Longevity

You sort donors in this category in two ways:

• Donors who have given once and not yet been asked for a second gift
• Donors who have been giving for two or more years

In many ways, the most important donors are those who have given you money for several years, regardless of the size of their gifts. If your organization has been around for a while and your records are good, you may want to create subcategories for donors who have given for five or even 10 or more years.

Size

Determine what amount of money is more than most people in your constituency can give, and create a list of donors who give that much or more. In some organizations, this may be $100, but for most it will probably be $250 and up, or even $500 and up.

Frequency

Although many donors give only once a year, there are many others who give every time they are asked. Create a category for people who give two or more times a year.

Once you have segmented your donors according to longevity, size, and frequency, sort your donors as follows:

• People who have given $250 or more at a time more than once a year for three or more years
• People who have given $250 or more once a year for three or more years
• People who have given between $100 and $249 once or more than once for three or more years

In descending order, these donors are your best prospects for upgrading and are often good people to consider for volunteer opportunities. Your personal solicitation efforts should be directed to these segments. They care about you and have shown that caring for several years. These donors are signaling that they like your organization. Chances are they will respond favorably to personal attention.

Share this list with board members, trusted volunteers, and people who know your community and who have some discretion. Ask if they know whether any of the people on these lists are capable of giving a lot more. Perhaps Jane Smith gives you $250 twice a year and has done so for three years. A volunteer knows that Jane Smith gives $1,000 to an organization similar to yours and says that Jane always speaks highly of both organizations. Because as a general rule donors should be asked to upgrade their gift every third year, Jane is a little overdue. In your next solicitation, done personally, ask her to consider making a gift of $1,000.

Donors who only give once a year should only be asked once or twice a year, whereas you can send another extra appeal during the year to people who give every time they are asked; these are also people who should be asked to join a monthly donor program. People who only give online can be taken off all snail mail lists.

Donors Who Just Started Giving

A subset of longevity are the donors who only recently started giving. Because most people who give your organization one gift will not give again, it is clear that the most fragile time in the life of the donor is between the first and second gift. People who have made one gift need to be thanked for joining the family of donors who make your work possible, and then asked to continue their commitment with a second gift. These donors receive a different appeal than donors who have given for several years. Ideally, donors of $100 or more are thanked by phone in addition to the thank‐you note.

Other Segments

In addition to categorizing by size, longevity, and frequency, note which donors only come to events or perhaps come only to one particular event. These donors should not receive regular appeal letters unless you have evidence that they respond by giving to those as well. If a donor only gives when they come to your signature event, does so for three years or more, and does not give to any other appeals, that is a sign their primary loyalty is to the event. If one year that donor does not come to the event, then you can send a letter after the event telling how well the event did and how they were missed, and ask for a contribution.

Note which donors only give to appeals for specific things (get out the vote, organizing campaigns, capital projects) but who never send money in response to general appeals. If you have a specific need, these are the donors to approach more personally for that need. These are often your best prospects for capital campaigns as well.

Identify the people who give several times a year and either send them one more appeal or ask them to become monthly donors. All donors should be offered the chance to become monthly donors on all your reply devices and as a suggestion in renewal letters, but donors who give frequently should be offered that option in a special letter about the advantages of pledging. (For more on setting up a monthly donor program, see Chapter Twenty‐Two.)

If you have more than 1,000 donors or you are very adept at working with your data, you may want to add two more segments:

• Lapsed Donors: You need to make an effort to recapture donors who have given more than once but have not given in 18–24 months. (You can go back further than that, but with each additional six months, you will have less and less success.) As long as your appeals are yielding more than 1% return, you are ahead of any acquisition strategy. People stop giving for many reasons unrelated to the organization. The two most common are that they move and forget to send you their forwarding address (this is as true of people changing their email address as it is of snail mail), and they experience some major life change that puts their regular lives on hold. Divorce, death of a loved one, major illness, loss of a job—the list of why people forget to keep giving your organization money is long and rarely includes “I don't like you anymore,” even though that is often our conclusion.
• Episodic Donors: More and more we see a new phenomenon with donors: people who give sporadically. It is hard to distinguish them from lapsed donors except that they reappear every so often, often in two‐ or three‐year intervals. They will often give when something major has happened to the constituents of the organization. Natural disasters, outrageous sexual misconduct, or complete disregard of human health and welfare by corporations (such as dumping toxic waste into drinking wells), and the like bring episodic donors out of the woodwork. The only way to work with them is to make sure that you publicize such episodes widely, particularly on social media, where many of these donors get information.

How Many Segments Should We Have?

The decision about how many segments to have is largely informed by how many donors you have. Organizations with fewer than 500 donors will have very few segments, and organizations with 5,000 or more may have a dozen or more. Only create the number of segments you can actually work with and that you actually notice, over time, are helping the organization have a higher retention rate, which will come about, in part, because the fundraising program focuses most energy on donors loyal to the organization as opposed to donors who are loyal to a person in the organization or to an event.