5+ Key Tips for a Successful Sustained Giving Program

If you asked some of the largest nonprofits the secret to their success, what do you think they would say?

We often learn from our clients that sustainers—those donors who reliably and regularly support a nonprofit—are the primary reason they see such consistently high revenue numbers.

There are many tips we offer on strengthening a recurring giving program and running a successful sustained giving program...but that’s only half of the solution. To benefit from a strong program, you must have technology that ensures high collection rates.

That's why we created this guide. In it, we'll review:

• The Current State of Sustainer Revenue
• How to Build a Successful Sustained Giving Program
• What Software Is Best For Running A Sustained Giving Program?

One of our largest clients boasts an impressive sustainer program, with more than 250,000 regular monthly donors. This proves strong donor loyalty, effective donor outreach and engagement, and excellent marketing.

We'll show you how CharityEngine can strengthen your nonprofit's monthly giving programs and give you the tools to capture lost revenue.

The Current State of Sustainer Revenue

Whether you realize it or not, you’re likely entrenched in the subscription billing economy. From Spotify and Netflix to your local Equinox gym to software like Adobe, paying a weekly, monthly, or yearly fee in exchange for access to a product or service over time is increasingly common.

This trend shows no sign of slowing. According to recent studies, the Subscription Economy Index is growing 3.7 times faster than the S&P 500. Mature companies in this index can count on existing subscribers for 70% to 80% of their annual recurring revenue.

In the nonprofit world, subscription billing is called monthly giving, recurring giving, and sustainer revenue, and it matches the growth trend that for-profit companies are seeing. Recurring giving is a critical component of your nonprofit’s growth.

But would it surprise you to learn that for every dollar pledged by sustainers, you’re only getting 85 cents? Recovering that missing 15 cents on every dollar can add up to hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of fundraising dollars.

Why You’re Losing Money on Recurring Gifts

We speak with clients often about the importance of recurring giving and how a strong program can form the most solid fundraising foundation for nonprofits. Double the Donation’s 2024 statistics show that 57% of donors are enrolled in a recurring giving program (up from 46% the previous year). This proves that donors appreciate the convenience of monthly gifts. Nonprofits are the beneficiaries.

But is your nonprofit maximizing the value of those donations?

To answer this question, we must look at the financial tech industry. We all understand that nonprofits need a payment processor to collect and process payments. When payments fail because the expiration date hasn’t been updated, or the card has been reported lost, or just because someone hit their credit limit, there isn’t much that any payment processor can do to recover those payments.

According to Mastercard and Visa, an average of 15% of all recurring payments are declined. The 15% you lose is chalked up to churn, and nonprofits accept it because they hear the same story from every payment processor.

When a credit card is declined, you’ve lost a donor. Only the most committed donors will call or visit your website to update their credit card information. Most, though, won’t. Once you lose a donor, you either replace them or live with the lost revenue.

And the revenue can be significant. Let’s look at the passive churn impact on organizations:

• A nonprofit with 500 or fewer sustainers can lose up to $300,000 in two years.
• A nonprofit with 5,000 or fewer sustainers can lose up to $1.3 million in two years.
• A nonprofit with 10,000 or fewer sustainers can lose up to $2.5 million in two years.

How to Build a Successful Sustained Giving Program

1. Make your sustained giving program easy to join. 

This basic point is often overlooked. Many nonprofits don't realize the benefits of a sustained giving program! 

Some simple donation form tweaks can remove obstacles for donors:

• Add a toggle button to your donation form. Let donors choose to convert their one-time gift to a monthly gift by switching a toggle button.
• Accept different types of donations. Consider which types of nonprofit donations you can accept: cash, check, credit card, ApplePay, or in-kind donations. Will you accept donor-advised funds?
• Ask strategically. Research shows that $19 is an effective ask, and you can then see if the donor will upgrade to $25 a month after they’ve engaged.
• Provide suggested giving amounts. Lean on your nonprofit CRM to automatically adjust suggested giving amounts based on donation history

What’s the best way to ask? You can use any one of several fundraising tools, but for offline channels like direct mail, choose a toll-free phone number and a memorable URL so you can start tracking the relationship and managing the donor journey. 

