Spring into Monthly Giving Success - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Monthly Giving

As spring blooms, so does the opportunity for growing monthly giving. May sees a surge in new sign-ups, and in this episode, Andrew and Rhen share creative strategies to engage and inspire new monthly donors.

Show Notes:

May is a key month for attracting new donors, and smart organizations take proactive steps to make the most of it. Andrew and Rhen discuss innovative ways that organizations can encourage both new and existing supporters to commit to monthly gifts.  As Andrew emphasizes at the end of the discussion, he loves monthly gifts programs, and he hopes to encourage fundraisers to build intentional, well-stewarded monthly giving initiatives.   

For more on the nuts and bolts of monthly giving programs, check out our Petrus Academy course "Raising Money with a Giving Day". 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

00:22.14 Host
Well, howdy, everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus. Joining me today, Andrew Robinson. How's it going, Andrew?

00:29.99 AROB
It's going great, Rhen. How about yourself?

00:31.74 Host
It is excellent. Spring is in the air. It's a bright, sunny day. I know you got back from a spring break camping trip.

00:37.32 AROB
We surely did. I took my two middle kids, so Nora and Luke. Nora's 10 and Luke is 5. And we met up actually with Matt Bond, one of our consultants. He lives in Oklahoma. And so we kind of split the difference, so we met in North Texas in the Panhandle. And it was great. It was a good trip.

00:56.84 AROB
We ended up... We were in... It's called Caprock Canyon. And then we had this weather storm kind of come through. I think it even hit you guys up in the UP, but we got a lot of high winds in Texas and North Texas.

01:14.38 AROB
And so the rangers came around Thursday and said, "You guys sticking around?" And we said, "Well, I don't know." He said, "You heard about the wind?" And we said, "Uh, tell us more." And he said, "Yeah, we're supposed to get 60 to 80 mile an hour wind gusts."

01:27.39 AROB
We're like, "Ah, I don't know that that's a good idea."

01:27.70 Host
Oh my goodness.

01:31.23 AROB
And Matt said, "How many..." And we don't have like expedition level tents, right, and you know, little kids. And Matt says, "Just by the way, how many tents do you typically see in this park that survive 80 mile an hour winds?" And the ranger says, "None." Okay, yeah, we're out. So we bugged out. We packed up the tents and sleeping bags, left our gear that was in boxes at the campsite, but we...

01:49.03 Host
Hint, hint.

01:58.43 AROB
...drove about an hour away and found a hotel and hung out there for the night and most of the day. And then we got back that night and got set up and finished our camping trip. So that was good.

02:08.72 AROB
They did record 74 mile an hour winds in the canyon. And I am 100% sure our tents would not be around if we had stuck around.

02:13.56 Host
Wow.

02:21.70 AROB
So.

02:22.05 Host
That would have made for quite a story, I think.

02:24.13 AROB
Yes. Even when we were sleeping in the tent, I bought one of these like big high wall, you know, multi-people tents just so we have room to spread out and take the whole family if we ever do. Although I don't see that ever happening.

02:38.56 AROB
But it's not a, you know, like I said, it's not a North Face expedition ready to go to Alaska tent. And the night we got there, it had twenty-five mile an hour gusts, and there were multiple times that I thought, "I don't know that I want to be sleeping in this tent right now," but it worked out. So the stories were good enough without having to deal with hurricane force winds.

03:03.41 Host
All right, wise choices.

03:05.11 AROB
Yeah, thanks.

03:05.19 Host
Spring being in the air makes you think of one thing, I'm sure, and that's monthly gifts.

03:11.71 AROB
Obviously, yes.

03:12.00 Host
For some reason, it's not really clear why, research has shown that May is the month of the most monthly gift signups over the course of the calendar year.

03:21.51 AROB
Cool.

03:22.58 Host
Again, not really clear why that is, but it is. So it's something we should all probably be focusing on as we get close to May here.

03:31.26 AROB
Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, I could come up with some theories for that. It's, you know, end of the school year, you've got a lot of people traveling for the summer and wanting to continue their gifts, whether it's at their parish or to their school or they're graduating and they want to give back.

