By Mathew Harkins, Director, The Engage Group

Sustainers are the backbone of your program’s revenue. That part is easy to understand if you’ve seen the numbers. The question then is: how do you get them? How do you encourage sustained giving from one-time donors and your prospects? How do you convince people to take this action without getting too aggressive? Luckily there are myriad ways to go about this – enough for you to try some now, test them, and continue tweaking your sustainer program for campaigns to come. Here’s where we’ve seen success:

• Segment your repeat donors and direct sustainer messaging and offers to them. If someone is giving repeatedly during the year on their own, there’s a good chance they’ll appreciate being noticed and offered the convenience of sustained giving. This allows both recognition, cultivation, and a unique ask for your sustainer program.
• Implement a sustainer upsell on your donation form. These pop-ups appear after a supporter has clicked to donate a 1x gift asking if they would like to convert to a smaller monthly gift. If they select “No” or do nothing, the 1x gift processes, but if they say yes then you have converted a new sustainer.
• Share the impact of sustained giving. This can be storytelling about how you are able to allocate resources thanks to monthly giving, or it can be offering your sustainers the tools to share that they’ve made this gift (or both!). People like to tell and be told stories – encourage this on both ends of the program.
• Encourage donors. Those arrows on donation forms that point to the amount you want to encourage? Or that point to the monthly recurrence? They are very easy to deploy in most scenarios and it’s one more variation on asking. Ask your supporters to go
• Treat your sustainers. They’re giving to you monthly, you can give them something back. It may be a sustainer-only premium, it may be a low-to-no-cost perk (e.g. special phone wallpaper). It may even just be a “membership” title (recognition can sometimes be the most effective perk).
• Stick with it. A single effort may not get the job done right away. You’ll need to invest time, effort, and some money to make this work.
• Show them how and tell them why it makes an impact. You can indicate the gift that most supporters are giving or just point out the monthly option.
• Sustainer upgrades? Yes please. Don’t rush on this one. Be thankful, be grateful, and be patient. Make a plan to ask your sustainers to upgrade their gift. $1, $3, $5; and make it easy. Use your eCRM and/or email marketing platform to autofill as much of the saved user data that you have – maybe even the amount – so your sustainer only needs to hit a single “Yes, Upgrade My Gift” button to complete the upgrade.

There is room to grow and there are a lot of ways to facilitate sustainer growth. Create a checklist and a plan and then map out how you can test these various efforts. It doesn’t hurt to try, so get started now. Monthly gifts await.