Soapbox Engage Blog

Thanking your donors is perhaps the most fundamental best practice that every nonprofit should master. It goes without saying that the individuals who keep your mission moving forward deserve recognition and thanks—but what are you doing to keep them connected to your work weeks, months, or years after their first gift?

Donor stewardship should be an intentional process that takes place across multiple channels. By having an organized plan for staying in touch and keeping your mission on donors’ minds, you’ll see significant long-term benefits for your mission.

Perhaps your organization hasn’t updated its stewardship approach to fit today’s digital landscape—if so, you likely have a few questions. This crash course will introduce you to the essentials of multi-channel stewardship cadences.

Table of Contents

1. What’s a stewardship cadence?
2. What is multi-channel stewardship?
3. What are the key channels to use?
4. Multi-channel stewardship best practices

What’s a stewardship cadence?

First, let’s review the basics. A stewardship cadence is the specific rhythm of messaging you employ to keep donors connected to your mission and primed to re-engage when it’s time to make a new request, whether that’s asking them to donate, volunteer, create a planned gift, attend an event, or take any other target action.

The benefits of strategically stewarding your relationships with donors include:

• Increased donor engagement
• Improved donor retention
• Boosted fundraising results due to improved engagement, retention, and overall visibility

Stewardship cadences, including the messages themselves, the channels they’re sent through, and their frequency, should be adapted to support different goals and resonate with specific audience segments or high-impact individuals.

These cadences then shape the whole of the donor journey, informing and guiding their relationship with your organization. Although it can take a variety of forms and utilize a wide range of tactics, the general purpose of most stewardship outreach is to keep the donor relationship warm.

What is multi-channel stewardship?

Multi-channel stewardship encompasses a more holistic, digital-savvy approach to stewardship. It takes various forms of digital engagement into account as valuable touchpoints for continuing the donor journey and deepening relationships over time. We’ll take a closer look at some essential channels to consider below.

By broadening your conception of stewardship beyond just phone calls and in-person meetings with top donors, you’ll stay on more donors’ minds in more places, leading to stronger engagement and retention numbers across the board.

The key to success with multi-channel stewardship is to allocate your time and resources efficiently. Your development team likely already uses various qualification strategies to prioritize top prospects for outreach. Stewardship should take a similar approach, with more personalized attention going to the individuals with the greatest potential impact and automated cadences for broader segments of your donor base. Consider these two example scenarios:

• A grateful patient gives a major gift to a healthcare institution. The institution’s major gift officer then regularly checks in with the donor to express gratitude and generally catch up. Alongside this personal outreach comes a cadence of periodic event invites, emails with organizational updates, and direct mail birthday and holiday cards. All of these touchpoints ensure the institution remains a friendly recurring part of the donor’s life and keeps them receptive to future meetings for new fundraising asks.


• A supporter makes a modest online donation to an animal rescue organization located in another state. An automatic thank-you email is immediately sent, followed by a pre-configured stream of other emails to showcase the organization’s work, demonstrate impact, and ask the donor to follow its social media profiles. On social media, the organization regularly posts updates, multimedia, and contests, which keep its mission on the donor’s mind and help them feel like part of a community. Since the donor is from out-of-state, the organization can tag them as such and send virtual event invites rather than invites for in-person events. All of these touchpoints keep the relationship warm and help ensure the donor will see the organization’s next donation appeal.

These two examples show how multi-channel stewardship cadences help drive continued engagement and action, with each requiring different levels of personalized attention depending on the potential impact of the donor. Having an overarching stewardship strategy and implementing the right tech makes it easy to use multiple channels as part of a coherent whole.

What are the key channels to use?