03:47.58 AROB
There's probably a lot of events in the spring, galas and now a lot of virtual galas, that offer matching challenges. A lot of times those will ask for and invite people into monthly gifts. So, you know, there's some theories. I don't know why, but you get the information and sometimes you can try to make sense of it and sometimes you can just find ways to act on it. So I think that's what we're in the position here is let's just find ways to capitalize on that.

04:17.77 Host
Exactly. And we covered, we did a deep dive in kind of the mechanics of monthly giving and monthly giving programs back in episode 139, about a year ago.

04:25.54 AROB
I remember that.

04:26.62 Host
So if you want to dig into the how-to's, how to set up a monthly giving program, what you need to do, what you don't need to do, that's all in there. Today we want to focus on how to make kind of a push for monthly giving, especially in the month of May or in the coming weeks.

04:39.93 Host
And it still feels a little ways away right now, but you got to start planning for things just like you do with a giving day. If you want a successful Giving Tuesday, for example, you guys are planning that late summer, early fall, not early November, couple of weeks where it happens.

04:50.37 AROB
Right.

04:53.51 Host
So we're getting close to May. So let's talk about how we might make a push and sign up some monthly donors and encourage people to sign up. Any first suggestions on some activities that we might plan out for the month of May to encourage the monthly donor signups?

05:08.19 AROB
Yeah, so you definitely touched on it a minute ago. It's all about the preparation, right? So it's about, you know, first, you need to make sure you're ready for people to sign up for monthly gifts. So the very first thing before you ever start asking for monthly gifts is you got to make sure that your website is ready. The content on your website and your giving page is good. The links are there so people can easily sign up for monthly gifts.

05:33.30 AROB
Maybe you've even got some blog posts about monthly giving donors or, you know, social media highlights about your monthly giving society. You want to make sure that you're ready so that when people start, when you start doing that promotion, they show up, they're not then faced with challenges and obstacles that make it difficult. Right. So that's just kind of before we even start talking about ideas and techniques, you make sure you're ready with your website and your platform to be able to do monthly gifts.

06:05.06 Host
And let me cut in right there. If you don't have kind of online giving set up, ready to go, we have a brand new course hot off the press on that topic. It'll walk you through step by step everything you need to do, setting up a processor, getting your website in order, getting your website in good shape, then to encourage people to join, etc. Everything you need to do. So go to PetrusDevelopment.com/Academy, if that sounds like it would be for you.

06:28.36 AROB
Yeah, perfect. So now, fast forward, you've got your website, you're good, you've got your processor, people can sign up for monthly gifts. What are some techniques or tactics that you can use to actually leverage this? People want to sign up for monthly gifts in May or any time of year and get them ready, right?

06:45.40 AROB
So here's a handful of ideas that I think there's a blog post, you can go back and read it on the Petrus Development site.

06:45.64 Host
Yeah.

06:52.94 AROB
But here's some ideas that are included in that and then also some new ideas. So number one, I would say it's worth considering a monthly giving challenge for the month of May, right? There's 31 days in the month of May. So what if you've set a challenge, a public challenge to secure and bring in and invite and...

07:17.39 AROB
Um, so, uh, So there's 31 days in the month of May, right? Wouldn't it be great if you had a challenge to secure 31 new monthly donors in the month of May, right?

07:33.61 Host
Yeah.

07:33.63 AROB
You make it a public challenge. You invite people to give. You keep a tracker on your website, whatever that looks like, but make it fun, give some rewards, give some prizes, but make that a public challenge to secure 31 donors in the month of May.

07:49.28 AROB
Wouldn't that be a great challenge, Ryan?

07:50.89 Host
I mean, yeah, anytime you have a goal like that, it encourages people to sign up, right? And that could be any number. It might be, we need 10 new monthly donors for our 10th anniversary. Or I know an organization that just did 60 new monthly donors for their 60th anniversary.

07:59.72 AROB
Yeah.

08:04.91 Host
Or 25 new donors for 2025. You know, whatever that, just finding a reason to have a goal based around something. You know, you can kind of make up a reason. And sometimes sometimes there's an obvious anniversary or something.