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: Our forms support default toggles, flexible billing, and mobile payment options - all built right into the software.

2. Use data to understand your sustainers.

If you have an all-in-one nonprofit CRM, you have all the data to identify sustainers within your donor base. Many donors give multiple times a year but aren’t flagged as sustainers because their giving isn’t regular, or they have given sizable gifts infrequently. Mine your data and view it to find someone committed to your cause. That’s the number-one quality of all sustainers.

Data can show you how many gifts a donor makes per year, and many organizations will use AI-enabled tools to predict the best time to ask donors to give more or give more regularly. 

Once you’ve found some potential sustainers, create a compelling message or relay a heartfelt story about your organization’s impact. People want to help, and data can show you the paths that will be most successful.

For example, suppose you have a donor who donated to fund advocacy for FDA approval of a drug because her husband is sick. In that case, she might be touched and motivated by stories about other successful advocacy efforts you’ve launched. Or she might appreciate an email wishing her a happy anniversary; use data points to personalize your outreach and strengthen donor relationships.

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: Our AI-backed CRM mines donor profiles to spotlight those most likely to become monthly donors, so you direct outreach where it delivers.

3. Focus on stewardship in sustainer giving.

The key to a successful sustainer program is retention rates. You not only want a donor giving you $20 a month, but you also want her donating every month…forever! There are myriad ways you can retain donors and increase sustained giving, including:

• Automate a series of emails. Show donors how your nonprofit is affecting the mission. Highlight how each donor's gifts are put to work, positioning them as superheroes in your nonprofit’s story.
• Plan an outreach campaign around holidays or special anniversaries. Statistics reveal that December giving accounts for 26% of all online revenue, making it especially important for your nonprofit to reach out at the end of the year.
• Invite donors to events. Cater these events to recurring donors, where possible, so that they yield long-term support rather than one-time attendance. Use event software to organize everything from ticketing to volunteer management.

As you start to map out a sustained giving program, it's helpful to piggyback a donor steward campaign to make sure you’re letting those donors know how impactful their giving is. This means you’ll be promoting your sustained giving program along with a donor stewardship campaign, effectively riding the coattails of the stewardship campaign to broach the sustained giving program.

Simply add some of the outreach strategies listed to an ongoing campaign, and you’ll have a solid start to your sustained giving program.

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: We provide out-of-the-box stewardship automation, including successful payment notifications and reactivation sequences, for seamless long-term nurturing.

4. Manage your sustained giving program effectively.

A sustained giving program must be monitored over time. Keeping in touch with these donors will keep them engaged and encourage them to continue to commit to your mission.

There are four keys to sustainer management:

• Dedicate staff members to donor care. Whether you assign different clients to individuals or run blanket campaigns, ensure your donors have someone looking out for them. If you're a small organization, you look out for them.
• Stay in touch with consistent, personal communication. Make donors part of your team, recognize their loyalty, and understand why they give.
• Don’t skimp on technology. Invest in a good CRM with billing software and a vendor with significant experience with successful sustainer programs. Data integration means that your tools are all leveraging each other, and data hygiene keeps your data solid and actionable.
• Carefully monitor critical metrics. Know which metrics you need to track. Data will validate your successes and illuminate areas for improvement.

And finally, specialized billing software is vital. The right type of billing technology can make a significant difference. 

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: Our all-in-one CRM bundles payment processing and fundraising tools...and helps you capture up to 30% more monthly donor revenue with our specialized sustainer billing technology.

5. Measure the results of your sustained giving program.

A data-driven approach is highly effective because you can quickly see what’s working, but you can also find areas of weakness and promptly pivot to improve the success of your program. According to the Nonprofit Tech for Good Report, 67% of nonprofits use a CRM to manage donor data, and 15% use AI tools to find new donor prospects. 

You can also measure:

• Credit card decline trends: Analyze patterns to identify common issues, such as outdated payment information, and implement proactive measures, such as automated reminders for donors to update their payment methods. 
• Chargebacks (when donors didn’t really intend to be sustainers): Review chargeback data to understand donor concerns, then refine your communication and donation confirmation processes to reduce misunderstandings. 
• Average monthly gifts: Track trends in gift amounts and identify opportunities to encourage increased giving, such as through tiered recognition programs or impact-driven messaging.

