How to Start a Monthly Giving Program at Your Nonprofit
Monthly giving is one of the most sustainable revenue streams a nonprofit can build. It generates predictable, unrestricted revenue and builds a community of engaged supporters. If you've read my post on sustainable nonprofit fundraising strategies, you know that sustainable fundraising isn't about chasing new donors; it's about building systems that last. Monthly giving is one of those systems – if it’s done right.
Here’s how to build one from the ground up.
Why Monthly Giving is Worth Building
First, let’s look at the data.
Monthly donor retention rates are nearly double one-time donor retention rates. On average, monthly donor retention ranges from 77% to 90% (Neon One Recurring Giving Report), while one-time donor retention rates can be as low as 40% per the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Monthly donors have significantly higher retention, often giving to organizations for as long as 8 years.
More importantly, monthly giving creates steady, consistent revenue that your organization can plan for.
There are a lot of reports out there that paint a gloomy picture about declining individual giving, but monthly giving is actually trending upwards.
I help organizations build sustainable fundraising strategies, and one of the key ways to do that is to have steady, reliable revenue that your organization can predictably depend on and, more importantly, grow. Monthly giving is a clear way to do that.
But how do you start? It’s easy to say, “Start a monthly giving program,” but I’ll be honest, it takes some work to set up. Sure, you could just turn on the monthly giving option in your donation processing platform, but it isn’t quite as simple as that. So let’s get into how to build a monthly giving program, step by step.
What You Need Before You Launch Your Monthly Giving Program
Before you launch your monthly giving program, you need a few things in place:
A donation processing platform that supports monthly giving.
A dedicated landing page for your monthly giving program. This should be separate from your main Donate page. Why? Because a dedicated monthly giving page lets you make the case for monthly giving more specifically. Instead of your main Donate page, this page allows you to really hone in on why monthly giving matters for your organisation and creates a unique value for those donors.
Here are some examples of monthly giving pages I love: World Central Kitchen and Solidarity Engineering (I’m on their Board!).
A dedicated monthly giving communications plan.Your monthly donors should still receive your regular communications — but that can't be all they get, especially when it comes to appeals. They've made an ongoing commitment to your organization and they deserve stewardship that reflects that. Your communications plan should include: a personalized welcome series when they first become monthly donors, regular impact reports, a plan to acknowledge when someone reaches a milestone (like one year of giving), and plans to segment them from regular communications.
A plan for failed transactions. This is important. Credit cards fail all the time. The last thing you want is to lose monthly donors because their credit cards expired or didn’t go through for some reason. Some donation processing platforms flag this for you automatically. For others, you have to pull a report manually. You need to know which it is and make an action plan for how you’ll communicate with your donors if and when that happens.
Someone on your team who owns this process. This is key. I talk a lot about fundraising staff retention, and one of the key drivers of nonprofit staff turnover is too much responsibility and not enough support (Social Impact Staff Retention Project). If your team does not currently have the capacity to implement a monthly giving program, then it shouldn’t be a priority for your organization – regardless of the benefits outlined above.
Someone on your team has to own this process, from launching it to handling communications, consistently keeping in touch with donors, managing failed transactions, etc. A monthly giving program that doesn’t have someone to manage it will not work. Trust me, I recently worked with an organization where the person managing their monthly giving program left, and no one picked up the work. Four years later, the program had lost half its revenue, mostly from failed transactions.
How to Structure Your Monthly Giving Program
Your monthly giving program should have its own identity. Like the two examples I shared above for World Central Kitchen and Solidarity Engineering, both have named their monthly giving programs.
Solidarity Engineering calls their program The Butterfly Garden, and they send a small packet of pollinator-friendly seeds to all new donors. The cost is minimal, and it’s a really nice, on-brand touch point that connects donors to the mission.
One thing that should stand out from your monthly giving is the impact. You want your donors to tangibly see what their monthly gift is supporting. Both World Central Kitchen and Solidarity Engineering show recommended gift levels and what they’ll help accomplish.
Your stewardship should mimic this. Your impact reports that you’re sharing with donors should share updates on how your program delivery is going, specific to what you’ve identified with those gift levels. This helps donors see the through line from donation to impact and keeps them connected.
Should your Donate Page Default to Monthly Giving?
This is a controversial topic among fundraisers. There are many who say that your monthly page should default to monthly, requiring donors to switch to one-time before making a gift.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
No matter how clear you might think it is that donors can switch to one-time donations, you will have donors who make a monthly gift by mistake, and that does not create a positive donor experience.
This is my profession. I’m writing an entire blog post about this. I’ve run monthly giving programs at several organizations. And a few months ago, I tried to make a first-time gift to an organization and accidentally set up a recurring contribution. I emailed their team to let them know, and it took almost a week for someone to get back to me.