08:13.99 AROB
Yeah.

08:16.59 Host
People like to be part of achieving a goal like that together. So I would say set a goal and start publishing it out there.

08:24.83 AROB
There you go. You want to take that a goal like that or a challenge to the next level. Our second idea would be to add a matching gift component to that. So I remember I think working with you when you were at St. Al's, we would do these matching challenge, matching gift challenges where there would always be a goal.

08:42.79 AROB
Or a challenge that doubled the gift, right? So sometimes it's, you know, we're trying to get $1,000 a month and we have a donor that's going to match that dollar for dollar up to $1,000 a month or, you know, over the course of the year.

08:48.06 Host
Right.

08:58.16 AROB
But whatever it is, you tie a challenge, a dollar challenge to that so that you have a donor who's going to match monthly gifts. That's a great way for people to, again, it's just about like, what do you need to, the two things you need to convince somebody before they're going to make a gift.

09:13.94 AROB
Why should I give to your organization and why should I give to your organization right now? Right? Challenges and double your money offerings, things like that. Deadlines move people to action.

09:25.81 Host
And it's been shown that matching gifts, like doubling your dollars, so to speak, are kind of the most effective way to encourage somebody to give. It's something like donors are 82% more likely to make a gift when there is a matching gift challenge going on.

09:38.86 Host
And that's, in my own experience, that's what I've seen be probably the most effective way to encourage new monthly donors, even though you don't necessarily always associate monthly gifts with a matching gift like that, but saying, hey, the first three months of your new monthly gift they are going to be matched, or you know if you have maybe a bigger matching gift goal, the challenge goal, than you are comfortable with, like, oh, we might not hit it, maybe match the first six months if that's okay with the challenge donor, the first 12 months of a new monthly gift or an increased monthly gift.

09:57.43 AROB
Yeah.

10:05.94 Host
I've gotten a lot of existing monthly donors to increase their gift as part of a matching gift challenge. Explaining how it works is maybe the most difficult thing to do.

10:14.47 AROB
Yeah.

10:14.96 Host
Succinctly, if you're trying to do it in a mailing or email.

10:16.11 AROB
Yeah.

10:17.52 Host
But just give them some examples, you know, sign up for $100. The first three months of that, $300 is going to be matched toward our $5,000 challenge goal, right? And people love that.

10:27.68 AROB
Yeah, I remember St. Mary's at Texas A&M, they do matching collection weekends in the fall and in the spring every year. And one of the times they did it, they actually had two pools of matching dollars. They had their $50,000 or $100,000 match for one-time gifts, and then they had this $25,000 challenge just specifically for new monthly donors.

10:47.94 AROB
And so it was kind of like if you make a one-time gift, it's doubled. If you sign up for a monthly gift, it's tripled. Right? And so you know after all the math and everything worked out, it was like a quarter of a million dollar weekend because there were so many gifts and so many people that signed up for monthly gifts.

11:04.27 AROB
So again, explaining it before, counting it after, explaining the results after. That all gets kind of tricky, but you can figure that stuff out. The main point is to get creative and to secure a challenge gift.

11:20.62 Host
Excellent. What other activities might we include in our monthly giving push here in May?

11:26.41 AROB
Yeah. So one thing that you can do is you can include or you can offer exclusive thank you gifts for new monthly donors. So maybe that's a special coffee mug. Maybe it's a special t-shirt. Maybe it's just your regular t-shirt that you send for free to new monthly donors in the month of May.

11:43.38 AROB
Socks, you know, magnets, whatever that looks like. It doesn't have to be—don't have to break your bank in terms of spending a lot of money on these offerings, but it's just a special exclusive thank you gift for new monthly donors.

11:57.62 Host
Great. I love that. I know the different Catholic saint socks are kind of all the rage right now.

12:03.19 Host
So if you have—you can get some that are associated with your ministry in some way, I've seen that be a pretty popular giveaway for new donors and new monthly donors recently.

