Tis the Season: A Potpourri of Fundraising Performance

Happy holidays to you and yours! As we on the CDP Analytics Team get ready for a new year of helping stations improve their fundraising results, we wanted to look back and share some of the most interesting public media fundraising trends of 2021. With more than 170 stations participating in the CDP National Reference File (NRF), there is a LOT of data to crunch, and no matter the time of year, nothing puts a smile on the face of a data analyst quite like a big data set.

So, without further ado, here’s what we found:

1) Sustainers and Passport continue their takeover of station files.

The median station in the NRF now sees nearly 44% of its donors giving sustaining gifts, up from just under 40% a year ago. That is GREAT news because the average sustainer is worth nearly 40% more over their first five years on file than the average non-sustainer.

With that said, it’s no surprise that the median TV/Joint station now sees 34% of its first-year donors coming via Passport, a 2% increase from a year ago. While this is a more modest increase than the 9% increase over 2020, it does mean that Passport is now the single largest source of new donors for most TV/Joint stations: By October 2021, the median station saw more of its new donors from Passport than from on-air pledge — and that includes both phone-in and online gifts combined.

2) And yet donor value is going…up??

The concern with Passport taking over station files has always been that Passport donors give, on average, less over a 12-month period than non-Passport donors. It may be a surprise, then, to find that the overall average 12-month donor value has gone up for the median station in the NRF over the past year, from $125 to $127. This finding surprised even us as we gathered learnings for this year, and we don’t yet have a full explanation. But it’s likely a combination of improving sustainer retention rates across stations as well as potentially increasing one-time gift value. We’ll be digging into that in 2022.

3) Station file growth has slowed.

In FY21, many stations budgeted conservatively due to the unprecedented uncertainty the pandemic caused. As donors rallied, stations saw performance greatly exceed those expectations. While we haven’t yet seen a downturn, we have seen growth slow this year. The median station in the NRF increased its member file 4% year-over-year as of October — good news, but still below the 5-9% rates stations were seeing last year. And the median station actually lost 12-month new donors year-over-year. File growth in 2020 was driven by those new donors — many joining for Passport. (One reason that we’ve seen radio stations struggle in comparison to TV stations over the past year — radio donor acquisition was much less robust in 2020.)

Thankfully, for now at least, it seems that stations are retaining those donors well — likely because such a high percentage of them are sustainers — because many stations are struggling to keep adding new donors at the same rate.

4)     Direct mail is…holding steady?

Reports of the demise of direct mail have been greatly exaggerated. (And have been predicted since just after the mail was invented.) Despite shifts happening elsewhere in station giving patterns, direct mail is holding its own and remains a key source of revenue. The median National Reference File station drove 31% of its membership revenue (for gifts under $1,000) from direct mail for the 12 months through October — and that number hasn’t really budged in the five years of reliable data we’ve crunched. The lesson here? Don’t neglect your direct mail program! As costs rise and USPS service levels become less reliable, it’s important to look for ways to maintain effectiveness, reduce costs and protect that net revenue. Whether finding savings through a direct mail cooperative or making sure you’re giving donors the ability to respond to a mail piece through other channels — via a webform or even texting — every step you take to shorten delivery and response times and lower costs is well worth the effort.

Best wishes to you in the coming year. If there is anything CDP can do to help you achieve your goals for 2022, please let us know!

Dan Atherton