Name: 2025 donorCentrics® Sustainer Summit Key Insights and Themes
Uploaded: 2025-04-30T18:31:05.707Z
Duration: 57 min 56 s
Description: 2025 donorCentrics® Sustainer Summit Key Insights and Themes

Transcript for "2025 donorCentrics® Sustainer Summit Key Insights and Themes": Hello. Hello. And welcome to the donorCentrics collaborative benchmarking sustainer summit webinar where we're going to review from f y twenty twenty to f y twenty four insights, trends, and key takeaway on sustainer giving. My name is Paige Grainger, and I'm a senior principal consultant at Blackbaud. And, I'm happy to be here with you today. If you are interested in diving into Sustainer Metrics and the metrics behind, that recent trends is Sustainer Giving, then you have come to the right place. First of all, if you are new or unfamiliar with the Sustainer Benchmark I'm trying to fast forward the here. Joanna is clicking. The slide is not looking forward. Oh, I seem to be frozen. Yeah. Let's see. Let me try now. Sorry. My my screen is frozen at the very time. Can someone else fast forward the slide there? There we go. Oh, hold on now. I need to go back a slide. I am frozen. There we go. Alright. So we'll get this going here. Apologies for the technical difficulties. So if you are familiar with, donorCentrics benchmarking, I'll provide a little summary. This is a service off Blackbaud where we bring seeing trends. So it's a look back at fundraising trends where organizations are group group together either by sector or fundraising technique to talk about the strategies that are driving their fundraising assessment. They receive a one on one review of the, data insights as well as a review of, participating other organizations in collaborative benchmarking, as well as a meeting in the, that brings together all of the organizations where they can talk and be one on one with each other. Seems like my Internet's a little choppy, and it was fine before. So, hopefully, it's finding some stability now. So apologies for that. Alright. I'm able to advance the slide there. So, hopefully, that means some stability is coming back to my Internet. So today, we are going to be looking at the participating organizations, from the f y twenty four donorCentrics sustainer summit, where the in the this group, we had 38 sustainer focused organizations, and we'll be reviewing their giving, which totaled 19,400,000 donors and $3,400,000,000 in revenue. Now I wanna focus on one thing when we look at this year today is that these are all organizations that are sustainer focused. They have really raised their hand to make it a key component of their fundraising strategies. So remember that when you're looking at the metrics and trends as we walk through the data. And I wanna do here's a quick summary of the participating organizations, and I wanna do a quick shout out and thank you to all of these groups who have been participating for many years. And before I dive into the numbers, I want to make sure I review the methodology and the logic that we are using to review the first of all, there's a gift cap applied. This is really intended to look at direct response, lower vet lower end, of the, giving table of, donors when we look at the benchmarking. So any individual contributions of $10,000 or more was excluded from this analysis. I'll also remind you that we actually analyze the the transactions, when we look at the metrics here. These are not survey based responses. And what I'll be sharing today are the median values as we do not share the individual metrics of organizations, but rather the medians. As I noted, this is really a focus on direct response. So I'll do a little bit of a summary on channels, including direct mail, digital channels, which could be an array of channels, including web site gifts, email motivated gifts, digital advertisements, so anything organizations paid for online such as a digital ad, social media, so forth. Telemarketing, talk a little bit about direct response television, and face to face door to door fundraising. The final thing is I wanna focus on the time frame. This is going to be looking the most recent time frame we'll be looking at is 07/01/2023 through June thirtieth of twenty twenty four. It's a little bit of a look back in time, and we want to make a note of that as we know that there is in the current today happening fundraising environment, there may be some instability for some organizations in their fundraising. So we really hope that when you look at the data today from this, benchmarking cohort that you can use it to help develop strategies moving forward. Because I think one of the key themes that you're gonna see after, we walk through the data is that in a period of instability, sustainers can provide that stability that organizations are really looking for today. So, hopefully, my Internet has stabilized here as we get into some of the metrics and themes. So what are we gonna walk away with today after I've walked through the data? First of all, one of the themes you're gonna hear me talk about is is that for organizations, one of the keys to growing your recurring or sustaining donor pool is to acquire donors directly as recurring donors. Meaning, they begin their support, and the very first gift of record is as a