12:12.98 AROB
Yep. Another one, number four, I think we're down the list too, is to host an event for monthly donors. So this could be in-person if you have a lot of your donors local, it could be virtual if a lot of your donors are not local, but just something to kind of give excitement to monthly donors. Maybe it's, you know, a speaker that is exclusive for your monthly donors or,

12:39.12 AROB
you know, a celebration or something like that, right? One of the things that we can offer as nonprofits that our donors are looking for that is a non-tangible benefit is access, right?

12:52.80 Host
Mm-hmm.

12:52.84 AROB
It's this kind of, you know, this idea of access. And so I remember when I was working at the university, a lot of times our donors would come to events specifically because the dean was going to be there or the university president was going to be there.

13:06.03 AROB
Or somebody from the region was going to be there or a football player was going to be there. So it wasn't that that was the reason they gave, but offering access to your donors to something that they wouldn't otherwise have access to is, it's just kind of an ongoing gift.

13:23.18 AROB
And it's also a stewardship practice from a philanthropic standpoint, right? So hosting an event with a special guest or something like that just gives access to your monthly donors in a way that they wouldn't otherwise.

13:27.87 Host
Love that.

13:35.38 Host
Yep.

13:36.87 AROB
Yeah. Number five would be to emphasize your monthly donors on social media. Obviously, we're talking about kind of all the different techniques on how you engage people and how you reach out to people, right? Don't sleep on your social media.

13:53.99 AROB
So, you know, emphasizing your monthly donors, your monthly giving, and what does that look like? You know, doing a donor highlight, doing a donor story, talking about what monthly gifts mean to your organization, just, you know, short stories or short videos like that on social media is a great way for you to promote monthly giving.

14:13.67 Host
Definitely. And probably email as well. Probably utilize all the communications channels, right?

14:17.60 AROB
Totally. Yep. And you can even do, you know, with that email or social media, you could do a series, right? So maybe it's, you know, a couple of emails that talk about the benefits of monthly gifts, how easy it is to do monthly gifts, a donor highlight on a monthly donor or, you know, a highlight on monthly donors, kind of look at a targeted way to secure or to introduce and educate people on monthly gifts, whether it's through email or social media.

14:47.38 Host
Great. And I know in the past we've talked about the concept of a senior class gift program. It doesn't apply to every type of nonprofit necessarily, but for the ones that it does apply to, I think it's a pretty powerful thing. You want to talk about that just real quick?

15:00.03 AROB
Sure. Yeah. So years ago, I was at a ministry and we started a senior class gift program. And so this is a campus ministry. Students graduate every May. And so we invited our seniors to make a pledge, $1,000, and they paid that at $20 a month over 50 months.

15:18.73 AROB
So it was a pledge, but they paid it automatically through a monthly gift. We started getting into the habit of that. They did it for about 15 years. Every class did a class gift. And afterwards, they went back and they looked and about 75% of those donors who made a who signed up for an initial pledge ended up continuing that monthly gift either at that level or at increased level after the pledge had been completed.

15:45.34 AROB
So that's a class gift for a campus ministry, but you know you can get creative. A high school, a missionary organization, anything that you have where you have people that are kind of part of your organization for a while and then they leave, that's—as they leave, that's a great way for you to introduce them and invite them into making a sort of parting gift.

16:11.09 AROB
And you always want to make it available, make it possible for them to pay that parting gift off automatically.

16:18.35 Host
Definitely. And one thing that I found to work really well, you're never going to get all the graduating seniors, so to speak, depending on your type of organization, but you know, the people leaving to sign up for this gift. But, in the case of a campus ministry or a school, what we did in our campus ministry is we approached the people who didn't sign up for the senior class gift a year or two later,

16:36.64 Host
and say, hey, we're trying to get together some people to put together a monthly gift challenge. And you know one of the years we got 40 recent graduates from the previous two or three years who hadn't signed up for the senior class gift to come together and put together a challenge gift of $1,000 a month of monthly gifts that we then brought to the rest of our list and said, hey, can you match these recent graduates and their $1,000 a month?

16:58.11 Host
So you can get creative with things like that.

16:58.94 AROB
Yeah. And that's the point, right? It's not about "these are the ideas and if you can't make it work, then just give up on it." It's "here's some inspiration for some ideas."

