5 Best Practices for Showing Genuine Donor Appreciation

The non-profit quarterly states that keeping a donor is five times more cost-effective than finding a new one. Loyal donors are like a circle of friends you can always rely on. However, for institutions, building that circle requires a proactive approach and genuine commitment that can sometimes prove difficult. This is why donor retention has steadily become more important over the years.

In this blog, we’ll take a fresh approach to defining donor retention and engagement that goes beyond the traditional ask. We’ll dive into creative strategies that truly integrates donors into your goals to make a permanent part of your journey.

What is donor retention?

Basically, donor retention is the ability of an institution to keep its donors coming back to contribute over the years. It is not just the numbers but also the genuine long-term donor relationships with people who appreciate your mission and enjoy being a part of that mission. It involves understanding their motivations, doubts, and the personal connection they feel as a giver and as an individual.

Making a habit of measuring your donor retention rate allows you to spot trends early and find new ways to keep supporters engaged. The data from the most recent Fundraising Effectiveness Project report shows that the first-time donor retention rate is 26%. In comparison, the average donor retention rate is around 46%, meaning most donors stop after contributing for the first time. Considering the unpredictable nature of the world today, keeping donors on board will be even more essential for the long-term success of K-12 and higher education institutions.

Factors influencing donor retention

Several factors can influence donor retention. Let’s take a look at some of them to understand what motivates long-time donors—big or small—to stay:

Donor Engagement:

Engagement is one of the key pillars for long-term donor retention. Your emails, newsletters, blogs, in-person events, and reports all play a key part in making returning and new donors alike feel connected to your institution. For past donors especially, continuous and meaningful interaction can reinforce their dedication to supporting your mission.

Trust and Loyalty:

Trust and loyalty drive any fundraising effort. Your donors come with their own expectations This can be achieved by a transparent demonstration of the impact of their contributions.  

💡Check out how Thomas Aquinas College holds one of the highest alumni donor participation rates across the country

Donor Management:

For retaining donors, donor management matters even more as it involves how you collect and analyze their data, as well as what you provide through communication, recurring gift enrollment, etc., to keep them interested and in the loop.

Feedback management:

To retain donors, you’ll want to be proactive in collecting and acting on feedback to show your commitment to how donors feel as well as what they can expect by sticking around. It will also help returning or past donors develop a sense of community and progress, making them feel like a vital par of your overall fundraising efforts.

Strategies to improve donor retention

Understanding the components of a well-rounded donor retention strategy is necessary to create a pathway for first-time donors to walk on and become repeat donors. These can include:

Strengthening Donor Relationships

Your efforts to reach out to the donors should go beyond fundraising needs. Send them timely thank-you emails, curate programs to identify and honor long-term donors for their valuable contributions, and conduct community meet-and-greet events that strengthen your bond and forge a trustworthy relationship.

💡Check out these 6 ways to take your donor relationships to the next level

Donor Management Tools

Try to get the most out of your donor management software for real-time engagement metrics,  deep integrations, live dashboards, automated communication tools, etc., to create an environment where donor interactions are recorded and analyzed to power future outreach and fundraising efforts.

💡If you’re looking for a new donor management tool, give Almabase a try

Personalized Communication

Tailor your communication to each donor to make sure you communicate your goals, acknowledge their impact, and make them feel appreciated. Emails, phone calls, handwritten notes, gifts, and event invitations are all viable communication channels to show how you can personalize your outreach to each donor.

Social Media Engagement

Keep your donor informed and engaged by providing updates on where their donated funds are being spent, any achievements arising out of them, and acknowledging their generosity whenever possible. Depending on how your donors use social media platforms, you can consider forming groups of similar donor segments to form giving communities.

Annual Reports

Annual reports are a time-tested way to communicate the impacts the beneficiaries achieve. These longer reports and real-life success stories inspire donor loyalty to the institution and the cause as they allow your donors to zoom out and view your overall fundraising mission as you do.

You can also provide subscription and recurring donation options or welcome different kinds of donor engagement through volunteering, referrals, and advocacy. At the end of the day, there are countless ways to retain donors, and what works for one institution may not work for you. Always consider your donors and how they they prefer to contribute to your cause.

Determining the success of Donor Retention

You can take a quick look at your overall donor retention rate using the formula below.

Donor retention rate = (Number of Donors who gave again / Total number of donors in previous period) × 100

With the wide array of tools available today, however, tracking your donor retention rate is a lot more extensive than it used to be. Making detailed segments of various levels of donor retention, however, will require more effort.