sustainer. Secondly, that one of the things we know that organizations do is convert single gift or non sustaining donors to become recurring gift donors, and this has seen a slowdown over the last two years. But digital channels play a key role in that conversion. And finally, the last thing we're gonna walk away with today is that channel diversification in acquiring recurring donors is critical. Having an array of channels, not just one, to acquire sustainers is very important. And a piece of positive news from this data is that the acquisition of sustainers or recurring donors via digital channels grew in f y 24 time frame. Alright. So as we go into the data here, we wanna talk about not we're gonna talk and really focus on sustainers here. But one of the things that we're gonna focus on, is not just look at sustainers in isolation. We want to look at them as a part of an organization's overall fundraising program. So when we look at that, we're gonna first start by looking at what are the overall giving trends, the total giving in the benchmarking cohort to give us a sense of what are those overall trends in giving in this fiscal year time frame, for over the last five years? How has donors and revenue shifted over the last five years? So if we look again, I'm gonna focus on the median trends, for this cohort. And if we across the 38 organizations, there was a median 8% overall decline in donors, so the total donors, not just sustainers, a median 2% decline in overall revenue, and a 4% increase in the revenue per donor. And that revenue per donor calculation is total revenue divided by donors. So that means the overall value of the donors represented here has been steadily has is increased. So over the long this we're gonna be analyzing five years here, but based on my, experience in looking at benchmarking cohort participation, the theme of overall declines in donor counts declining with revenue holding steady due to an increase at donor value has been a consistent theme, and we see it here in this f y twenty four dataset. And to give you some data around that, here's a quick snapshot of the median revenue per donor of the 38 participating organizations. So from f y twenty twenty to f y twenty four, you can see the year over year steady increase in overall revenue per donor. Now a few things to consider about the overall increases is that, you know, donor gifts may be getting bigger, but there could be strategic shifts across organizations that are driving the increase of this overall, revenue per donor. And if we break this out by sectors, so we had an array of sectors represented in our benchmarking cohort, you can see that increase in revenue per donor is widespread. It's across the board, whether it was animal welfare, environmental, societal benefit, or our public broadcasting as even international relief and development. Revenue per donor is up across the board. But keep in mind, a couple of things could be driving this. One of the factors we think is that sustainers are growing for orgs. It's a growing population of donors, and sustainers tend to have higher value. So that's one factor. The secondary factor is is some underlining changes that are likely happening in that, single gift donor market in the sense that you know, some organizations who used to have large populations of donors, let's say, giving $10, you know, recruiting $10, that volume has, shifted. You know, where now organizations are no longer looking to acquire $10 donors. They've shifted that to more of a focus, for example, on, maybe $25 donors. So increases in donor value have been widespread by multiple factors. So in just a moment, we're gonna get into the specific metrics around sustainers. But before we get started, I wanted to get a little sense of who we have here, participating, today. So we're gonna put up a quick little poll, and we wanted to ask specifically who do we have listening today. So if we'll give you a second to vote here. So for those participating, we wanted to capture some votes. So are you a do you have a small sustainer program that you've been nurturing and you're hoping to grow it? You have a good what you feel is a solid sustainer program, but you wanna see that growing? You have a pretty big sustainer program, but you wanna learn the current trends, or are you from an organization that is supporting, sustainers here? So let's see. Looks like we're kind of split right now between the smaller and the solid sustainer program here growth. So okay. That gives me some sense of where to go here as we, dive into the metrics here. And as we dive into the metrics, I do wanna point out, that this oh, oh, I see Joanna put it up there. You are gonna be able to download the metrics that we look at here today. So this presentation is gonna be available for everybody. So So if we walk through the numbers after the fact, you will have access to them. Alright. So let's get into some of the shifts about these, about single and recurring donor populations. So before I get into the numbers, I wanna be really clear on the methodology here. When we're analyzing the data, we axe ask organizations to clarify if don't if they are distinguishing donors as a single gift donor, and what that means is that is a donor giving on a non set