17:07.38 Host
Thank you.

17:10.10 AROB
It's up to you to get creative and figure out how you can implement an idea or that concept in a way that matches with your organization and what opportunities you have.

17:22.49 Host
Definitely. And I guess as a closing point here, I may have shared the story in the past. I can't remember. But I feel like monthly gifts are the type of gift you should not be sheepish about asking for, if that makes sense. It's an approachable gift.

17:35.08 Host
I've seen instances of...

17:37.93 AROB
[inaudible]

17:38.29 Host
...a nonprofit out on the sidewalk with clipboards, asking people to sign up for a monthly gift to their nonprofit. And people were stopping and signing up—people that I assume had never heard of it. I can't remember the name of it anymore. But people are stopping and signing up for a monthly gift on a sidewalk because they were asked for it, from somebody they didn't know.

17:54.09 Host
So if you have people who know your organization, are already reading your communications, and hopefully like what you're doing, it should be all the easier. It's a very approachable gift. So get out there and promote it.

18:05.26 AROB
Absolutely. And one idea we didn't talk about, but that could be implemented, is to get creative about what that ask specifically looks like. So you're talking about groups on the sidewalk with clipboards.

18:18.03 AROB
Oftentimes what they're asking for is, "Would you sign up for $17 a month?" That would fund, if it's a child missionary organization, their missionaries' operations for a month. Or they're asking for $26 a month because that will feed six kids in a foreign country.

18:38.85 AROB
Whatever that looks like, get creative in that ask amount, especially if you're doing a challenge over the course of the month. Try to come up with not just asking for a monthly gift, but how can we ask for a specific amount? Not everybody's going to sign up for that amount. Some are going to go higher. Some are going to go lower.

18:58.06 AROB
But wherever people start, there's always the potential that they're going to increase down the road. So get creative about the ask and the ask amount. And that could also lead to more monthly gifts.

19:11.23 Host
I love it. Anything else you want to add about monthly gifts, Andrew?

19:14.98 AROB
I love them. I think that more organizations and more fundraisers would benefit from having a more intentional approach to asking people for monthly gifts, for signing them up, and for stewarding those donors. Because it's just the beginning. In some cases, it's the beginning of the relationship.

19:34.62 AROB
In some cases, these are people that have been giving for a long time, but it's always an increase in that donor loyalty step that we're always trying to create or engineer or look for with our donors. They're moving along the donor continuum from one step to the next by giving you their credit card or checking account information, by trusting you to run that and for signing up for that. So it's always a good thing.

20:05.66 AROB
And I think if you do monthly gifts, but you've never really had an intentional strategy around it, now's the time to develop an intentional strategy.

20:17.01 Host
Sometimes they feel like small gifts. It's like, "Oh, why are we focusing on that?" Until you look up one day and monthly giving has replaced the entire annual fund from a couple years before. Like, "Oh, this was worth investing in! Now we can focus more on the major gifts because we have that security from the monthly gifts."

20:24.63 AROB
Exactly. Yeah.

20:32.55 AROB
That's true.

20:34.52 Host
Great. Well, before we wrap up, just wanted to mention our RAISE regional fundraising workshops are coming up in the next few weeks. If you'd like to join us for a one-day deep dive in fundraising with Andrew and Tara Doyan, one of our senior consultants, we have workshops coming up in New Orleans on May 15th, a Thursday. And we have one coming up at the University of Notre Dame on June 5th.

20:58.73 Host
So those are coming up soon. Prices go up as you get closer to the date. The New Orleans workshop is at $79 per person right now. Notre Dame is only $59 per person for an entire day of fundraising. Plus, you get some extra bonuses on top of that if you check out PetrusDevelopment.com/raise.

21:15.65 Host
You'll see that. And like I said, prices go up as we get closer. So get on that soon.

21:20.85 AROB
Fantastic. I'll be there and I hope to see you there.

21:24.56 Host
All right, that's PetrusDevelopment.com/raise. Thanks for joining us today, Andrew, and happy fundraising.

21:30.49 AROB
Thanks a lot. You too.