Sustaining monthly giving has grown in popularity to become one of the most reliable income sources for nonprofit and higher education advancement organizations. A new study from M+R found that in 2021, revenue from monthly giving increased by 24 percent and accounted for 22 percent of all online revenue, up from 16 percent in 2020. This special group of donors is not only committed to the organization but actively engaged in giving all year long, and this trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

According to the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Fundraising Effectiveness Project, while the number of donors who gave between three and six times fell in 2021, the number of those who gave at least seven times increased—further indicating growth in monthly donors.

As a growing donor segment all their own, monthly donors require unique stewardship. They shouldn’t be on every prospect list or campaign appeal going out. Adopting five simple, straightforward strategies can help your organization cultivate, nurture, and grow monthly donors.

1. Identify and segment monthly givers in your database.

How can you treat monthly donors with special care if you don’t know who they are? To manage and retain sustaining donors, start by clearly labeling each monthly donor in your database. You need to be able to easily and quickly update, maintain, and track data and contact information for your monthly donors, including their giving history, so you can identify recurring donors who have lapsed. Depending on the CRM system your organization uses, there may be multiple ways to accomplish this task.

2. Integrate your CRM with marketing and online giving portals.

As every development officer knows, there are multiple technological components driving the fundraising engine. There is no one CRM, application, or platform that can do everything; the power comes from the assembled pieces.

In particular, integrating marketing and online giving portals to your CRM allows you to track and understand data that inform the strategic process. Who is being sent appeals? Are they being opened? Are your donors engaging? What contact information has changed? Integrations also make it easier to develop and verify mailing lists so that when your appeal goes out, it’s more successful.

Donation forms and online giving portals offer a key opportunity to confirm details in addition to basic contact information: why they’re giving, where they want to direct donations, or if they’re giving in honor or memory of someone. The information requested on these forms should reflect the data priorities of your organization—and that data should always go back to your CRM.

Without integrations, the data from your marketing and giving portals will likely require a lengthy manual collection and import process. This can prevent data from being reflected in the CRM in a timely manner, putting your organization at a disadvantage in a competitive fundraising environment.

3. Scale your gift-processing practices with automation.

While monthly giving can be a boon to your fundraising efforts, it also creates a 12-fold increase in gift recording and processing tasks compared with those for a one-time gift. The data show that you’ll raise more with monthly givers in the long run, but if you’re manually processing gifts, those additional funds can be eclipsed by the increased resources needed to process them.

If your data processing practices are scalable, which involves automation functions to facilitate verification and processing, an increase in monthly donations will be significantly easier to manage.

In our work with the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Affinaquest’s Advancement IT team configured a solution to automatically match new gift data from online portals to existing records and prepare it for batch processing. This solution not only made UCI’s gift processing work more efficient but also scaled its operations to handle a higher quantity of donations.

4. Identify and engage new potential monthly donors.

We know monthly donors are more likely to return to an organization to make future gifts. Some existing donors, whether one-time or intermittent givers, have the potential to become monthly donors and should be engaged.

The first step is to take a close look at your current monthly donors. What characteristics do they share? What is their motivation for giving? Are there patterns in giving history, age, household income, connection to the university, or graduation year?

By analyzing the data, you can uncover sustaining donor trends that enable you to identify others most likely to become monthly donors. Once this target group is segmented in your database, you can offer monthly giving as an option.

Informing prospective donors about the impact of their monthly gift can help secure their commitment. People want to know that their donation is making a difference. If you tell a donor their monthly gift of $100 will provide 40 meals for food insecure constituents, for example, they can visualize the benefits of their investment.

5. Expand the donation footprint among existing monthly donors.

At a minimum, monthly donors must be stewarded in accordance with their giving. This means acknowledging monthly gifts as they’re received as well as informing donors about, and thanking them for, their impact throughout the year. Some institutions and organizations send monthly donors special communications—both emails and mailings—and/or invite them to exclusive events.

If stewarded well, some of those loyal sustaining donors could move up into higher giving levels. Today’s monthly donor may be tomorrow’s major donor. Prospect research can help produce a prioritized list of those with the greatest potential. From there, it’s a matter of qualifying donors for next-level giving. This is where leadership annual giving, major gifts, or qualification officers come in.

Some sustaining donors will be content at their current giving level. For others, a conversation may reveal greater philanthropic inclination. In those cases, the development officer will have the opportunity to learn more about the prospective donors, including their motivations and interests, to present a curated solicitation. Even if your monthly giving donors don’t have major gift potential, they may have an inclination to increase their monthly giving or make a planned gift.

Following these five strategies will make a big difference in growing your sustaining donor footprint and overall fundraising revenue, setting your organization up for further success now and in the months to come.

James Werner is executive vice president of institutional advancement at Affinaquest, a CRM, data management, and data analytics company specializing in growing donor affinity for nonprofit organizations and higher education advancement.