schedule. So they have a they are a supporter, but they are not giving on a committed time frame such as monthly, annually, quarterly. They're responding to direct response. They're giving over a website, but not on a set schedule. When I say recurring and sys or sustainer, I'll use them interchangeably throughout this. What we're talking about here specifically are are those donors on a set payment schedule. That payment schedule may be, recurring, donors who a, you know, who are giving monthly, but it could also be recurring to donors, which we hear more of who are giving on an annual basis. But it's an automated annual payment as on a set schedule. And as I said, we need to look at the context of single and recurring donors together. What is their impact across, and how is that shifting? So we'll start by looking at those donors that were designated as single gift only donors. So the only type of contribution these donors are giving in the twelve month period identified is as a single gift donor. And this is what drove kind of some of the overarching changes. We saw an 11% decline in single gift donors across this benchmarking cohort from f y twenty three to f y twenty four, a 7% decline in revenue, and a 4% increase in revenue per donor. Thus, that increase in the, in revenue per donor hoping to offset the overall and larger decline in donors that we see here. And if we look at the last four years of year to year change, we've seen the last three years amongst this cohort has shown declines in overall single gift donor counts, from f y twenty two to f y twenty three. '2 years ago was amongst the larger decline, but that decline continued in in f y twenty four. Over the last four years, the only year where single gift donors increase across this cohort was in f y twenty one. And I will remind folks, as we look at the these time frames that f y twenty one was during that period, of the COVID nineteen pandemic where we tended to see some lifts in overall giving across the board. And these organizations that participated here today were not alone, and it is the last time where single gift only donor counts increased at the median. And to give you a sense of the shifts, this is the percent change across the 38 organizations. We had five organizations who experienced an increase in their overall single gift program. Five. So I think what actually, what we're seeing here is in the single gift, fundraising program across these participating organizations is that year to year volatility in single gift giving is becoming the norm. And what I mean by that is is that organizations are going to today and moving forward, we'll have a very core group of donors who give every year, whether it be to your membership drive, an annual fund, what whatever that may be. But what this is saying is is that single gift go giving can go up and down from year to year based on a of factors outside factors, you could have an event that impacts your organization, whether it be a natural disaster or addressing food insecurity, for example, or even, you know, a prominent figure mentioning your organization on the nightly news. It can have an impact on your fundraising from year to year. And that's what we're we're continuing to see over and over in kind of these, shifts. And helping to compensate for this volatility in donor count is an increase in the value of single gift only donors. You could see it here in the data across these groups. The median has gone from a hundred and $35 in fiscal year twenty twenty to a hundred and $61 in fiscal year twenty twenty four. So that overall increase in revenue per donor that I mentioned is very much influenced by the increasing value of the single gift only donor population. Now if we shift to recurring gift donors, and this is again where we'll see a little bit of a different trend emerge, is that recurring gift donors, so donors who made at least one recurring or sustainer gift of the year, declined 1% at the median, 1% increase in revenue, and a 2% increase in revenue per donor. So a more modest increase in revenue per donor, but for all intents and purposes, let's call it flat. The recurring population was stable from f y twenty three to f y twenty four. And if we look at the median percent changes of recurring donors for this cohort, we can see that there was some significant increases in recurring gift donor counts in f y twenty one and f y twenty two. And then over the last two years, that population has been pretty much flat overall. 