I probably won’t ever give to that organization again. Because if you could trick me into accidentally making a recurring gift, you are definitely going to trick my grandmother or someone less tech-savvy.
Create a dedicated monthly giving page and drive monthly giving prospects to that page so there’s no room for confusion.
How to Get Your First Monthly Donors
This is where a lot of organizations get stuck. The backend stuff is time-consuming, but relatively simple. Once you have that set up, how do you actually get people to donate monthly?
One mistake I see organizations make is launching a monthly giving program and simply announcing it to their entire email list. You can absolutely include it in your newsletter. Frame it as an exciting new way to engage with your organization, but don't make that your whole acquisition strategy. Sure, you might get a few signups that way, but your best prospects for monthly giving are those who have already shown up for you.
First, pull a report of anyone who has given to your organization more than once in the last 12 months. Pick up the phone. Let them know how much you appreciate their support, and then let them know you’re launching a monthly giving program. Invite them to be a founding member, and maybe create a unique experience just for founding members, like a program visit or special breakfast with your team.
If your organization has volunteers or hosts events, you should reach out to volunteers and event attendees in the same way. Anyone who has already engaged with your organization is a great prospect for monthly giving.
Get your Board on Board! There’s no better way for Board Members to engage in fundraising than supporting your organization’s monthly giving program!
Some organizations offer benefits to their monthly donors, which can be a great incentive but it’s important that these benefits connect to your mission (like the seed packet) instead of generic swag that people will feel their donation is paying for.
Remember, donors might not immediately sign on. Be consistent in your messaging and know that it’s ok to reach out more than once.
How to Keep Your Monthly Donors
Retention is where most programs fall apart. Yes, monthly giving retention is a lot higher on average than one-time donor retention, but you don’t want your donors simply giving because it’s on autopilot. “Set it and forget it” is not the vibe we want.
Do you know what the fastest way to lose monthly donors is? Not having a system in place to manage failed credit card transactions.
I worked with an organization recently that had lost over 200 monthly donors to failed credit card transactions. These aren’t donors who cancelled. Something happened, and their credit card didn’t go through, and there was no mechanism in place to engage them and let them know what had happened. That’s a lot of revenue left on the table for a simple process issue.
The best way to keep your monthly donors is to have the right systems in place to track them.
Next, keep them engaged. Be clear on your dedicated monthly giving page about what donors get for their ongoing support. That might look like quarterly impact reports, program visits, Lunch & Learn-style events, or monthly office hours with staff. Whatever you choose, the goal is the same: donors should be able to see and name the impact their gift is having.
What to Do When They Cancel
You will have donors cancel. It happens. When they do, let them go with gratitude. When a monthly donor cancels, I like to send a heartfelt thank you and let them know exactly how much they’ve given since they’ve been a monthly donor and what impact their donations have had.
Whatever their reason for cancelling, this kind of outreach will leave them with a very positive view of your organization.
How to Grow Your Monthly Giving Program
You did it! You launched a monthly giving program. You followed the steps outlined here, and you got some donors to sign up. So how do you grow the program?
Run upgrade campaigns every once in a while. Ask a donor to increase their monthly gift by $5 and explain the additional impact that has for your organization.
Acknowledge anniversaries. A really good donation processing platform will automatically tell you when these anniversaries are coming up. Others, you may have to pull a monthly report and look at the start dates. When an anniversary comes up, send a postcard to say thank you, and give them a call to acknowledge their anniversary. They likely won’t have any idea that it’s their anniversary, but this kind of personal touch goes a long way with stewardship.
Convert one-time donors to monthly. That report you pulled to find your first monthly giving prospects? Pull that a few times a year to see who else you can reach out to and make sure to share the program often. If you decide on some kind of event or gathering as a benefit, you can promote that and say, something like, "“Become a monthly donor today and you can join us for XYZ.”
Establish metrics so that you can track performance. You won’t know if the program is growing unless you have baseline metrics in place. Here are the key metrics you should be tracking:
Monthly recurring revenue
Failed payment rate & reactivation rate
Average gift size
Once your program has been well established, you can start tracking retention and donor tenure.
This takes time to build and build well, but that’s the point of sustainable fundraising. There are no “quick wins” in fundraising (no matter how many people wish there were), but the organizations that put in the effort to build sustainability into their fundraising are the ones who are working smarter to fundraise effectively.
A monthly giving program isn't a campaign. It's infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, it takes real work to build, but once it's in place and managed well, it becomes one of the most reliable things your organisation has. That's what sustainable fundraising actually looks like in practice.
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