Marcia Beckner
I welcome back to the Nonprofit CEO SPARK podcast. I’m your host, Marcia Beckner.
I’m a CEO, mentor, and culture strategist, helping organizations build healthy, inclusive, and empowering cultures where all their leaders and teams can thrive.
Today, we’re diving into the research behind successful recurring donor programs and what nonprofit leaders need to know to build stronger donor relationships and more sustainable revenue.
Our guest is Abby Jarvis, a researcher, writer, and speaker at Neon One.
Neon One is a new partner of mine. They are a donor CRM platform.
They do so much more than that, but I’m always encouraging my clients and listeners to look into Neon One as an amazing tech solution that can help streamline your processes.
You’ll learn more about it in this episode. For more than a decade, Abby has studied donor behavior, fundraising trends and the factors that drive long-term donor engagement.
Her work helps nonprofit leaders better understand why people give, what inspires them to stay connected, and how organizations can build driving fundraising programs.
Today, she’ll share key insights from the latest recurring donor research, and what nonprofit leaders can learn from the organizations doing it best.
Abby, welcome to the show.
Abby Jarvis
Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.
Marcia Beckner
Well, before we dive into the research, I’m curious, what drew you to this work? How did you end up building a career around studying donor behavior and helping nonprofits succeed?
Abby Jarvis
It was 100% an accident. I started working in the nonprofit tech sector, like you said, spent, I think, a little over 13 years, and I was just tasked with starting a blog, and then a webinar program.
Then I started asking questions about what actually motivates people to give, and what do donors actually want from the relationships they build with nonprofits?
And I did my first research study, and I was just hooked. So, this is not where I anticipated going.
I have learned, like, I don’t have a background in data analysis or data science or anything like that.
I have a background in poetry, so I got really passionate about making data, which is so overwhelming and intimidating to a lot of people, and making it very easy to grasp and understand and apply, even to people like me who don’t have a background in it.
Marcia Beckner
So, you’re kind of a translator.
Abby Jarvis
Yeah, I’ve joked that that’s my niche that I translate huge portions of data for people and tell stories with it.
Marcia Beckner
I love it. Yeah, I mean, that’s what all of it, all nonprofit leaders are striving to become better at, is telling stories around their mission impact and turning that into ongoing support, whether it be volunteers, donations, grants, all of this stuff.
And I know, as I’ve been an executive director for nearly 10 years, and what kept me up at night was mostly revenue, sustainability, donor relationships.
How do I continue to improve in that area? So I know this is this subject is top of mind, and I’m glad that you’re here to share the research with us and translate it into ways that the leaders listening can utilize and and make actionable by the end of this episode.
Abby Jarvis
Absolutely,
The Reality of Today’s Recurring Donor Trends
Marcia Beckner
okay. Well, we, we were introduced to each other because you have just, or your company, Neon One, has recently published the recurring donor report, and so my first question is, Why should nonprofit CEOs and executive directors pay attention to it?
Abby Jarvis
There are a couple reasons. The biggest, and I hate to start on this, but there are some – there are some trends that we’re seeing industry-wide that are really difficult.
So, for years now, we’ve seen year over year declines in individual giving. We, as a sector, consistently have low donor retention rates, and those things have a direct influence on nonprofit leaders’ ability to develop a community that supports their work.
So, what we’re really doing as a sector is looking for ways to turn those trends around, and just to be super clear, building a recurring giving program isn’t going to be the silver bullet that solves declining individual giving and low retention rates, but it is a really valuable step toward turning some of those trends around.
So the report really digs into recurring donors, the people who make recurring gifts, what motivates them, and then how they’re having an impact on the sector. So to understand that, we combined two data sets.
The first looks at three years of transactions. Those transactions were made to over 4000 nonprofits, a huge. Lots of data.
And what we see is that the people who are making recurring giving are doing so with increasing frequency. That is a style of giving that’s growing.
So even as we see individual giving declining, fewer and fewer individuals are making traditional donations to traditional nonprofits.
People who are choosing to make recurring giving, that group is growing, so that’s important to keep in mind.
The second data set that we looked at is, I think, much more interesting. We did a survey and asked donors to tell us about their motivations and their preferences and what inspires them to give.
We got around 2000 donors to talk to us, and around 720 of them had a history of making recurring gifts.
So, for the second part of the report, we really dug into what those recurring donors told us about what motivates them to give, their patterns around their giving, and what they want from the nonprofits they support.
