KCBI—a media and radio broadcasting organization based in Dallas, TX—uncovered a problem. Their recurring donors were leaving.
For years, they embraced a humanized approach to their communication. This approach helped lead to a healthy base of recurring donors—representing nearly 54% of their active donors.
As you may know, recurring donors often retain at a very high rate. On average, 86.7% of a nonprofit’s recurring donors will retain next year.
Avid Insights identified early warning signs of a retention issue with their recurring donors. KCBI then used Avid Pathways to power new multichannel cultivation that increased their retention rate by 19%.
You can watch as Nathan Hill of Avid and Courtney Krus of Amplify discuss how KCBI unlocked this growth in recurring donor retention below.
Or keep reading to see exactly how Avid powered this boost in retention.
The Problem: Recurring Donor Attrition Was Going Up
Retention is usually not a concern when it comes to recurring donors.
Most organizations choose to make an investment in recurring donors because their retention rates are significantly higher than one-time donors by nature.
You can see the specific stats on how much more valuable these donors are using Avid Benchmarks.
But KCBI noticed a steady trend beginning to creep in.
Their recurring donor attrition rate was increasing.
The more their attrition rate rose, the more work was required to either acquire new recurring donors or reactive lapsed recurring donors.
There had to be a solution.
Avid Insights helped bring this alarming trend to the surface.
Courtney Krus of Amplify uses Avid every day in her work helping nonprofits grow their fundraising—including in her work with KCBI. She used Avid Insights to identify this steadily growing attrition trend.
After alerting the team at KCBI to the trend, Courtney and the team at Amplify put a plan together to solve it.
While some organizations might shy away from reminding the donor that their credit card was still being charged on a monthly basis, KCBI went the opposite direction.
Courtney, Amplify, and KCBI built a human-first approach to get recurring donor retention back on the right track.
The Strategy: Human-First Cultivation Across Multiple Channels
Reminding donors of their recurring gift every single month may not seem like a go-to strategy for solving retention.
If you took a page out of many for-profit subscription marketing playbooks, you might hope the donor forgets about their monthly gift so they keep giving it in perpetuity.
The plan that Courtney and her team at Amplify implemented with KCBI went the opposite direction.
They used every channel they had at their disposal to not just remind donors of their recurring donation—but to invest in their donor and show them the impact of their giving.
This strategy was a true, multichannel fundraising approach.
They installed a cultivation plan that utilized:
- A semi-monthly direct-to-voicemail message
- A monthly email showcasing the impact of the donor’s monthly gift
- A monthly text message to help cultivate a deeper relationship
- A one-time physical resource sent to recurring donors in the mail
- Ongoing cultivation via Meta advertising
In all of this communication, they leaned into their proven approach of connecting with donors in a human-centric way.
Personal tone. Authentic language. And a focus on investing in the donor relationship.
The Challenge of Multichannel Fundraising
Multichannel fundraising is challenging to pull off at scale.
In today’s fundraising landscape, multichannel communication is so much more than just emails and direct mail.
It encompasses a wide variety of channels:
- Phone & Voicemail
- Meta Advertising
- Google Advertising
- Text / SMS
- Events
- Apps
- Website
- And more!
There are a seemingly infinite number of channels you can leverage.
The challenge of multichannel fundraising is to sustainably leverage each key channel using dynamic messaging for each of your key segments.
The hours this takes is typically more than any fundraiser or team has time for. Thankfully, a system like Avid makes scaling multichannel fundraising possible.
KCBI leveraged Avid Pathways to help automate their segmentation and power their multichannel fundraising efforts.
The Result: A 19% Increase in Recurring Donor Retention
When retention rates for recurring giving are already high, it’s very hard to increase them in a significant way.
But KCBI saw a major improvement in performance.
This multichannel cultivation effort increased recurring donor retention by 19%!
Rather than keeping donors in the dark about their monthly giving, this human-first approach to cultivation caused more donors to stick around.
These recurring donors now had greater awareness of where the donation was going, who it was helping, and how it was making an impact.
Beyond that, the human touch built a deeper, trusting relationship between the donor and the organization.
How Avid Powered the Increase in Retention
KCBI’s effort to increase recurring donor retention was powered by Avid.
While Courtney and Amplify brought the strategic guidance, Avid brought the issue to light and allowed this multichannel cultivation effort to scale.
Avid Insights Diagnosed the Problem
Avid Insights is built to bring all your data together.
Your CRM data.
Your donation platform data.
Your email analytics.
Once all your data is talking, Avid then visualizes your performance in clear, actionable ways to help you spot opportunities and diagnose potential problems.
KCBI used Avid Insights to spot the trend of recurring donor attrition—leading them to develop a new plan to increase retention.
Avid’s Audience Creator Built the Segmentation
Avid aggregates all your data together, enabling you to create more sophisticated and accurate audiences than ever before.
You can build segments using giving data, contact info, email performance, and other engagement data.
Not only that, but these audiences are updated every day.
KCBI used Avid’s audience creator to instantly create an up-to-date list of their recurring donors.
Many CRMs have challenges identifying recurring donors due to inconsistent data and large variations in how recurring donors are classified.
Avid was built by fundraisers who understand recurring giving, so it knows how to target your recurring donors with accuracy.
Avid Pathways Kept Audiences Synced Across Channels
Avid is more than an audience creation tool. It’s designed to help you turn your data into action.
Avid is capable of taking any of your audience segments and deploying them to the fundraising channels of your choice.
It does this using a tool called Pathways.
KCBI uses Avid Pathways to sync their audience segments to Hubspot and Meta. This keeps their email targeting always up to date—and maintains accurate advertising audiences for ongoing cultivation.
Avid Pathways helps many organizations automate workflows, saving tremendous time on tasks that would otherwise require a manual effort.
Ready to See What’s Possible?
KCBI didn’t just run a one-off campaign.
They launched an ongoing, scalable, and sustainable strategy to boost recurring donor retention for the long term.
Without Avid, sustaining this strategy would require more hours than they have time for.
With Avid, this human-first cultivation strategy can run on an intelligent fundraising system that’s built to scale your time and your resources.
This is what Avid makes possible.
Want to see how you can build more scalable fundraising strategies using Avid?
