Michael Palmer, head of fundraising at the Connecticut Public Broadcasting Network, knew his radio and television stations were leaving money on the table by not cultivating more sustainers (supporters who make automatic monthly gifts instead of one-time donations).
Still, he was surprised to learn exactly how much they were passing up—$680,000 a year—and exactly how to get it.
In 2011, his network joined the Contributor Development Partnership, a group formed to analyze fundraising data among public broadcasters and then identify and disseminate best practices.
At the center of the new effort were quarterly reports, known by the acronym ROAR (for Revenue Opportunity and Action Report), which gave each participating station or network a one-page snapshot of its performance in a couple dozen fundraising categories, such as donor retention, planned gifts, and online revenue.
The first report Mr. Palmer’s network received, in early 2012, outlined its fundraising strengths and weaknesses, how it stacked up to its peers, and its potential for increasing revenue. The findings showed that with fewer than 3 percent of its donors giving monthly gifts, the network sorely lagged behind the industry average, and that it could earn an additional $119,000 a year if its recurring-gift program met the norm. If sustaining memberships grew to the level of the field’s top performers, according to the report, the network could haul in an additional $680,000.
“We knew we could do better, but here it was in black and white,” Mr. Palmer says. “Here’s the giant chunk of money you are missing out on by not improving your fundraising.”
Connecticut was one of the first participants in the benchmarking partnership, which now includes more than 130 public television and radio stations. The group started with seed money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and WGBH in Boston, and still receives some support from the Boston station. Members—which can be individual radio or TV stations or networks of stations—get the quarterly reports for free, as well as free access to fundraising information and resources, including webinars and checklists of best practices. Stations can also choose to participate in fee-based programs offered by the partnership, such as a service that makes thank-you calls to donors.
For Michal Heiplik, executive director of the partnership and a top fundraiser at WGBH, what sets this benchmarking effort apart from others is the follow-up.
“We calculate the potential revenue opportunity for stations, and then we say, here’s a road map, here are the tools, here are the services,” he says.
The reports also feature data analysis that is especially sophisticated, produced with the help of the fundraising-software company Blackbaud. Borrowing from Blackbaud’s own vast databases, the reports customize some of the fundraising metrics for specific markets. So, for example, for a station in a city with few large companies and where, according to Blackbaud’s national statistics, other nonprofits already have trouble attracting corporate matching gifts, the potential-revenue number for such gifts will be skewed down.
Chuck Longfield, chief scientist at Blackbaud, says this approach produces more realistic goals for each station. But, he says, that level of sophistication is not necessary for all benchmarking tools to be both meaningful and useful. Nonprofits just need to find like-minded organizations willing to share their fundraising data and their experience regarding which strategies work best.
Mr. Longfield is helping two new benchmarking groups get started, one for about a half-dozen mid-sized private colleges and another among various Chicago-area charities. Large national nonprofits with chapters or affiliates around the country are also likely candidates to collect data, create reports, and share fundraising secrets among their own branches.
Mr. Palmer, in Connecticut, says the initial ROAR report the network received “lit a fire” under his organization. It has since started focusing its on-air radio fund drives exclusively on attracting monthly donors, and it has taken other steps to spotlight recurring gifts, based on suggestions from the stations in the partnership with the most successful sustainer programs.
Sustainers now account for nearly 17 percent of the Connecticut network’s donors (compared to less than 3 percent in 2012). And the organization blew by the ROAR report’s predictions, earning $1.09 million from sustainer revenue in the fiscal year that ended last summer, up from $187,000 in 2011. While some of that revenue is not considered new because it was shifted from other fundraising areas, like one-time annual gifts, it represents a big win for the network, because sustainers are typically more committed and generous than other kinds of donors.
“We’re going to keep pushing,” Mr. Palmer says, “and as we watch our numbers improve, we are looking forward to learning more about what is going to help everyone else improve.”
