Monthly giving programs in Canada: benchmarks smaller shops can use

What to take away

What the metric actually is

Monthly donor retention at 12 months is the share of a joining cohort still making a successful gift in month 12. Build the cohort from the month of the first cleared charge, not the month someone opened a form.

Two rules keep it comparable year to year. Count only donors whose payment cleared at least once, and exclude donors who died or asked in writing to be removed. Log those exclusions, so the definition survives staff changes.

The wider donor retention picture matters, because a monthly program cannot outrun a file that loses one-time donors faster than it adds them.

Most published monthly giving benchmarks come from US vendors with much larger files. Canadian figures are thinner. Statistics Canada's General Social Survey on giving is the closest national baseline for who gives and how much, and it does not report monthly gifts separately.

How to read a cohort

Read the shape of the curve, not one month's figure. Most programs lose donors steadily for 90 days and then flatten. If the curve never flattens, the problem sits with the ask or the payment method.

Those bands are illustrative, sized for programs with 200 to 2,000 monthly donors. They are not published Canadian averages. Replace them with your own four-cohort average as soon as you have one.

Segment before you draw a conclusion. A flat overall rate can hide a stable 25-dollar cohort and a collapsing 10-dollar one. The habits in this nonprofit marketing analytics guide apply to monthly files as much as to campaign reporting.

If you test the ask, read the method before the result. A/B testing explains why a small sample can flip a result, and a fortnight of data tells you about the form rather than the relationship.

What the numbers cannot tell you

A cohort of 60 donors moves four points on one cancelled gift. Small programs read noise as trend and rewrite the welcome series for nothing. Set a minimum cohort size, around 200 donors, before you treat a change as real.

Retention cannot separate a failed payment from a donor who wants out. In Canada, pre-authorized debit failures and expired cards look identical to voluntary cancellation in most databases. Check the failure reason code first.

The metric also says nothing about cost per retained donor. A program can hold 85 per cent and still be expensive if every retained gift arrived through paid acquisition. Donor acquisition is where that cost is set, long before anyone joins a monthly list.

A rate of 82 per cent sounds steady until you see the same 18 per cent leaving each year and nobody moving up the file.

Example: the arithmetic of a 60-donor cohort

Sixty donors join in January. Fifty-seven are still giving the following January. That is 95 per cent retention, which looks excellent.

One more cancellation drops it to 93 per cent. Two drops it to 92 per cent. Nothing changed in the program. Three people moved or changed banks.

Run the same arithmetic at 600 donors and two cancellations move the rate by 0.3 of a point. The same metric needs different thresholds at different scales.

When to act

Act when 12-month retention falls three points or more below the average of your previous four cohorts, and the drop is not explained by a spike in payment failures. Act within one quarter if month-3 retention falls below 85 per cent in two consecutive cohorts.

Cost gives a second trigger. CRA guidance on fundraising by registered charities (CG-013) treats a fundraising cost ratio under 35 per cent as generally acceptable, and sustained ratios above 70 per cent as a concern. A monthly program should sit well inside the first figure across a full year.

Most fixes live in the first 90 days, and most are email problems. The mechanics in this nonprofit email marketing guide cover the welcome series and the failed-payment message.

Common questions