1% increase in '23 and one % decline in f y twenty four. And here's that range of this one year shift. As you may what I showed before is that the, for for single gift donors, there were only five orgs that had an increase in recurring donors. Here, we're about split, but we also had a, but the percent line for recurring donors is much smaller. You know, there are, four organizations with 10% or more decline, here. For recurring, it was a much larger number. So the while there are some declines, they are not as widespread as they are for single gift owners. Alright. I also mentioned that the revenue per donor of recurring gift donors has been increasing, and we can see it it did increase $2 across this cohort from 2023 to 2024. So the value of recurring gift donors has been growing and is at a higher level than single gift donors, and it has seen some increases in the last two years. So what does this all mean? This means that the file makeup or the distribution of donors, whether it be single or recurring, have seen some shifts in recent years across these. And I think this is indicative of some of the trends we're seeing in the marketplace. Back in f y twenty, if we look at this dataset, 16% of the donors were gave at least one recurring gift, and 26% of the revenue was from sustaining gifts. Fast forward to five years today, f y twenty four, '20 '3 percent are giving a recurring gift, and it's accounting at the median for these groups about 32% of total revenue. So it has increased as a share of total revenue over the last five years. And, again, there's been that stable force, and there are growing share of their donor population. Now one of the ways that we are gonna do some breakouts in this report is some of you, we saw about a split of some works that of listening in today that said they were on the smaller side but wanted to grow. Also some medium and maybe some more established programs. But one of the ways we look at this mix of organizations and benchmarking is not necessarily by the size of the organization, but rather by the size of their sustainer program. And we've broken them out into three distinct buckets. Those organizations with less than 20,000 donors as sustainers, organizations with between twenty and seventy five thousand sustainers, and orgs with more than 75,000 sustainers. So, kind of trying to mix it up, the, you know, to show how different size sustainer programs may have slightly different metrics. So we wanna distinguish that as we talk through the data. So from this, what we're saying is this is is that of the share of overall donors that are sustainers for the small and what I'll call mid sized sustainer programs, It's represents about 20% of their donors. So 80% of the donors would be categorized in that single gift and we have about, about 20% of the donors are sustainers for those mid and small. If they're the larger sustainer programs, you can see it's a growing share. 43% of their donors. If there is a large sustainer programs, not quite, but just under half of their donors are giving us sustainer. So really, it's sustainer forward in their fundraising strategies. And if we flip that to look at with the revenue share, it's an even bigger share of revenue. So for the mid and small organizations, about a quarter of their revenue is coming from sustainers, 75% from single gift donors. And for those larger organizations, in f y twenty four, half of their total revenue came from sustainers. So just shows you what a driving force that sustainers can be in the overall revenue of these organizations. Alright. So we're giving you a sense of the overall trends, some, fluctuations in single gift giving and some stability and recurring giving. Well, a lot of that is gonna be driven by the inflow of new donors. So we're gonna take a look at overall new donor trends and then break them out by donor type. So first of all, one of the things that, you know, kind of to fill that, leaky bucket each year of donors, one of the things we like to look at is the share of overall donors who are new. So another way to look at it is is that if you look at your overall donor counts, you know, and take off your all of your new donors or take excuse me. Look at all of your overall donors. What share of that pie are brand new donors? So truly making their first gift ever to your organization. And one of the things we see is that f y '24, the share of donors who are new hit a five year low. 24% of the donor represented here were new. And if we look at the one year percent change of new donors for organizations, we can see that there were widespread declines in new donors. 11 of the 38 orgs participating increased new donors, with a lot of declines. And this is, as I mentioned, the swings in, high profile giving events that could drive giving up or down. Again, whether it be an emergency or your organization's moment in the news cycle, we can see big swings up one year and big swings down the next. And we see in f y twenty four, the dominating factor here was a decline in new donors and the the majority with a 10% or more decline. But how was this impacted by single and recurring? That's what we'll take a look at next. So for single gift donors, what we saw is the declines were pretty widespread for single gift donors. They really influenced that overall trends. 