The Curious Case of the Missing New Pledge-Acquired Sustainers

I was enjoying a hot cup of tea and polishing my magnifying glass when this urgent message came over the “Ask Deb” wire (available to your station by emailing askdeb@cdpcommunity.org) 

Q: We have had a sharp drop in the share of new donors acquired during pledge who are making sustainer gifts. We have not changed our messaging or approach to acquiring new sustainers during pledge. What could be the cause? 

Well, that is curious, indeed. And a perfect case for Sherlock — both the great detective and the data analysis tool available with CDP Insights. 

Pledge is a primary source for new sustaining donors so any dip in the percentage of sustainers should be investigated and understood. A broader look at year-over-year trends by organization type reveals that Radio-Only stations experienced an increase in the share of new pledge-acquired donors making sustaining gifts. Joint Licensees were flat. But TV-Only stations experienced a decline of four percentage points (see right). 

For this particular Joint Licensee organization, we started to unravel this mystery in the Donor File Trends tab, which allows us to segment donors by several Giving Filters to see if there are declines within a subset of the larger group. 

We made three selections in our Giving Filters: 

  • Members Status = NEW 

  • Membership Acquisition Category = All “PLEDGE” selections 

  • Membership Acquisition Gift Kind = Sustaining Gift 

Having isolated our new pledge-acquired sustaining donors, working through the options in the “Way to Segment” filter, we saw a definite drop in the share of these donors who were also new Passport streamers in the current year. A clue! Could the Passport benefit be a factor? 

To test our theory, we returned to our giving filters and set “Streaming Acquired” to TRUE. This indicates that, regardless of origin source, eligible and Passport-activated donors streamed Passport content  within three days of their first gift. 

And sure enough, we saw sharp drops here, as well.   

Our deduction was that potentially waning attraction toward the Passport benefit, which typically tends to draw more sustaining gifts, was possibly the driver for declines within this donor group. Armed with this information, this public media organization can now review messaging and pledge timing in relation to Passport content to look for ways to return to greater shares of sustainers during their pledge drives. 

As for myself, I have another cup of tea, keep my magnifying glass smudge-free and continue unraveling your fundraising mysteries using CDP Insights! After all, as Sherlock himself (in this case the great detective) tells us, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” 

 

Is there a particular challenge your station is facing? Want to dive deeper into the data? Send Deb your questions by emailing askdeb@cdpcommunity.org. 

Deb Ashmore