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Monthly donors are gold, but they’re hard to come by! Nonprofits have tried tactic after tactic to recruit new monthly donors online – from monthly checkboxes on donation pages to rolling sustainer invite series to themed monthly giving options – with varying degrees of success. But even the most successful monthly giving programs are always looking for new ways to turn one-time donors into sustainers.

Here’s one you might not have tried: the “upsell lightbox.”

Rather than forcing nonprofits to choose between asking donors for a monthly gift and asking them for a one-time gift, the “upsell lightbox” provides the best of both worlds.
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If you’re a fundraiser or campaigner, you should find plenty of food for thought if you read between the lines of this recent NPR story, “Gamifying the system to create better behavior.” It certainly caught my attention when I heard it!

The story highlights the use of rewards to encourage specific behaviors (in this case, rewarding people for driving the speed limit by entering them into a contest to win a prize or encouraging people to lose weight by putting them on national TV), but they also address a hierarchy to rewards:
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There’s no denying that the recent economic downturn is affecting nonprofit organizations’ funding streams. Although a recent M+R study found that nonprofit online fundraising continued to grow through the end of 2008, we did note that average gift sizes have declined considerably. Since there is no predicting which way this trend will go, it seems wise to pull out all the stops to recruit new donors and to maximize online giving.

One of the biggest challenges nonprofits face when it comes to raising money online is getting a prospective donor to make that all-important first gift. In order to clear that hurdle, the organization must effectively convince the potential donor that there is a good reason why they need to give right now!

One way to make that case is by offering a premium for donating. Premiums alone will never provide the entire ‘case for giving’ but when combined with a compelling institutional or campaign ask, they can have a significant impact on returns. (more…)