So the report as a whole hopefully gives people a roadmap to starting to build a stable, sustainable base of supporters that gives them the ability to kind of figure out how to deal with the other trends that are impacting the sector.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, and it’s, it’s said often that you know retaining donors is less expensive than recruiting new donors.
Abby Jarvis
Yes,
Marcia Beckner
yeah, and I just interviewed someone else on the podcast.
We talked about this in the staff, like staff culture relationship, and the leader staff, like it’s much easier and less expensive to retain your staff versus like go out and recruit and train and onboard and all of that.
And I’m seeing like some similarities in in the psychology between what gets people to stay and really connect and commit whether you’re a staff member into an organization or whether you’re a donor.
So tell us more about like give us some like practical things in in the patterns and the trends that you saw in this research.
Abby Jarvis
One of the questions we asked our panel of recurring donors is, what motivated you to give, and their two primary motivations were a personal connection to the to the organization or the work that the organization was doing, and a desire to make a difference in the community that they serve.
That showed up over and over and over again. We see the same patterns in volunteers.
They wouldn’t be donating their time and skills if they weren’t passionate about the work, and if they weren’t invested in making a difference in the community.
I don’t have as much data as you probably do around what motivates staff to get involved, but I suspect some of the same drivers are there.
So over and over again we see that these three groups of people, and that I want to be clear, like donors and supporters, like donors and volunteers are the big ones.
But we see this in people that attend events, and we see this in people who raise money for nonprofits, and we see this in people who are grant makers.
All of these people are coming together as a team to address issues that they see in the world, to solve a problem they’ve identified together, and to work together to make a difference in that area.
And so there’s a lot of common ground, a lot of common ground to build upon there, and that common ground, if, if we find ways to embrace it.
I think can not only help you acquire donors, but and supporters of all kinds, but help you keep them engaged for very long periods of time as well.
Harnessing the Power of Visibility
Marcia Beckner
Did you get any, like, specific, like kind of tactical things around how to leverage those recurring, those donors most likely to become recurring donors.
Like what specifically we understand that they’re connected to the purpose, personal connection, and the community, but like taking it down a level, like how do you do that? How do you harness that power?
Abby Jarvis
Honestly, the biggest thing that I took away from it is being very visible in your community and showing people the work that you’re doing.
So, we found that almost half of the people who made gifts, who made recurring gifts, I’m talking specifically about them, did so, not because they were asked, they just chose to do so.
And the number one thing that prompted them, so we know they’re motivated to do this thing. So, what prompted them to do it?
The number one prompt was simply seeing an organization in their community doing good work.
So, if you want to do one thing, one tactic for acquiring new donors and keeping the ones that you already have, it’s to share the work that you’re doing with people on lots of channels, because that will help you reach both existing and new donors.
So, if you have a program that you know that your people are excited. About talk about it everywhere, on your website, on social media, in email, at community events.
Just be present and show people the work that you’re doing, and then invite them to be part of that work.
That’s the single most valuable tactic that you can use for any, for any activity, program, donor group, volunteer group, whatever it is, that’s the number one thing you can do.
Marcia Beckner
Well, it’s really interesting that they didn’t need to be asked. And tell me more about that.
Abby Jarvis
Yeah, so one of the things that.. so I had a conversation with a, with a fundraiser the day that we launched this report, and she looked and she’s like, oh, almost 50% of your, of the people who gave her current gifts, gave despite the fact that they weren’t asked.
And I said yes, and she said, well, doesn’t that mean then that we don’t, we shouldn’t be asking for this, because so many people are giving without being asked?
And I was like, no, these people are passionate, they’re in your community, they’re looking for a way to make a difference, and they happened to see you, and they decided to make a serious, ongoing commitment to supporting your work.
That’s beautiful, but imagine what could happen if people started actively inviting people to support their work that way.
And I, there’s so much research that went into this, and so many data points behind it, but now and then, when we published research on recurring giving several years ago.
We see data point after data point that hints that nonprofits have recurring giving options available to the people in their community, but they’re not focusing on building recurring giving programs.
Lots of data points make me think that that hypothesis to use a very data sounding word is true, but the number one thing that makes me think that nonprofits are not asking is that only in our group 25% of our recurring donors gave you as a nonprofit asked, if
Marcia Beckner
20%
Abby Jarvis
25
Marcia Beckner
of 25
Abby Jarvis
most people gave without being asked at all. Others gave as part of a, like, a workplace giving program, or they, they gave because they were asked to by a friend or family member, but only 25% were giving because a nonprofit invited them to become a recurring donor.
So we’re seeing this group of donors grow, we’re seeing this type of donation becoming more popular, and that’s happening despite the fact that they’re not being asked to give that way.