At its core, donor retention will take more time and investment from your team to get started and you’ll want to make sure you get a good ROI from your efforts. For this, you’ll first want to consider all donor retention expenses such as:

• Staff time and salaries
• Communication and engagement materials
• Events and stewardship activities
• Technology and software costs

It may be a bit difficult to narrow down your exact expenses for retaining donors but once you have a somewhat reliable estimate, you can use the following formula:

ROI = (net gain from retained donors / cost of retention efforts) x 100
‍
where Net Gain = Total donations from retained donors - Costs of retention efforts

Keep in mind that these are rudimentary calculations meant to give you a simplistic idea of your donor retention efforts. No two donors are exactly the same, and one retained donor might just be the right person who can snowball your efforts into a large giving community later down the line.

Challenges and considerations

Keeping the donors around throughout is not an easy task. Some of these challenges include but are not limited to:

• Lack of manpower or funding
• Donor fatigue
• Mismanaged or messy databases
• Inconsistent donor engagement
• Over-solicitation
• Changing donor expectations
• Lack of personalized outreach/generic communication
• Demographic shifts
• Inadequate stewardship
• Insufficient transparency and/or reporting

‍

Consider these key questions to improve donor retention strategies:

• Do your donors get to see and feel the impact of their gifts?
• Is your donor retention strategy appropriately scaled to your institution’s resources available?
• Which gaps in your fundraising strategy most often seem to cause donor fatigue?
• Do your existing digital engagement strategies and tools inspire donors to maintain interest long-term?
• Is your database/CRM suited to integrated communication, donor tracking, and analytics?
• Are your outreach efforts sufficiently customizable and scalable to enhance donor retention?

How Almabase helps you retain donors

Almabase offers digital engagement tools with features such as dynamic event management systems, personalized donor portals, and automated communication workflows to foster stronger donor relationships. Institutions such as the Merchant Taylors’ School and the Alumni Association of the School of Medicine at Loma Linda University have not just increased their donor base but have formed active online communities to power future fundraisers.

Finding the right tools to balance technology with a personal touch is crucial. That’s where Almabase’s engagement solutions come in—helping organizations offer both a personal and digital experience that makes donors feel valued, keeps them engaged, and drives sustainable long-term giving.

If you’re interested in learning more on how we can help, we’d love to not just tell you about us but also hear your problems and show you how we can help! Request a personalized demo and we’d love to get in touch with you ⬇️

The pandemic posed a formidable challenge to alumni volunteer program coordinators, complicating the ways in which they were able to engage, communicate, and connect with their alumni. Luckily, constraints for physical gatherings have eased as the crisis has progressed, and we seem to have entered a new and exciting era of hybrid engagement where program coordinators have more agency over their volunteer offerings than ever.

In fact, with in-person events having opened up again and new digital engagement strategies cropping up every day, now is the best time to level up your alumni program in and beyond 2022.
Volunteering is an essential element of any robust alumni program because it can form long-lasting relationships between alumni and your institution and boost donation revenue through volunteer grant funds. Read on to maximize these benefits and increase the success of your alumni volunteer program.

1. Take your messaging to new platforms

With each new generation of alumni more frequently engaging online through using their phones, interacting with social media, and discovering new virtual platforms, your alumni program must adapt to these changes to secure their attention. Add an insightful social media strategy to your current marketing initiatives to create a more effective, multichannel campaign for your volunteer program.
Virtual marketing mediums not only allow you to directly connect with alumni where they live, chat, and play, but they also offer unique opportunities to engage with your audience. You simply need to know how to leverage these platforms to their fullest potential.
Be mindful of these social media best practices to engage alumni and increase interest in your volunteer opportunities:

• Actively engage with followers or commenters who react to your posts.
• Share high-value photos of your volunteers and events in action to reinforce the human side of your volunteer program and attract newcomers.
• Celebrate the achievements of your volunteers with alumni spotlight posts and other displays of appreciation for their service.
• Use hashtags and similar platform-specific tools to spread the word about upcoming events and volunteer positions.

While email, direct mail, and other, more traditional channels are essential to your alumni communications, new mediums like social media will allow you to take your marketing materials to new heights.

2. Target your alumni by interest

Get Connected by Galaxy Digital’s guide to starting a volunteer program cites opportunity matching as one of the most effective methods to recruit and engage volunteers. This strategy allows you to fine-tune your communications by sharing volunteer positions and events with alumni based on their skills, experience, and interests.

