Create an Effective Donor Stewardship Plan In 5 Steps

You do amazing work. You work to make the world a better place, and you partner with your community of donors to do it. But finding and engaging those donors adds up to a ton of work overall. How can you make the most of it?

The answer is to have a great donor stewardship plan.

Learning how to create and implement an effective donor stewardship plan will improve your relationship with your donors. You can use it to improve your retention rate, engage your supporters long term, and raise more money. Here’s how.

What is Donor Stewardship?

Put simply, donor stewardship is the practice of building relationships with your donors and keeping them engaged in your work. An effective donor stewardship plan will help you build a base of highly-engaged supporters. That will move you toward meeting some common nonprofit goals, like increasing donor retention, increasing revenue from recurring donations, and even inspiring people to volunteer at your organization or serve on your board.

A good donor stewardship plan will begin the moment someone makes their first gift. It will deepen the relationship between your new donor and your organization, help them understand how their support makes a difference in their community, and result in their support continuing for years to come. 

These plans will help you transform some of your donors from one-time supporters into lifelong givers. You may even discover some extremely passionate donors who choose to volunteer with you, make major gifts, or even plan a legacy gift in their will.

Why Does Having a Donor Stewardship Plan Matter?

Let’s be honest: Retaining existing donors is a challenge. And it’s a challenge for everyone! Lots of organizations—even large, well-established ones—struggle to retain their donors. 

This often means that nonprofits spend large amounts of money to reach, inspire, and recruit donors only for those supporters not to make a second gift. 

On average, only 34% of donors will make a gift in the following year—and that percentage is even lower for one-time donors. Once you obtain a first-time gift, how you choose to engage with your new donor will determine how likely they are to give again in the future.

That’s where a great donor stewardship plan comes in.

If your nonprofit nails an effective donor stewardship plan, you can make a positive impression on your supporters and encourage them to give again in the future. This is an important tactic if you’re looking to build a sustainable fundraising program: As a general rule, repeat supporters have a far higher lifetime donor value than those who never make another gift.

At first, investing time and resources into building a great stewardship program seems like a tall order. But the effort will pay off: Cultivating and maintaining donor relationships will ensure your organization’s success for years to come.

The Difference between Good Donor Stewardship and Great Donor Stewardship

It’s vitally important to give your donors a great experience after they’ve chosen to support your work. Whether you’re completely new to fundraising or are simply looking for new ideas to build into an existing donor stewardship plan, this section will outline a few ways you can create a next-level plan for keeping your donors engaged.

Think Outside the Box

You may already be working on some of the basics of a great donor stewardship plan. You do all the right things: You send thank-you letters within 24 hours of a gift, you report donors’ impact, and you send tax receipts promptly. You may even hold a yearly appreciation lunch for your loyal donors. What else can you do? 

Get creative! Ultimately, your goal is to become so successful at stewarding that you know many of your donors personally and understand how your supporters prefer to interact with you. As you think about how to work toward that goal, brainstorm new ideas with your team.

You may also want to consider sending surveys to loyal donors and volunteers to learn what they’d like to see from your organization. They may give you some unexpected ideas you hadn’t considered before, like:

• Facility tours so they can see their support in action
• Community meetups or volunteer opportunities
• Peer-to-peer fundraisers or donor-hosted events
• New formats for updates, impact reports, or annual reports

Don’t be afraid to try something new, and remember that it’s okay to try things that aren’t immediately successful. Even a tactic that flops can teach you something important!

Say, for example, you’ve added a new event for recurring donors to your stewardship plan. Even though you did a good job spreading the word about your event, turnout is pretty low. What can you learn from this?

Interview a handful of donors to learn what you could do in the future to make your event more appealing. Could you run it on a different day or time? Would they prefer to connect in a different way? 

The next time you update your donor stewardship plan, you can draw on your experiences and donor feedback to plan something outstanding.

Get Everyone Involved

An organization with a good donor stewardship plan will have one or two employees who are in charge of planning and executing the whole thing. An organization with a great stewardship program has all its employees and volunteers involved in the stewardship process in some regard. 

It might look something like this:

• Your development staff lays out the different pieces of the plan, creates amazing donation experiences for donors, and writes great receipts, thank-you letters, and impact updates that get your supporters excited about how their support makes a difference.
• Your marketing staff works with development to get awesome photos that support those impact updates, helps build and send emails, and plans marketing activities that make current and potential donors alike excited about how they can get involved.
• Your event planning staff plans donor recognition events, sends targeted event invitations to donors, and recognizes very engaged supporters at fundraising events.
• Your board of directors helps call donors, write thank-you notes, or arrange in-person meetings with them.
• Your program staff share updates, pictures, and other assets that support your donor retention activities.

Everyone at your organization should know how their role fits into and supports your overall donor stewardship plan. This can even include treating your loyal donors as valuable members of your team who can provide helpful feedback on your plan’s effectiveness.

Create Your Own Donor Stewardship Plan in 5 Easy Steps

If you don’t have a donor stewardship plan—or if you think your existing plan needs some tweaking—don’t panic! The process of creating one is less daunting than it may seem. A great stewardship plan can be put together in five simple steps.

Step 1: Set Donor Stewardship Goals

Setting some goals for your donor stewardship plan will help you be more successful. And make sure those goals are S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) is the perfect place to start! Once you have those goals, they will guide the rest of your planning decisions. 

