[Infographic] The Importance of Donor Retention

This week's infographic was put together by Jay Love and his team at Bloomerang, developers of a CRM product focused on donor retention and management, and was featured in a good post on Katya Andresen's Non-Profit Marketing Blog.

According to Love, nonprofits do a poor job of retaining donors compared to organizations in the for-profit sector -- in part, because they tend not to have clearly defined donor-retention goals or devote adequate resources to tracking donor retention rates. (Note: The 94 percent customer retention rate mentioned in the top left square of the infographic was derived from 10K filings for "large publicly held tech companies" -- think Apple, Amazon, Google, and so on -- and is probably not representive of the for-profit economy as a whole.)

In the post on Katya's blog, Love shares six donor retention KPIs that most (if not all) nonprofits should be tracking:

• First-Year Donor Retention Rate by Dollars
• First-Year Donor Retention Rate by Number of Donors
• Repeat Donor Retention Rate by Dollars
• Repeat Donor Retention Rate by Number of Donors
• Overall Donor Retention Rate by Dollars
• Overall Donor Retention Rate by Number of Donors

Back in November, Derrick Feldmann, CEO of Indianapolis-based Achieve, wrote a good post on this subject here at PhilanTopic. The Bloomerang blog is also a good source of information for those who want to learn more.

So, how is your nonprofit doing when it comes to donor retention? Does it track donor retention rates? Is it spending more or less on donor retention activities than it did five years ago? And what would you tell other nonprofits looking to improve their performance in the donor retention area? Share your thoughts/advice in the comments section below....