People are choosing to do that alone.
So, imagine what could happen. Imagine the growth we could see, and the stability we could see if nonprofits started intentionally inviting their community to support them that way.
There’s a huge amount of opportunity here, and that I’m so excited about it.
Marcia Beckner
and so this report, when did it come out?
Abby Jarvis
This launched at the end of April in 2026
Moving Beyond Transactional Mindsets
Marcia Beckner
Okay, this is very recent. It is, yeah, when you’re looking at recurring donors as people rather than transactions, what does this research teach us about like trust, connection, and long-term commitment.
Abby Jarvis
So I want to start by saying that nonprofit fundraisers are in a uniquely complicated situation. Fundraisers, by necessity, live in two worlds.
They live in the transaction-driven world. You have to meet your fundraising goals, you have to meet your revenue goals, you have to run reports and make sure that you’re hitting all of your KPIs, and that’s an important world to live in.
However, the transactional mindset, when it extends to the relationships that are built with with supporters can get really tricky. When you are a fundraiser, you are consumed by necessity by meeting your goals.
Your donors do not care about what your fundraising goal is. They care about the squishier, more emotional, very human things.
They care about making a difference. They care about feeding your community, they care about preserving the arts, they care about whatever your mission is.
When you are stuck in a very transactional mindset, when you have a hard time moving over into the squishier, human-centered thing, one, it has a negative impact on your donors, they don’t feel connected to you. The connection that drove their gift in the first place fades.
They aren’t as excited about the impact that they’re making, because they don’t necessarily understand it. But it also has a negative impact on fundraisers too, because it contributes to this terrible..
I think about as a vending machine. If I go to the vending machine, I get put in my inputs, I give them my dollar 50 or whatever, I punch in a sequence of numbers, and then out pops a treat.
And when a fundraiser is stuck in the transactional mindset, there’s a lot of stress associated with that. Well, I sent the appeal on the right time on the right.
A, and I included the right number of links to the donation form, and I made sure that I had the right font size, and I knew it was accessible.
It’s very transactional and tactics-oriented, but a lot of the feeling, a lot of the squishy part gets lost, and donors don’t respond to vending machine transactional interactions, they respond to squishy human things.
That’s hard for fundraisers. So, if you, if you can practice pulling yourself out of the transactional headspace and get into the squishy headspace, focus on building emotional connections in your appeals.
Focus on building trust, not only saying, like, “Hey, donate to us because it’s the end of the year and we need to hit our fundraising goal, but donate to us because you love the work that we’re doing, and you know we’re going to use your money to achieve that work.
And you know that we’re going to tell you what you helped accomplish, and together we’re going to celebrate the impact that we’re making. It’s a fine distinction, and it can be a tricky one to navigate.
But it really can impact both your donor relationships and your fundraising, but it has a huge impact on the just the head space that fundraisers live in.
Fundraising is less scary when you remember that you’re talking to people who love you and not just people that will give you a gift if you do exactly the right things in exactly the right sequence.
Marcia Beckner
right, and have that right script and everything.
Abby Jarvis
Yeah, yeah.
Marcia Beckner
As an ED, I, you know, one of the most stressful parts of my job was fundraising and worrying about those numbers and making sure I can make payroll, and you know.
Keeping the lights on in the office and paying for all the bills, or whatever, in addition to serving the community.
So executive directors listening right now have so many competing priorities.
But the most successful fundraisers that I’ve seen over the last 20 years in this work are the people who embrace that.
They are inviting people into the most important work that they could possibly do, that they’re creating a legacy through their gifts and helping achieve, helping achieve solving society’s biggest problems.
Abby Jarvis
Yeah, and that it is such a.. I don’t know, it’s a huge shift.
If you move from, I all the time talk to fundraisers who are saying, like, well, I don’t want to bother my donors by asking them, I don’t want to bother my recurring supporters by sending them an impact update.
I feel like I’m imposing, or there’s this attitude that inviting someone to give or volunteer or serve on your board, or whatever it is, is hard and onerous, and you’re imposing upon them, and that’s absolutely not true.
When you’re doing those things, you’re not asking someone to do something difficult, you’re asking them to do something that they have already shown you they love to do, and that’s hard to internalize.
But when you finally do internalize it, it can absolutely change the way you interact
Marcia Beckner
with your community, and it takes a lot of pressure off. I think, yeah, this is like really important for anyone in a fund raising role to hear, I think.
