New donor acquisition is the lifeblood of growing a broad base donor program. It’s also the lifeblood of growing your program at large.
Broad base donors are your major donor pipeline of the future. And increasingly, most new broad base donors are coming in via online channels.
But new online donors don’t show up unannounced. Their first touch point is often an email signup.
They might sign up for your newsletter, download a resource, access a video series, or register for an event.
But how do you convert these new subscribers into new donors? And how do you accurately measure the success of your efforts?
2 Ways to Convert New Subscribers into New Donors
There are 2 primary categories of new online donors:
- The Instant Donor
- The Downstream Donor
Let’s take a brief look at each type.
The Instant Donor
The Instant Donor is a new email subscriber who decides to give right away.
After someone signs up for a newsletter, downloadable resource, or fills out some other type of online form—many organizations will ask for a donation directly on the confirmation page.
This is called an Instant Donation Page.
According to NextAfter’s benchmarks, this opportunity to give via an Instant Donation Page often converts about 4% of new subscribers into an Instant Donor right away.
Downstream Donors
If someone doesn’t give right away but chooses to give later, they are called a Downstream Donor.
They could choose to give the next week after joining your email list. Or they might give their first gift 6 months later.
Both types of donors are critical to the success of your donor acquisition efforts. Some organizations will see roughly 50% of their new donor revenue come from each type.
The common challenge that many nonprofits face is how to measure their performance.
Measure Donor Acquisition with Ease Using Avid
To measure your donor acquisition efforts most accurately, you’ll need to connect your tools to Avid including your CRM, your email capture tool, and your online giving tool(s).
Once these are connected and mapped, you’ll start seeing data in your Email Acquisition report.
Just head to your Insights dashboard, scroll down to your various reports, and look for the Email Program reports at the very bottom.
This Email Acquisition report will be your go-to source for measuring the revenue impact of your email acquisition efforts.
Using the Email Acquisition Report
The Email Acquisition report is divided into 4 main sections:
1. New Subscribers
This section of the Email Acquisition report lets you measure all the essentials about your new email subscribers.
Evaluate trends of when new subscribers are connecting with your organization.
See the subscription status of your new subscribers including who is sendable, who has bounced, and who has unsubscribed.
You can even drill into the top sources of new email subscribers to help you prioritize which channels, offers, and campaigns you should continue to spend time and budget on.
Avid Expert Tip
Create custom audiences based on your top email acquisition sources. You can use this for segmenting and personalizing future communication based on what you know these new subscribers are interested in.
2. Instant Donors
The next section is all about Instant Donors. These are new subscribers that choose to give immediately after signing up for emails.
Read more about how we calculate instant donors below.
You’ll find critical metrics and insights including answers to questions like:
- How many new instant donors do I have?
- How valuable are my instant donors over time?
- How likely are instant donors to give again?
- Which email acquisition campaigns have the highest likelihood of converting new donors?
Avid Expert Tip
Donors that give twice within their first year are significantly more likely to retain for the long term. Use the Instant Donor section to see which campaigns lead to more 2nd gifts, and prioritize your donor acquisition budgets accordingly.
3. Downstream Donors
Equally important in your measurement of your email acquisition efforts is Downstream Donor conversion.
Instant Donors are a powerful way to measure your immediate ROI and justify your donor acquisition budgets. But in many cases, Downstream Donors can account for up to 50% or more of your new donor acquisition revenue.
The Downstream Donor section will help you evaluate critical questions including:
- How long does it take to convert new subscribers into downstream donors?
- Which email acquisition sources lead to the most downstream donors?
- How valuable is a downstream donor?
- What is the lifetime value of a downstream donor?
All these insights and more will help you better prioritize your new donor acquisition budgets and efforts.
Avid Expert Tip
If it’s taking a long time to convert new subscribers into downstream donors, consider testing a new approach to your new subscriber welcome communications. Avid Playbooks can help you create one from scratch or test a new approach.
4. Donor Cohorts
The final section of the Email Acquisition report lets you view each Donor Cohort side by side.
Evaluate the current makeup of your email subscribers based on which type of donor they are including:
- Non-donors
- Instant Donors
- Downstream Donors
You can even see your Recurring Donor file based on their acquisition type. This will help you understand where recurring donors are coming from.
Avid Expert Tip
Create a custom audience from your “Non-Donors” directly from the Donor Cohort report. Push this audience to a Facebook / Meta campaign to re-engage them with a downloadable resource— prompting them to give for the first time via an Instant Donation page.
Drill Deeper in Your Email Acquisition Reports
As with any Avid report, you can always add filters to slice your data in new ways.
Open your “Filters” using the red button in the top right corner. From here, you can customize everything from time frame down to the specific email acquisition channels and sources.
If you’re tracking your campaigns with UTM parameters, you can apply UTM filters to get even more granular in your analysis.
Notes from an Avid Pro
Measuring "Instant Donors" can be tricky. Below are a few technical notes on how we measure your Instant Donors.
The basic criteria:
"People who give on the same day that they became an email subscriber."
A few nuances:
- Different CRMs and donation tools handle time stamps and time zones inconsistently. There is a chance that someone who becomes an email subscriber at 11:55pm and then gives at 12:01am the next day will not get counted as an "Instant Donor."
- If no time data is provided by the online donation tool, it can be difficult to tell if the email subscription came first or the donation—creating minor data discrepancies.
- When manual process are involved for migrating emails and donations to various systems, this can create discrepancies in the Instant Donor measurement.
All-in-all, we have dialed in Avid's Instant Donation measurement to be within a 5-10% margin of error—a more than reliable range to build meaningful segmentation and personalization.