Monthly donors are magic!

If you know me, you know I'm a big fan of monthly donations. Such a big fan that if I could get every donor to donate monthly instead of once, I'd totally do it!

Why the love:

• ​Monthly donors levelize your revenue! From (painful) experience, I can tell you that monthly giving makes the end of year crunch is a lot easier, since you've already raised a significant part of your revenue through the year.
• More people can participate! Donating $10/mo ($110/yr) is financially more viable than donating once for $110, so more people can participate.
• More Millennial love! Millennials are now the largest generation in the US, quickly nearing 40 and we want to change the world! We were raised on subscription services, it makes sense to us and we're comfortable with it. Your monthly giving program is a subscription service for changing our community/world!
• Regular reminders of the work! With each monthly donation, your donor will be reminded that they're making their community a better place and that feels good. (You still need to be regularly communicating with your monthly donors of course)

Your payment provider probably offers you *many* different options for recurring donation frequency and it's tempting... but don't enable anything other than monthly! Here are the common options I've seen with some reasoning why you shouldn't do it:​

• Weekly - Why, just why? This will wildly drive up your transaction costs and all these transactions is a bookkeeping nightmare. Don't do it.
• Every 2 weeks - It's tempting because a lot of people get paid every two weeks. If you really want to fight me, I'll give you this one. But for a lot of the same reasons above, don't do it.
• Quarterly - This isn't frequent enough and allows your donor too much time to forget they signed up as a monthly donor, which can make them wonder if something fishy is going on.
• Semi-annually - No, for the same reason above, but more. At the rate that people get new credit/debit cards, it's somewhat unlikely that card will even be good anymore once it attempts to run again.
• Annually - No, just no, not ever. No donor will remember signing up for this! Also, the donor's card info will have changed by the time a year rolls around again and the donation will fail.

Don't forget I'm available for hire! Let's chat and build a monthly giving program at your organization!

Did this post help you raise more money? I'd love it if you bought me a beer!