Donor retention can be as notoriously challenging as it is vital for nonprofits. The good news, though, is that doesn’t have to be! Here are twelve simple ideas that keep givers giving and vault donor retention:

NPSP Sprint Baltimore 2017

I need to apologize to Kevin Bromer.

Kevin is the Vice President of Product Delivery at Salesforce.org. He's also the father of the Nonprofit Success Pack. We chatted between sessions at the NPSP Community Sprint in Baltimore this March. I was participating in a breakout group led by Megan Himan of BrightStep Partners and Dean Graham of Wombat Works tackling issues around User Defined Rollups in the NPSP when I learned about a limitation. I told Kevin in no uncertain terms that this limitation of User Defined Rollups made them virtually useless.

I was wrong.

With this week’s issue, the PUB Crawl marks 100 straight editions! Whether travel or holiday or rain or sleet or dark of night, for 100 consecutive weeks without fail, the PUB Crawl has delivered its friendly, informative weekly digest of the best of the Power of Us Hub to the inboxes of busy people wanting to stay in the nonprofit Salesforce know.

To honor this century mark, we’ve combed our email archives to deliver the following top 25 posts shared over the course of those 100 weeks. Enjoy the walk down memory lane!

The cues are all around you. Kids are back in school. The Labor Day holiday is here. And the calendar begins its string of months ending in “...ber” as if to subliminally prepare your skin for the shock of seasonal cold ahead.

All of these cues signal that you’re in the backstretch of the fundraising year when the marathon pace picks up and you gather yourself for the final push. You can vaguely see the finish line ahead, Father Time and Baby New Year holding each side of the tape. And the strides in between here and there are the remaining opportunities you have to convince those who donated last year to donate this year.

Excellent donor retention is an essential element of successful fundraising. But how do you keep donors donating?

Nonprofit fundraisers are magical creatures. Through a mixture of science and art, they conjure connections between individuals’ better desires and nonprofit missions to spark change in the world. Magical, I tell ya.

Fundraisers are also a passionate, determined breed. Studies show that fundraisers work an average of five to twelve hours of overtime each week. Again. And again. And again. Those hours get longer as the days get shorter when the holidays approach. And, year after year, the job gets yet more challenging as program beneficiaries’ needs grow and nonprofit budgets increase.

Magical, passionate and determined, though they may be, nonprofit fundraisers are often bright stars that burnout fast. The average tenure for a fundraiser is just 16 months. This fact is not only deeply felt by the individual fundraisers but by the nonprofit sector as a whole. High turnover rates combine with struggles in finding qualified candidates to result in long-term vacancies in development positions. Those empty development desks present serious challenges to nonprofits and their missions.