickly. I know I have some customers in here that I’ve worked with before. You know I’m a talker for sure. Margie, how are we doing on any questions I haven’t answered so far in the chat?

Margie Worrell: We’re doing okay. We’ve just got a couple of questions.

Kirst Wantland: Awesome. Go ahead and read them, and I’ll build this in as we’re talking. That way, they have the visual of how to build it on their own, but I’m still giving attendees the feedback.

Margie Worrell: Perfect. You’re a multitasker. We have a question from someone who has had some success lately. They’ve gathered some new, first-time, and recaptured donors in the past few weeks, and they’re hoping for ideas on how to retain those donors going forward.

Kirst Wantland: There are a lot of different behaviors and segments to think about. First, you can see all of them in this report, which is great. You’ll be able to see loyal donors, first-time donors, and donors who are contributing through donor advised funds. The approach may change a little for each, but one thing I typically talk about with a report like this is that these are all current donors. All of these donors have given a gift in the last 365 days, and the language you want to use is to talk to them like partners. Margie, you’re helping me do this really awesome thing. You’re helping me get orange cats tuna treats. It’s fabulous. We want to talk to them and develop that connection, and figure out, if we don’t know already, what their mission or priority is with giving us a donation. What do they hope to change? If I know that Margie loves orange cats, I’m going to say, Margie, you’re a fabulous partner, you’ve helped us, and maybe talk about that past impact to keep that connection rolling and strengthening. Then we have more engagement-related communications.

One other point of visibility you can add to a report like this to help you track that: remember we talked about “has” being the magic word? Instead of “has transactions,” I can look for “has interactions.” Because we’re in a people report, I can think about all the things on people’s profiles or timelines. You have the same flexibility in the “has interactions” filter. Let’s say I want to look at the number of interactions they’ve had. I typically like to pick the last 275 days, because that’s the same amount of time, at minimum, that they have not given you a gift. And you can even make that channel-specific. Sometimes people don’t want mass email in this, because everybody gets mass email. But let’s say you’re looking to have intentional conversations with donors. I want to see email, which will capture BCC, and maybe in person, phone, text message, and video call. I’ll leave it at that for now. I’m going to have some whopping zeros, but remember that this is in the last 275 days. So we’re thinking, of course I haven’t had any of those intentional touch points with these four records in the last 275 days. No wonder they haven’t given a gift. This is another point of visibility for connection awareness. That was a long, roundabout answer. If you have a follow-up, send it my way.

Margie Worrell: That’s great. I also recommend going to our website and putting the word “retain” into the search bar. You’ll have all kinds of blogs and resources come up. I’m going to launch the poll now, but I’m going to give you one more question, Kirst. If you can read this and respond, it’s basically: do you want more information, do you want an online tour, or are you okay for now? Final question first, and this is a good one from Kylie. As far as cleaning our databases, someone donated to a fundraiser five years ago but hasn’t donated since. Do you delete them, or at what point do you purge lapsed donors?

Kirst Wantland: This is a fabulous question. I had a fundraising textbook during my master’s degree with a picture of a man on a unicycle holding two plates and spinning a plate on one elbow. That’s the kind of decision you make when you decide to remove things. My best advice as a fundraising consultant is, first, consider the space you have and your daily workflows. You almost have to make a theoretical decision before you answer that question: do you want your database to be one hundred percent financially accurate, with any financial contribution over any amount of time? I did see a comment in there that says, “We never delete anyone with transactions.” Or do you want it to be a bit more manageable and present, I would call it?

Going the first route can mirror some of those financial records, and I know that’s a big sticking point for understanding impact and how things change over time. But you also have a finance department to look at those records. Bloomerang is not your primary accounting system. We want you to think of it as the way you manage relationships. So that is definitely the right way to go if that’s your preference.

Otherwise, if you want it to be a little more manageable, say a lower database size, or fewer filters to add in to kick out people who aren’t relevant anymore, we have some criteria that we’ve developed as best practice. My recommendation is that most folks are typically comfortable with no giving in ten years. But by IRS guidelines, if you need access to any contributions, it’s about seven years. So I look for that seven-to-ten-year time frame of no giving, and then I also look for contact validity. If Margie has unsubscribed from my emails and she’s moved and I can’t reach her anyway, she is almost surely not going to come back.

That’s where you can take one of our mass delete classes with a consultant. We can walk you through this in your database and prepare a lot of reports to help you export all that information safely, so you can store it outside of your CRM, and then you’re just going through what you need on a daily basis. You’re not sifting through all that extra stuff. So, again, a long-winded answer to that seven-to-ten-year time frame, but I wanted to give you some context for why. The more time that passes, the less likely donors are to come back. Statistically, even after that five-year mark, it’s probably a fraction of a percentage of folks coming back, unless they’ve indicated something like a bequest. If that’s an uncomfortable thing, and it is pretty uncomfortable dealing with mass delete and cleaning up that data, definitely reach out to one of our consultants and take a class with them. They can help you prepare that workflow so you can do it confidently, and then you can have more success managing your database day to day.

Margie Worrell: Love it. This was awesome. Kirst, thank you so much for being here and helping everyone learn all of these great techniques and skills. It’s just remarkable. We’re always glad when you’re here.

Kirst Wantland: Thank you so much, Margie. It was great to be here. I loved having everybody join. I don’t even know how many attendees we have on here. Fifty-seven. Awesome. Thank you all again for joining. Again, my name is Kirst. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to stay connected on your missions. If you have any follow-up questions about the webinar, just shoot me an email. I’m happy to answer those. You’ll get the recording, and I would love to get you the slides. Thank you all so much for being here. Lots of positive juju in the chat. Have a great day.

Margie Worrell: Thank you, everyone. Take care. Bye-bye.