Picture yourself on a boat that’s taking on water. But you only have a teacup to bail with. You have to keep going so fast that there’s never any time to find and fix the leak. The metaphor illustrates a perennial challenge faced by a lot of fundraisers. There’s a natural tension between striving to meet immediate goals  — keeping the budget on track for the current fiscal year —  and planning strategies for a longer-arced future. At many public media organizations, the fundraising staff wear more than one hat and move from one campaign to the next in rapid or even overlapping succession. It can be an environment where finding the time and headspace to do long-term donor value analysis can feel like a luxury.

But the reality is that understanding how decisions we make today impact our revenue for years to come is an absolute necessity. Lifetime donor value analysis is how we make the right choices when it comes to acquisition techniques and strategies that lay the groundwork for a solid base of support from valuable, loyal donors.

The lifetime value of a donor is simply how much a donor contributed, in total, over a period of time. For our purposes, we will be evaluating the average lifetime value of donors as a cohort: a group of donors acquired in the same period or by the same technique.

Within CDP Insights, we now provide benchmarking metrics for 12, 24, 36 and 60-month lifetime values. We also provide lifetime values by whether the origin gift was sustainer or non-sustainer in nature and by how the donor was acquired.

A review of the overall lifetime value for donors acquired three years ago shows us increasing values over time for all station types, with radio outperforming joint licensees and TV only organizations.

When we review the same donor segment, but isolate those donors acquired as sustainers, the results become more pronounced. Though all lifetime values increase when donors are acquired as sustainers, radio lifetime value for sustainers further exceeds joint and TV than overall donor lifetime values.

With this information we can make strategic decisions including how we message during pledge drives or the giving levels we offer.

We can take this analysis even further by segmenting according to the origin gift channel. Let’s take a look at the lifetime value at 36-months for donors acquired by pledge.

Here we can see that over the five-year period the lifetime value of donors acquired via pledge has increased for all organization types and is similar across all organization types. This could be an indicator that as new donors via pledge have declined for most, public media organizations are making the most of that precious airtime by encouraging more new donors to become sustainers and/or acquiring donors at greater starting values.

If you are a CDP Insights user, you can access your lifetime value metrics in both the ROAR+ benchmarking reports (providing comparison data with your cohort) and in Sherlock to drill deeper into lifetime value by more specific segments.

If you are a National Reference File participant and would like to take a peek at your LTV metrics, give me a shout at AskDeb@cdpcommunity.org