Hi everyone,
We are exploring the idea of adding a "suggested donation" line on our subscription renewal mailing this year. It would be a 10% increase on their gift from last year, or a set amount of $50 or $100 if they have never given before. I was wondering if anyone else suggests donations on sub renewals... what works, what doesn't, do you give a "grand total" on the form with ticket price AND donation? If anyone has example forms that they are willing to share, that would be really helpful as well!
Thank you for your input!
Nicole Eibe - Director of Donor Engagement - Annual Fund
Sarasota Orchestra
Hi,
We always do a suggested ask for subscription renewals and for the past couple of seasons it has been customized based on prior giving history. The increases ranges from about 15% to 50% depending on a variety of factors and we use a static $50 for someone that did not give in the past year and no ask for someone that just donated in the past 3 months. Our DBA created a procedure used during rollover to create the ask on the renewal invoice. If you do not have a DBA for your organization you can select a Contribution Campaign when you run the renewal data using the Sub Renewal Notices utility. Note that our utility has been customized so I am not 100% sure that a "Contribution Campaign" parameter existed in the canned utility. This will populate the suggested contribution with the gift the person gave in the campaign that you selected. We export our data to Excel so the amounts can be manipulated manually or building formulas to increase the ask. We did include the donation in the Grand Total for the past couple of years but received feedback from the box office that subscribers were unhappy with this so this year we did not include the donation in the Grand Total and left it blank.
Good luck!
Thank you for your feedback, this is really helpful! Especially knowing that you had some push-back by including the donation in the Grand Total. We have been debating how to handle this for awhile, so we will probably leave it blank as well.
Much appreciated!
Nicole,
I've had lots of success in the past doing this- it does help to get buy-in from development for VIPs and give them some special attention, as well as looking at previous donation history (people may make the same gift every year with their renewals that is "off formula" so to speak, or always make a gift in December that you wouldn't want to ask for in April)
On the form I left the “total” box unfilled, so there was a column that had pre-filled- ticket price, ticket add-ons price, and suggested contribution, and patrons filled out the total themselves based on which of those boxes they checked (and there was a side bar box for adding a different contribution amount if they wanted to do that)
Best of luck. I do highly recommend it from both a fundraising and patron experience standpoint,
Zach