Turning One-Time Donors Into Sustainers: A Recurring Giving Roadmap for Good360
In short:
Good360, a Forbes Top-2 nonprofit serving families nationwide through hundreds of nonprofit partners, wanted its individual giving program to reflect its organizational scale, with recurring, monthly gifts becoming a much larger share of revenue. Delve Deeper proposed a segmentation and journey system built specifically to convert, recapture, and retain monthly donors.
The challenge:
Good360’s individual giving program leaned heavily on low-frequency, one-time gifts rather than recurring, monthly support. Industry-wide, most donors under 35 never give to the same organization twice, and Good360’s file reflected that pattern, with generic, one-time asks that didn’t build the trust required to convert a donor into a repeat, let alone monthly, giver.
The approach:
Delve Deeper built the donor lifecycle plan around converting and protecting sustainers, not just acquiring one-time gifts:
- Sustainers Conversion journey: Triggered by a donor’s second gift or a high predicted lifetime value, a persona-matched email and SMS sequence with social proof and digital retargeting, designed to move one-time donors toward monthly giving.
- Sustainer Recapture: A short, urgent sequence to win back donors after a failed EFT or credit-card payment, protecting recurring revenue that would otherwise quietly lapse.
- EFT Conversion: A simple, low-friction sequence moving credit-card sustainers to bank-draft (EFT) giving, a proven way to reduce churn.
- Persona-based targeting: Segmenting donors by motivation (for example, “Trust First, Then Give”) so the recurring-gift ask matches why a donor gives, rather than a generic monthly-upgrade pitch.