Part two of a three-part blog on donor loyalty: measuring and using tenure.

Q: if tenure is years of continuous giving, what is the range of tenure values we might expect?

A: the minimum tenure, of course, is 1 year, but donors often show great commitment. Tenure can rise to many years.

I’ve looked at databases that were commissioned 18 years ago and found appreciable numbers of donors with 18-17-16-15 years of continuous giving. What amazing, special people. Founding fathers and mothers. Veterans. Partners. Advocates. Words are not enough.

Q: so tenure measures loyalty then?

A: you could say that, and for a charity with both a long organisational history and a database that has been carefully – make that scrupulously – managed, loyalty-as-tenure is there for anyone to see. But of course it does not indicate at all WHY the donor is loyal. For that we have to probe the heart, mind, values, experience-of-the-cause of the donor and that is another discussion entirely. It means listening to long term loyal donors intelligently and finding out about their motives.

Q: does tenure differentiate how donors behave?

A: Yes. There is not a great deal of experimentation or testing around (that I know of), but one instance I will tell you about gives a powerful illustration of tenure in action. A membership-based organisation was contacting its supporters by mail, and cut a second, small slot-like window in the envelope. In it they lasered ‘Member since <1985>’ or whatever date it was.

Q: that is so simple. What happened?

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three-part blog on donor loyalty. Part one: tenure.

Q: there’s a lot of talk about donor loyalty – 627,000 hits on Google. But I can’t find much on how we should quantify loyalty though.

A: well, one way is to measure a donor’s tenure.

Q: what’s that?

A: tenure is a time measurement, made most easily from data in a donor database. The word comes from a Latin root meaning to hold or possess.

Tenure, at least the way I choose to define it, is the number of years of continuous giving. You can think of it as a measurement of the donor’s lifetime relationship with the charity, but independent of their financial value. It’s the ‘L’ in LTV (lifetime value)

Q: why do you think donor tenure important?

A: because it quantifies the duration of a relationship between the charity and the donor. All fundraisers want lifetime-loyal donors (or say they do).

In general, long relationships provide reliable, predictable revenue, often leading, it is said, to increased involvement and engagement, major gifts and legacies. Long donor relationships are a sure sign of success.

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