Relying on a robust nonprofit CRM, such as one that offers features like donor segmentation, automated reporting, or real-time analytics dashboards, can make you a smarter—and more effective—fundraiser. For instance, tools that highlight lapsed donors or predict donor behavior using AI can help you target and re-engage supporters efficiently.

If you A/B test email series, you will quickly see which email resonates more than the other. To identify what drives higher engagement rates, focus on:

• Subject lines
• Call-to-action buttons
• Email layouts

Ensure the test has a clear objective and sufficient sample size for statistically significant results. If a certain demographic has stopped giving, you can revise your messaging to engage those donors.

For example, suppose younger donors have become less active. In that case, you might emphasize digital channels like social media or text campaigns, highlighting impact stories that resonate with their values, such as environmental sustainability or social justice initiatives.

Relying on a robust nonprofit CRM to collect and analyze data can make your fundraising efforts more fruitful.

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: Detailed dashboards let you pivot quickly, tracking failed payments, donor lifetime value, and program health with ease.

6. Leverage a CRM with sustainer management capabilities.

Specialized CRM systems with sustainer management features can significantly enhance your nonprofit's recurring donation programs. The key benefits include saving staff time, improving donor engagement, and maximizing revenue collection rates. Here's how nonprofits can achieve these benefits:

1. Streamline Recurring Payment Processing:
   • Use a CRM with an in-house payment processor that offers tools like automatic rebilling for missed payments and credit card expiration updates. These features help maintain consistent revenue streams without manual intervention.
2. Enhance Donor Experience:
   • Provide online donor portals that empower donors to manage their contributions, update personal information, and access personalized content. This increases donor satisfaction and engagement while reducing administrative overhead.
3. Maximize Revenue Collection Rates:
   • Look for CRMs with proven high collection rates. For example, CharityEngine achieves over 98% sustained revenue collection, well above the industry average of 70% to 90%. This ensures that pledged donations turn into actual funds for your nonprofit.
4. Utilize Data for Strategic Decisions:
   • Measure and analyze donation trends and collection rates using your CRM's reporting tools. Understanding these metrics helps you identify opportunities for improvement and better predict future income.
5. Save Staff Time and Increase Efficiency:
   • Automate routine tasks like billing, donor reminders, and reporting. This frees up staff to focus on high-impact activities like building relationships and creating compelling campaigns.

Here's the CharityEngine Advantage: By leveraging the right CRM technology, nonprofits can reduce administrative burdens, foster stronger donor relationships, and secure more consistent funding for their missions.

What Software Is Best For Running A Sustained Giving Program?

CharityEngine offers top-notch tech, including niche technology, 20 years of experience serving nonprofits, and programs backed by millions of database points. Together, these elements produce collection rates that are up to 30% higher than those offered by the competition. Here are a few more highlights:

• CharityEngine offers a holistic billing system designed, in part, to manage high-volume recurring donors.
• As a payment processor, CharityEngine cuts out middlemen, leading to more dollars in your nonprofit’s bank account.
• Our credit card updater leverages our unique access to credit card data to automatically update cards as they expire, potentially saving each client thousands of dollars in lost revenue. This credit card updater offers a feature only found with CharityEngine: it directly interacts with all four credit card associations, including real-time interaction with American Express.

Just in the past decade, CharityEngine has processed more than $2.6 billion in charitable transactions, helping clients enjoy collection rates as high as 98.66% and retention rates as high as 99.5%.

You might be wondering just how we do that.

To fully understand the power of CharityEngine’s revenue collection, we will take a closer look at our Billing Engine, our payment processing capabilities, and our sustainer collection tools.

When these features are combined, our clients collect more revenue and retain more donors.

Billing Engine

Any payment processor your nonprofit uses—including Stripe, Paypal, Authorize.net, Blackbaud, etc.—can process monthly donations. What they cannot do is recover the revenue missing due to failed payments.