The following data metrics can help you tailor your event invitations to the right alumni:

• Area of study and extracurricular involvement. If you have alumni who have yet to build a significant engagement history with your program, their activities as students can inform what volunteer opportunities they may like to be involved in. For example, someone who was involved in your institution’s sustainability program might be interested in an environmental volunteer opportunity.
  

• Career field and post-graduate organizations. Understanding how your alumni’s interests have grown and what special experience they’ve garnered since graduating from your institution are both fundamental to keeping them connected to your program. For instance, an alumnus who has pursued and thrived in a career in corporate advising and management could be a great fit as an alumni mentor for students currently in your business school.
  
  
• Previous engagement history with your alumni program. Pay attention to what events they have previously attended or volunteered for, the number and distribution of volunteer hours, and any special groups or committees alumni may be a part of.

Keep your alumni involved and encourage their participation in volunteering by sharing opportunities that they would be most likely to participate in. Rather than sending out general email blasts describing all of your volunteer experiences, opportunity matching will enable you to personalize all of your alumni communications and thereby increase engagement.

3. Open up two-way communication and get feedback

The number of event registrations, total volunteer hours, and similar key performance indicators (KPIs) should all be automatically logged into your alumni and volunteer databases. However, there’s another important piece of information that too many alumni programs neglect: alumni feedback.

Regular volunteer surveys and polls allow you to gauge opinions, experiences, and reactions that would have been difficult to measure with raw data alone.
Many volunteer or alumni management solutions already exist that can help you create, send, and create reports based on these surveys. But if you’re still struggling to think of how you could make the most of these forms, here are a few of the different kinds of alumni volunteer surveys you should send out:

• Experience satisfaction surveys to share immediately after event participation
• Overall program engagement surveys to be shared annually
• Recruitment surveys to share during registration or onboarding
• Opportunity matching and placement surveys to share during registration or onboarding    

By spacing out these surveys during opportune times in each volunteer’s involvement with your program, you will be able to gather valuable information while it is still fresh in their minds. This information can then be used to directly address the issues raised by volunteers, improve your program, and further personalize your messaging to maximize engagement.

4. Promote community-building activities

Whether your alumni are longtime volunteer program members or they have yet to participate, the promise of being a part of a community is an enticing prospect for any alumni.
The lockdown era of the COVID-19 pandemic left many people feeling more distant than ever, and it’s essential to combat these lingering effects by coming up with opportunities for alumni to connect with one another.

Whether you conduct virtual and hybrid alumni events or in-person gatherings, these engaging initiatives will encourage community-building between your alumni volunteers:

• Peer-mentoring programs
• Meet-and-greets and icebreaker events
• Team game nights
• Partnerships with local nonprofits that alumni have indicated shared interest in
• Appreciation events and celebrations

While alumni may be motivated to participate in your volunteer opportunities to support their alma mater or help the less fortunate, it will take more than an altruistic impulse to keep them involved in your program. Offering the opportunity to form a community with like-minded people will ensure that alumni stick with your volunteer program for far more than a single event.

To effectively carry out these volunteer program best practices, you might also consider investing in an alumni or volunteer management solution. From locating qualified nonprofits for partnership opportunities to facilitating social media outreach strategies, the right management software will streamline volunteer recruitment, engagement, and retention.
However, regardless of whatever software solutions you may choose, these strategies should set you up to ensure the future success of your own alumni volunteer program.

As a higher education fundraising professional or alumni volunteer coordinator, you know how important your alumni are to the success of your fundraising and volunteer efforts. Your alumni support your institution by contributing donations as well as volunteering to support your charitable events. They deserve recognition for the hard work they put in to support your institution.

Showing appreciation to alumni volunteers helps boost their engagement in your programs and initiatives, making them feel like their efforts are valued. If you’re looking for guidance when deciding how to show gratitude to your alumni volunteers, these five ideas can help get you started: 

1. Send a thoughtful, personalized thank-you note.
2. Host an appreciation event.
3. Provide additional ways to get involved.
4. Offer them a nostalgic gift.
5. Ask for their feedback.

‍

‍

These ideas just scrape the surface of the volunteer appreciation strategies you might choose to adopt. But they offer a great starting point if you’re creating your volunteer appreciation approach from scratch. 