And that the numbers and the data capture and all of that, and the CRM, you know, is important to keep updated in that kind of thing, but if that’s all, if we start to get like overly balanced onto that side, we’re just gonna lose like all the people already surrounding you that want to help.
And what does it take? You know, what is their time, talent, or treasure that they can help you with?
Tell me more about like Neon One now, and how you help fundraisers like take that transactional part of their job, make that easier, so that they can expand more into the human centric relationship building story driven part of fundraising.
Managing Relationships Instead of Transactions
Abby Jarvis
There are there are a few things that we really intentionally try to do. So we recently changed the way we talk about the product in the company itself.
We talk about, we don’t call it a CRM anymore, we call it a relationship management platform, because I personally think the words that we use to talk about the tools that we have and the things we do impacts the way we do it.
So, of course, we are a CRM, we know that, but our real, it’s a relationship management platform, and the way we talk about, I’ll just use this as an example.
If you look at someone’s account, if you pull up a constituent account, yes, like you see things like their transaction history, but you also see things like their affinity for you.
So something that comes up a lot is there are folks in a nonprofit’s database that are there, but they haven’t necessarily given yet, and there’s some apprehension about asking them. In our system, you can see, like, if this person hasn’t given.
Been to you yet, but they have a high affinity for your cause, and they also have volunteered, and they also have attended events, and so we have all of these different data sources that are coming in. Well, it’s all on the same platform.
We have all these different activities that are managed in the same platform. It’s all pulled into one constituent profile, and then you can see, like, this isn’t a nameless, faceless person who just happens to be in my system.
This is Abby. She’s donated to other organizations like us before, and she’s attended our events, and she’s volunteered.
She’s probably a good person to reach out to and start building a relationship with. The other goal is for us to make it really easy to give, or for nonprofits to build communications that feel very personal, and so we have some tools that help nonprofits do that.
You can automatically build different segments of donors, so if you are a little intimidated by sending an appeal for recurring gifts, you can say, okay. Well, what if I pulled a list of people who have given to us before but aren’t recurring donors?
We can thank them for their past support and say that we know that you love the work that we do, and then invite them to get invited or involved in that way.
So, the goal is to make it very easy for fundraisers and leaders to build very personal feeling connections, even if it’s with large groups of people.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, and I just have to say, like, having a – I’m going to call it a CRM, because this is – we’re talking to professionals here, not the donors themselves, but having a system like this is so important if you have turnover.
Which almost everyone does have turnover, especially in the fundraiser. Sadly, I think fundraising turnover is around what, 18 months.
Abby Jarvis
18 months is the average, 10 is the
Marcia Beckner
average, right? So you’ve got to like to institutionalize the knowledge about the people who are giving to you, so if someone leaves, the next person can come in and get caught up on who are your major donors.
What are they like, where, which events have they attended, you know, what’s the potential that they could get even more involved.
And so it’s really important to track this like transactional relationship slash relationship data for the organization in a CRM like neon one, and so that’s why I wanted to kind of like bring this up for executive directors that may not have a system and are still tracking things in Excel.
When I was an interim CEO recently, I walked in, I, I helped an organization while their executive director was on sabbatical for a year, and where was their donor information?
Where were these relationships? I was supposed to continue all in a, in a Google sheet, you know, which is okay.
It was a little bit helpful, but a CRM is a dynamic, is a much more dynamic, comprehensive way to store this data for the next person.
Abby Jarvis
I had a similar experience when I was a board member with the local nonprofit. I was tasked with figuring out, well, why aren’t people engaging with our emails?
I was like, okay, show me your email list, and the email list had been built by a woman who was no longer there. So I was like, okay, well, there are three different segments in three different spreadsheets.
The last time they were updated was eight months ago, but we’re still sending emails as a one size fits all like message to all of these different groups.
No, no wonder we’re having this hard time, but all of that that knowledge just lived in one woman’s head, and when she left, finding out how to re-engage those groups of people was a real struggle.
So our goal is to get everything in one place, so everyone can access the same information, regardless of when they come in, or who has left, or even if someone is just filling in for someone when they’re on vacation.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, give us like a really high level of what Neon One, what services it offers to nonprofits.
Abby Jarvis
Our platform includes the things that you need to do to engage your community, so it includes things or tools for fundraising, for event management.
If you have a volunteer program that is also built into Neon One, it includes peer-to-peer fundraising tools, but it also includes tools like email, email tools.
So you can reach out to your community without having to run a report and pull a spreadsheet into Constant Contact, or whatever you’re using.
It includes the reporting tools that you need to use to report on your progress towards your goal, or to keep your board up to speed on what’s going on, and then we are starting to, we’re always kind of iterating and building upon the tools that we have.