To recover that revenue, you need more than a payment processor. You need highly specialized technology called subscription billing technology, and payment processors don’t have it. Nonprofit e-commerce companies don’t have it. Software companies don’t have it.

In fact, only one company serving nonprofits does have it—The only payment processor in the nonprofit industry that offers subscription billing software is CharityEngine.

CharityEngine’s Billing Engine was designed to offer robust billing and collection capabilities to support rapidly growing sustainer programs.

• As the system is robust and purpose-built for revenue collection and donor retention, our clients consistently enjoy higher collection rates than can be found with other e-commerce systems. If a client has more than 25,000 monthly donors, this results in millions of dollars in recurring revenue.
• Our Billing Engine was built for multichannel fundraising, meaning that it can handle income from many sources. The system supports both online and offline donor acquisition and attribution.
• The system leverages customized technology (to include advanced fraud protection) to maximize acquisition rates and ensure industry-high collection rates on sustainer billing.

This is a critical point: if you are not a CharityEngine client, you collect, at most, 85% of your recurring revenue. If you are a CharityEngine client, you collect up to 98% of your recurring revenue.

Payment Processing: A Cut Above

We recently launched the first ACH in-house payment processing network in the only integrated nonprofit CRM. This was the result of 20 years and millions of dollars spent building a sophisticated platform for nonprofits.

Launching this ACH-direct solution benefits our customers in several ways:

• It lowers the cost of doing business by eliminating intermediary banks that take cuts out of transactions.
• The complexity of payment processing often makes customer service difficult. Moving ACH processing in-house enables our customer service team to troubleshoot, providing visibility into the entire transaction directly.
• Donor and payment data won’t flow through multiple organizations, exposing vulnerability to risk. The only stops are those necessary for processing and funding transactions.

Keeping this data safe is a top priority for CharityEngine. We are PCI-certified and SOC 2-certified, meaning we’ve reached the highest levels of compliance with organizations regulating security in our industry.

CharityEngine is unmatched when it comes to sustainer giving, collection, and retention. Our competitors cannot compete with what we offer to midsize to large nonprofit organizations.

CharityEngine’s Sustainer Collection

Our software has two specific sustainer-collection features that enterprise-level clients find most valuable. 

• A Sustainer Reactivation Series is an out-of-the-box benefit of using CharityEngine. This series of emails is triggered when a sustainer’s automatic payment is declined, or when we customize it for a client. Once we build the series with the triggers and jobs our clients request, we automate the series and set it to run monthly for all our clients.
  • The first email prompts them to update their payment information to continue recurring nonprofit donations successfully. And our software offers a Donor Portal, where donors can manage their accounts, such as payment updates, with ease…saving your staff time.
  • The second email is triggered after several attempts to process the payment for the recurring gift. This email informs the donor their recurring payment will be deactivated. They are again given the opportunity to update their payment information.
  • The final email is a last chance to update the information before the account is moved to a lapsed status.
• The Sustainer Successful Payment Series is a communication series we build for all clients who have (or plan to have) sustainers. It is an automated email sent to a sustainer after a donation, informing them their payment was successful and thanking them for their support.

While these are out-of-the-box benefits, the email series is customized to reflect the client’s branding and colors. Our Professional Services team offers suggested standard emails, tokens, and designs unless our client requests changes.

CharityEngine understands that sustainers are critical to your nonprofit’s success, and we are always developing new tools and strategies to maximize sustainer donor engagement and collection.

Sustained Giving Programs: The Bottom Line

The size of your staff, the amount of your annual donations, even the cause you support—none of these are hurdles to creating and managing a successful sustained giving program.

It all comes down to caring about your donors, understanding their journey and why they give, and showing them how impactful their donation is and how much you appreciate their loyalty. Use technology to help you, whether it’s aggregating data points, using artificial intelligence for insights, or offering specialized billing software to keep the dollars coming in.

Finally, as with any effort, measure your results so you can amplify your success stories and find areas for improvement.

The scope of your sustained giving program is unlimited. If you want to see how clients, large and small, use CharityEngine’s software to create, sustain, and grow their programs, request a demo, and we will show you the tools in action.