1. Send a thoughtful, personalized thank-you note

Your volunteers donate many hours of their time and skills to support your institution, and in return, you can send them a personalized thank-you note as a form of appreciation. You can send a letter straight from your volunteer coordinator or even handwritten cards from current students. As a volunteer, nothing feels better than words of gratitude coming from those they served or the program leaders.

Your volunteer management system can help you keep track of volunteers’ personal information to reference in your communications with them. Use your software platform to keep track of volunteers’ preferred names, volunteer history, graduation year, and donation history. You can use all of these details to personalize your thank-you messages. You can also personalize your thank-you note by highlighting one of their major accomplishments and how much of an impact it brought to your institution!

For instance, perhaps a certain volunteer won a state championship as a student-athlete while attending your institution. In your volunteer appreciation letter, you can include a shout-out to that amazing accomplishment while thanking the alum for their continued support and involvement. 

2. Host an appreciation event

Consider planning an appreciation event as a fun way to get together and show appreciation to your alumni. This can be a great opportunity to allow all your alumni volunteers to connect and get to know one another outside of their volunteer hours! Invite them to events such as:

• A virtual or in-person happy hour - Gather your volunteers together to enjoy their favorite beverage and play some fun interactive games. This is a great way to help your alumni get to know one another. 
• An end-of-year appreciation gala - You can host an appreciation gala with food and entertainment and hand out awards to your most engaged or active alumni volunteers.
• A fun activity - Plan a team lunch or dinner or even something interactive like bowling for everyone to have fun and celebrate their accomplishments.

These ideas help create a good experience for your volunteers, encouraging them to stay involved with your future volunteering or fundraising opportunities. 

3. Provide additional ways to get involved

You don’t want your volunteers to miss out on any new upcoming opportunities! Keep your alumni involved by highlighting upcoming events and opportunities on your calendar. These opportunities might include:

• Networking events: These opportunities connect volunteers with fellow alumni and allow them to make personal and professional connections. This also helps your volunteers gain career knowledge from those who are more experienced.
• Mentorship programs: This is a great way for your volunteers to connect with students in the same field and talk about their interests, experiences, and gain other insights that may help them succeed in their classes or career path.
• Career development events: Consider planning job fairs or resume workshops that help your alumni grow their current skill set and learn how to market themselves effectively.
• Fundraising opportunities: These might include direct donations or peer-to-peer fundraisers where alumni solicit donations from their family members and friends. Alumni are effective peer-to-peer fundraisers because they can speak directly to how they were positively impacted by your university.  

Be sure to highlight these opportunities on your alumni website so volunteers can view them at any time. 

4. Offer them a nostalgic gift

Think of a thank-you gift that will remind your volunteers of their time spent attending your university. For example, you can offer merchandise that’s branded to your university, such as a t-shirt, coffee mug, or framed wall art. These can be branded with your university’s colors and logo. You can also offer tickets to a university sporting event, such as a basketball or soccer game.

Make things exciting by asking your alumni to participate in t-shirt designing contests and send out a poll to decide on the winning design! This is a fun way to get your volunteers engaged, and whenever they wear their t-shirts, they will be reminded of their fun experience.

These volunteer gifts will surely make your volunteers feel special and will strengthen their bonds with your institution. Remember to get creative and make your gift stand out from any other generic gift.

5. Ask for their feedback

One of the most important aspects of volunteer engagement is making volunteers feel like their opinions are valued. Ask what they enjoyed most and least about the volunteer opportunity and any suggestions they have to improve the volunteer experience in the future. 

Volunteer surveys are one of the best ways to determine how effective your volunteer program was and whether or not your volunteers were satisfied with their experience. Ensure you ask the right questions to receive the best feedback possible. This includes questions about whether they felt the volunteer experience truly made a difference or whether they would recommend your program to fellow alumni. 

Remember to leave a section at the end of your survey to allow your alumni to leave any additional comments to help you understand what to improve for next time.

Since your volunteers are dedicated and passionate about volunteering with you, ensuring they have a positive experience is crucial! This shows your volunteers that you care about their experience and also helps you enhance your future volunteers’ experience.

‍

Now that you’ve learned several ways to show appreciation to alumni volunteers, it’s time to start planning accordingly and put your ideas into action! Showing gratitude to your volunteers comes with many benefits, helping you increase your university’s volunteer program retention. Remember to personalize your appreciation gifts to make them special and stand out, and choose your gifts according to the preferences of your volunteers. Good luck!

‍