Best practices tell us that donors need to see, hear, and read the same messages repeatedly before many of them will act. Once they act, retention is key. At Reed College, inconsistent giving patterns were putting increased pressure on every appeal to function as both an acquisition and retention piece. The advancement communications team set out to address both messaging consistency and retention in its fall annual fund campaign. The team created overarching messaging for annual fund communications for the entire year, focusing on clearly demonstrating the impact of donors’ gifts, positioning the donor as the hero, and featuring individual student, faculty, and alumni-donor stories. For our fall campaign, we demonstrated how recurring giving impacts the heart of Reed’s mission: the academic program. The format for marquee print pieces set a template for the year’s communications, adding consistency and resonance, and messaging played out across email, video, and social platforms. Knowing that donor acquisition is more costly and time-consuming than retention efforts, we focused impact messaging and calls-to-action on recurring gifts. Paired with Reed’s new Evergreen Society for recurring donors, this campaign aimed to create a sense of community around the specific donor behavior we wanted to see. The strong emphasis on donors’ impact and consistency in messaging throughout different channels ultimately allowed us to generate 42% more new recurring donors in just eight weeks, compared to the median of new recurring donors in the prior six years.
From the Judges
We felt the focus on recurring giving was strong and successful. We also thought the execution was top-notch and that the use of digital media went beyond what is often a "scaled back" version of a print piece.