One of my favorite things that we’ve done recently is we’ve just included form analytics on donation forms, so we notice that our.
Customers had a lot of questions about what. How is my how is my donation form performing?
How can I improve it? What of my marketing channels are driving the most engagement?
And we’re like, okay, we can answer that question for you. Now we’ve built form analytics into the system, so anything you really need to do to manage to grow and maintain your community.
Our goal is to give you those tools and make it easy to understand all of the ways your community supports you and give you the tools you need to build relationships with all of those supporters.
Practical Strategies for Everyday Fundraising
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, and I have to say it’s also very affordable. Tell me the organization size that you serve best.
Abby Jarvis
So we serve organizations of all different sizes, our kind of sweet spot is right in the small to mid size nonprofit, so we really, when people, we base our pricing on revenue, so instead of capping like the number of cons constituents or contacts you have, we base there.
So we really see the most success with nonprofits that are bringing in maybe 120 $500,000 all the way up to like three to $5 million in annual revenue.
We absolutely work with organizations outside of those bounds, but that’s kind of where our sweet spot is.
We love working with nonprofits of all sizes, but the small and mid-sized ones, at least to me, are have a really special place in my heart.
Marcia Beckner
That’s probably because they’re operating on Google Sheets and Constant Contact, and have many tools, and live in many heads.
And you’re what Neon One mission, it sounds like, is to help you bring everything into one place, so that it doesn’t live in one person’s head, and you can kind of outsource that transactional, like, worry less about all the documentation, and just be able to easily pull reports that you need, and, and really focus your time and energy on building relationships, which is where the magic is when it comes to nonprofit growth.
Abby Jarvis
Yes, exactly. So, our goal is to make it easy for you to manage the transactional part of things, so you don’t have to spend all your time managing the transactional side of things.
Our goal is to empower you to build the relationships that really are going to make or break your, your fundraising and your organization in general.
Marcia Beckner
That’s wonderful. Well, okay, as we wrap up, is there – is there any like specific tactic, whether they have your, your neon one running in the background or not of their organization?
What’s like one specific thing that any executive director, CEO could do right now to improve their recurring donation program?
Abby Jarvis
I’m going to give you a tactic that I use all the time when I’m working in marketing, and that is to instead of writing to your donors, instead of writing to a nameless, faceless group of people who will or will not give you a donation if you do the right things.
I take a step back, and I want you to write instead to an individual person that you know already supports you.
When I do this, I will write to a friend of mine that I know is a user at Neon One, and I’m writing to her. It makes it easier to write, it makes it sound more natural, and it takes a lot of fear out of it.
So, instead of feeling overwhelmed when you write an appeal, or an email, or when you’re training your staff, even just tell them that don’t write to your capital D donors, write to Georgia Lynn, or write to Sarah, or write to Mark.
Write to them, it makes everything much more natural. It makes it feel more personal.
You will probably be less overwhelmed, and I would.. it takes a lot of fear out of it.
Marcia Beckner
Yeah, I agree. I think that it will be that much more effective as well.
If you’re thinking of, let’s pick out Sarah as a name, like write your donor appeal to just Sarah, not dear donors, dear friends, dear, you know, as if you’re writing to Sarah.
And also like with an excitement internally inside you that is like Sarah loves what we do, she has been to our events, she, she is excited to hear about this next story of impact, and she wants to be invited into the next thing that we’re doing, and, and that alone, anybody could do listening to that today.
So, thank you, Abby, so much for sharing your time about, and, and kind of drilling down into that recurring donor report. We are going to put a link to for you to download that report today to anyone who’s listening.
Just please go to the show notes and download this report, share it with your board, your fundraising team, and start to think about not just recurring donations but recurring donors, so that you have the person in your brain about who’s the type of person that wants to.
To be involved and be a bigger contributor to you, and so also, if you’re interested in learning about Neon One and want to get a free demo, reach out to me.
I can get you a discount if you decide to go this direction and apply Neon One into your organization. I highly recommend it, but as you’re doing research on these types of things, please let me know, so that at least you can check out Donor One.
I’m sorry, Donor One, Neon One, as your, as one of your options, as you’re looking into things. So, Abby, thanks again.
And I just want to close off with telling you that you are meant for great things, and you don’t have to burn out to prove it. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Nonprofit CEO SPARK.
If you’re ready to turn burnout into boundaries and build a healthy, happy culture where everyone, including you, can thrive, visit Culture cares.com to learn how I support nonprofit organizations like yours.
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