Some common S.M.A.R.T. goals you may choose to set for yourself include:

• Improving your donor retention rate by a certain percentage by the end of the year
• Upgrading a certain number of people from one-time to recurring donors this quarter
• Setting one-on-one appointments with a specific number of major donors next year

If your nonprofit is new or has a small team, these goals will be slightly different than a giant organization that is a household name. Jumping right into personal phone calls for every single first-time donor may not be possible if you don’t have a huge development department, especially if you’ve launched a new campaign that’s really starting to take off. Instead, try calling a handful of folks every week.

If you can, calculate some key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you understand your progress toward your goals. You may want to calculate your donor retention rate, lifetime donor value, or other metrics, then keep your current performance in mind as you work toward improving them. 

If you’re a young organization that doesn’t have several years’ worth of data, measure yourself against industry benchmarks instead.

Step 2: Create Different Segments of Donors

In order to execute parts of your plan, you will first need to segment your donors into different categories that will each have their own communications plans. Your donors aren’t a monolith, and using a nonprofit CRM to organize, report, and analyze your donor data can make segmenting much easier.

Consider segmenting your donor base by common parameters like giving history, demographics, communications preferences, and/or average gift size. You may also categorize donors based on the goals you’ve set!

If your goal is donor reactivation, for example, you might want to identify segments based on the date of each donor’s last gift. 

This is an important part of your donor stewardship plan because it will help make each of the activities in your strategy more relevant to your donors. 

Imagine you set a goal of inspiring 20 people per quarter to upgrade from a one-time donation to a recurring one. You’ll almost certainly send an appeal for ongoing support. Instead of sending a single appeal to everyone, you can send tailored appeals to:

• People who have made a single one-time donation
• People who have given a few different one-time donations
• People who are potential donors but haven’t made a gift yet

You can also filter out donors who already make a gift on a recurring basis. Instead of asking them to set up a regular gift, you can thank them for their ongoing support and invite them to increase their regularly-scheduled donation.

Step 3: Plan Outstanding Donor Communications

Once you’ve set your goals and segmented your donors, you can create a communications calendar for each donor segment. Devise a list of necessary communication points, any extra messaging you’d like to implement, and even what events and donor appreciation activities you want to host.

Some common communications you may want to include in your plan are:

• Thank-you letters
• Welcome emails for first-time donors
• Impact updates
• Newsletters
• Fundraising event invitations
• Donor appreciation events
• Additional appeals

Get creative with how you communicate with your donors! Look at the different segments you identified in the previous step—how can you make each of the people on those lists feel seen and appreciated? 

If you can segment by the campaigns that each donor supported most recently, for example, you can send them updates about those specific programs. Recurring donors may receive a special newsletter. Past event attendees may receive invitations that reference their prior involvement and include a discount code if they buy a ticket. 

Anything you can do to tailor your messaging to your donors’ history with your organization will help boost engagement. And, more importantly, it will help your donors feel like they’re a valued part of your community.

Step 4: Create a Stewardship Matrix That Informs Your Plan

After you complete the first three steps, you can create a stewardship matrix that outlines which donor segments are being included in each communication item in the plan. 

Your matrix will help you direct your time and resources to the areas they’ll make the most difference. It doesn’t have to be complex—here’s a sample of what it can look like.

• First-time donors will receive a thank-you message within 24 hours, a welcome email within 3 days, and an impact update within 10 days
• Donors who completed a second gift will receive a thank-you message within 24 hours, a phone call within 3 days, and an impact update within 10 days
• Donors who give above $500 will receive a thank-you message within 24 hours, a phone call within 24 hours, and an impact update within 10 days

To build a matrix, identify the segments you’ll use to plan your communications. Then, create a communications journey for each. Be as specific as you can as you map out what messaging they’ll receive and when they’ll receive it.

Step 5: Automate Different Processes When Necessary

Make no mistake: Donor stewardship can require lots of time and resources. There’s a lot to it—we could probably write whole articles dedicated to each point of these five steps! 

To alleviate the time-consuming nature of certain stewardship tasks, invest in technology like a CRM and automate tasks when you can.

This doesn’t mean your technology will do everything for you: Building relationships with donors is an inherently human activity, and technology can’t replace human involvement in this process. But technology can make it easier for you to make personal connections with your donors.

Your CRM should be able to support your stewardship plan by giving you the tools to keep important information organized and in one place. With the right platform, you’ll be able to set up automated processes for sending emails, synching and updating donor data, building and communicating with different donor segments, and so much more. 

You can even automatically schedule activities for certain members of your team! If your donor communications matrix includes a personal phone call within 24 hours of a large gift, for example. You can automatically create a task for someone to call a $500+ donor within a day of their donation.

Neon CRM Can Support Your Donor Stewardship Plan

Each of these steps—setting goals, segmenting donors, planning and executing a communications strategy for each group, and automating tasks when possible—will help you build a base of highly engaged donors who support your cause year after year. A CRM will make it all easier.

Neon CRM includes all the tools you need to steward your donors. From their first gift onward, you can use our platform to track your donors’ data, segment your list of supporters, manage your communications, and more. 

Interested in learning how you can succeed with Neon CRM? We’d love to talk with you! We’ll learn more about your nonprofit, your goals, and your needs, then create a personalized tour of our platform for you. 

Sound good? Talk to our team today!

Request a Neon CRM Demo