Reviews
Part of Donor retention: the parts worth your attention
A review checklist for teams serious about donor retention
A donor retention checklist that tracks cohort renewal, coded attrition reasons, and review integrity before you name or compare any provider.
What to take away
The short answer: measure retention by cohort, code every lapse, and keep stewardship apart from solicitation.
- Measure retention by cohortthe share of donors who gave in a period and gave again in the next one, tracked by gift date, not by calendar year totals.
- Code every lapsed gift with a reason (no contact, no ask, moved, deceased, gave elsewhere) so attrition becomes a number you can act on.
- Keep stewardship and solicitation as separate records. A thank-you call is not an ask, and mixing them corrupts both metrics.
- Before you name or compare a provider, check its reviews against the FTC's rules on solicited and incentivized feedback.
- Store each completed review with the released version, so a changed gift array or appeal does not inherit an old approval.
Retention is not the same as revenue. A program can raise more this year while losing the donors who funded it last year. The donor retention work starts with that distinction.
Track renewal by cohort, not by year
Pull every donor who gave in a defined window, then check how many gave again in the following window. That is your renewal rate. Run it by acquisition month, by channel, and by gift size band.
Cohort Renewal vs Yearly Totals
Cohort view
- Renewal rate
- by cohort
- Monthly giving
- early churn
- Small donors
- count tracked
- Largest gifts
- separate band
Yearly total view
- Renewal rate
- hidden
- Monthly giving
- blended
- Small donors
- masked
- Largest gifts
- inflate headline
A monthly giving cohort behaves differently from a one-time cohort. Monthly churn shows up in the first three months or not at all, so watch the early months separately.
For scale, sector studies such as the Fundraising Effectiveness Project have reported overall donor retention near 40 to 45 percent, while monthly giving cohorts typically run higher. Treat both as typical ranges and replace them with your own numbers.
Code the reason a donor stopped
Attrition without a reason is a number you cannot fix. Add a reason field to every lapsed record and fill it from what you actually know.
| Reason code | What it means | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| No contact | The donor was never reached after the last gift | Whether an address, email, or phone update was attempted, and when |
| No ask | Contact happened, but no request for a gift was made | Whether the record shows a thank-you only, or a message that also asked |
| Moved | Mail or email came back as undeliverable, or the donor relocated | Whether the address was updated and the old record closed |
| Deceased | The donor died, or the household reported a death | Whether the estate contact and any surviving spouse record were updated |
| Gave elsewhere | The donor now supports a different organization or cause | Whether the donor named a reason, and which program or appeal they left for |
Coded Attrition Reasons
- No contactcheck email deliverability, address hygiene
- No askcheck segment coverage, appeal calendar
- Gave elsewherecheck competing appeals, timing
- Life changecheck address and estate records
- Unhappycheck call logs, response times
Reactivation is a separate metric from retention. A donor who returns after a gap counts as reactivated, not retained, and the two need different appeals.
Keep stewardship and solicitation apart
Stewardship reports what a gift did. Solicitation asks for the next one. When a thank-you letter ends with an ask, the donor learns that gratitude is a sales channel.
Keep donor intent visible in the record. If someone gave to a specific program, the next contact should reflect that restriction. Quebec's Law 25 and federal PIPEDA govern how you store and use that donor data, and CASL sets the consent window for email.
Those rules cover Canadian donors. For a US program, the parallel duties come from IRS receipting and substantiation rules, state charitable solicitation registration, and CAN-SPAM. Confirm your own obligations with a qualified charity lawyer, or the CRA in Canada and the IRS in the United States.
Check review integrity before naming a provider
The FTC guidance for marketers using reviews names the practices that make a review worthless: fake feedback, selective requests, conditioned incentives, hidden relationships, and paid ranking.
Apply those five checks before you quote a review in a vendor comparison. If a platform's testimonials come only from customers who were offered a discount, say so, or drop the quote.
Make the check concrete with a named source. Third-party review sites such as Trustpilot, G2, and Google Business Profiles show dates, reviewer history, and any disclosed incentive.
Test the change before you scale it
A gift array change, a new appeal subject line, or a reactivation sequence should run against a defined comparison group. The NIST guidance on selecting an experimental design starts with the objective and the practical constraints, which is the right order.
Record the source date and limits beside the decision. A result from one segment does not transfer to another without a retest.
For data quality, the GAO data reliability guide treats quality in relation to intended use and calls for documented assessment. That supports a reproducible review, not a claim that your CRM export is certified.
A worked review for a lapsed-donor appeal
| Field | Test | Recorded result |
|---|---|---|
| Case | Take one lapsed-donor segment and one appeal | Segment size, send date, reviewer |
| Method | Recover the approval, the list source, and the consent basis for every contact | Inputs, gaps, unresolved limits |
| Outcome | Compare renewal and reactivation against the comparison group, with cost per recovered gift | Effect on cohort renewal and coded attrition |
| Escalation | Stop if the appeal raised message volume instead of improving stewardship | Correction owner and next review date |
Fix the windows before the list is pulled. A typical pattern is a 12 month cohort reviewed at month 13, applied across segments.
If the segment was mailed without a recorded consent basis, that is a control gap with an owner, not a footnote.
Common questions
What is the first decision in a donor retention review?
Define the cohort, the renewal window, and the outcome that would stop or change the work. Without those three, every later number is arguable.
How do you measure retention without a clean CRM?
Export gifts by donor ID and gift date, then build cohorts in a spreadsheet. The W3C Privacy Principles warn against shifting privacy work onto individuals, so keep donor data handling inside your documented process.
What should a team avoid?
Avoid substituting message volume for better stewardship. More emails to a lapsed segment raises complaints and deliverability damage without raising renewal.
Do you need a lawyer to review this?
For receipting, consent, and privacy rules, yes. Name the authority and refer the question to a qualified Canadian charity lawyer or the CRA rather than deciding it internally. For a US program, the authorities are the IRS, your state charity regulator, and CAN-SPAM.