Multi-channel stewardship should occur across the communication and marketing channels that the particular individual or segment you’re trying to engage is most likely to use and appreciate. These could include:

• Email, including automated streams designed for specific purposes/donor segments and personal messages sent directly to high-impact supporters


• Direct mail, which is still a highly effective medium in many cases, like for sending event invites, campaign announcements, and year-end thank-you/greeting cards


• Phone calls, either to high-impact supporters to check in and express gratitude or as part of more efficient phonathons that target wider segments of donors


• In-person meetings, reserved primarily for major supporters to discuss your organization’s plans, offer private tours, solicit gifts, and more


• In-person and virtual events of all shapes and sizes, targeted to various segments of your donor base depending on your goals for the event


• Social mediawhich can be a helpful way to keep engagement buzzing in the background, source new peer-to-peer ambassadors, and raise your mission’s visibility

When establishing a new stewardship plan, take the time to consider where your touchpoints will make the greatest impact for that particular goal and audience. If you’re improving your broad stewardship and follow-up approach for lower-level online donors, for example, sending direct mail to everyone would be cost-prohibitive and less effective than digital-first outreach.

What best practices should you employ?

To maximize the effectiveness of your stewardship strategies, your organization should follow several best practices:

• Goal-setting. Goals and benchmarks are essential for giving any initiative structure and momentum. If you don’t already, set specific and measurable goals for donor engagement and retention broken down by donor segment. Email open and clickthrough rates, direct mail response rates, growth in giving, and donor retention rates can all clue you into the performance of your stewardship strategy. When you launch new marketing or fundraising campaigns (or send any new messages or event invites), be sure to determine some specific conversion goals. This will allow you to actually gauge your successes, audit your channels, and make strategic improvements over time.


• Data collection. This best practice goes hand-in-hand with goal-setting—to measure your progress, you need ways to measure your performance. Use tools that report essential data like conversions, message opens, and more, and sync them all together in an integrated CRM system whenever possible. Establish clear data entry and moves management protocols, as well as portfolio management processes for your development team.


• Audience segmentation. To drive the most impact without eating up undue time and resources, your stewardship efforts must be focused on the right audiences. Collecting and managing your data makes it easy to sort, filter, and group your donors in ways that will best support your goals. It also allows you to continually requalify your top prospects over time to ensure you’re allocating resources effectively.


• Personalization. Personalization is key for making a lasting impression. Depending on the purpose and audience of your outreach, this could mean drafting completely personalized messages (or making phone calls) or automatically populating emails and mailers with details like donors’ names and past donation amounts.


• Tailored communication. As you work to keep more donors engaged and collect performance data over time, you’ll learn more about how each donor likes to be contacted. Use this information, plus new donations, event attendance, and any insights from one-on-one contact, to further tailor the donor journeys you foster. For instance, you may learn that a major donor is especially passionate about one of your programs, or you see that a donor segment generally prefers one social media platform over another—use these developments to tailor your strategy and boost engagement.


• Consistency. Sporadic messaging won’t work well to keep your mission on donors’ minds. In some cases it might even harm your efforts. For instance, if donors don’t recognize your organization’s name in their inboxes, they may start deleting your unread emails. Consistency and variety are key. Stewardship cadences should be regular and contain a mix of messages and asks, not just donation appeals.

Again, the exact strategies, messages, and channels you use to steward relationships with donors will depend on a range of factors—their relationship to your nonprofit, their average donation size, your current goals, and more. But by anchoring your efforts with these best practices, you’ll build a stewardship structure that’s organized and can continually improve.

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Although creating new touchpoints in more places certainly does add a layer of complexity to your stewardship efforts, it’s an increasingly important way to ensure that your organization can effectively engage and retain donors across segments. Thankfully, technology and the power of automation have made it easier than ever to create organized, scalable stewardship cadences for major donors and casual supporters alike.

If your nonprofit needs to improve or even overhaul its approach to donor stewardship, getting professional guidance can be a smart choice, particularly if you’ll be focusing heavily on donor acquisition or a major initiative like a capital campaign. By seeking support (from specialized providers in your industry like healthcare fundraising consultants or higher ed development experts when possible), you’ll help safeguard your growth and build longer-lasting relationships.

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Guest post by Kristin Fehrenbach, Senior Consultant at Graham-Pelton

With her ability to collaborate across teams, forge partnerships, build trust, and match donors with philanthropic opportunities, Kristin manages client engagements with an eye toward elevated thinking and program innovation.