11 of the 38 organizations increased new single gift donors, and the decline was a median 12% for single gift donors. As I said, we tend to see that this is a could be swing up and swing down from year to year, and f y twenty four was one of those years where there was a 12% decline. For recurring gift donors, we saw a little bit of a different trend. Roughly half of the organizations, a little less than half, experienced an increase in new recurring donor acquisition. And I wanna be really clear when I say new recurring donors. These are donors who are brand new, and in their first year of giving, they're a sustainer. Either they started brand new as a sustainer or they, made a single gift, and in their year of acquisition, they became a sustainer. So they're brand new as a is 17 of 38 increased, and the decline in new recurring donors was immediate 1%. So, again, we'll call it flat from f y twenty three to f y twenty four. So, again, similar to overall trends, overall, single gift donors drove much of the decline where recurring donors were generally pretty stable. Okay. I seem to be frozen again. Hopefully, my audio is okay. Sorry. Sorry. I seem to be frozen. Oops. Hi, everybody. My name is Megan Bachelor. I am also on the donorCentrics team here at Blackbaud. I just wanted to hop on. It sounds like Paige is maybe having some, issues with her Internet connection. So I'm gonna help her out for a little bit while, we are waiting for her to return. Hopefully, you all can still see Paige's presentation. I believe that I can, start to, kind of run the presentation for her for a moment. So while we, are looking or while we are waiting for for Paige to get back on, I will share a little bit. I presented, at our sustainer summit with Paige, recently. So I'm happy to share a little bit of what we have learned, in those meetings about sustainers. So, again, here we are talking about those organizations that experienced an increase in recurring donor acquisition. So, again, new donors being acquired as sustainers in f y twenty four. So it's about half and half, so we had 17 of our 38 organizations experiencing an increase in the number of new recurring acquired donors from 23 to 24. But the number of new donors, acquired directly to recurring declined a median percent from '23 to 2024. Again, if we're looking at that share, though, so as programs are growing their sustainer giving as sustaining giving is becoming more common people. There's Paige. Hey, Paige. I'm gonna let you take it over. Apologize. Lots of tests and I we had stable Internet. So thank you, Megan, for jumping in, and I apologize for that delay. So, Megan, hopefully, thank you for jumping in, and love technology. So thank you everybody for your, for your patience as we deal with this. So as I I'm gonna go back, hopefully, for the, where where, we left off is to new single gift owner. So that share of recurring while the whole thing stable is becoming a bigger part of the new Alright, everybody. I'm going to do my very best improv to try and hop in again, for Paige while we try to get her Internet, back up and running. Again, my sincere apologies here. But what Paige was saying was that we are looking at that share of donors acquired as recurring donors. So, again, as you are recurring, programs are growing, as you are advertising sustaining donors as an option, not only for conversion, but then for that point of acquisition. Our sustaining organizations have really increased in the share of new donors acquired with a recurring gift. So for this cohort, you can see a five percentage point increase over the five year period that we're looking at. And by 2024, you know, we're approaching 15% of new donors being acquired with some kind of recurring gift. So, again, incredible growth over the period that we are looking at. One of the things that we've been talking about pretty regularly oh, excuse me. I'm getting ahead of myself here. One of the things we are talking about pretty regularly in our sustainer summit is face to face and door to door. You know, during 2020, '20 '20 '1, we had all of this happening with COVID. We had in person events, not being, able to be held as they were previously. With that, our face to face and door to door programs experienced, hiccups to say, you know, to say the very least. We had less participation. Fewer organizations were able to use these programs during that time. Fast forward to 2024, and we do have some of these organizations bringing those programs back, restarting those programs. We also have a number of programs who are adding face to face and door to door as acquisition methods for their sustaining or giving. Paige, do we have you back? Do you wanna try to hop on? Are we still I'll I'll try, but maybe, Megan, you could hold tight for for me. I don't know what's happening, and as people know, this is a webinar nightmare. Alright. Thank you, Megan. Let's see. So great insights into face to face and the growth of that. And so as we look at this and again, I apologize if I'm repeating it here. We know not every organization has face to face, but for those that do into growing their direct acquired donors as the sustainer. So as we noted during COVID, it was a lost channel. It went down to a very small share, a little bit of this is timing. But about for those that do have face to face or door to door fundraising programs, it requires about half of their new donors direct to recurring giving. So it actually saw a little bit of a decline in the share here, but we could see it really did come roaring back after the pandemic and has been a growing channel. But if you're an organization that says, I, don't you know, I'm not gonna have or we don't have a budget for a face to face program, that means that non face to face, channels. So, the other area of growth, which I alluded to at the beginning, is digital channels and their role in acquiring recurring giving. So 20 of the 38 organizations actually increase the number of new sustainers acquired via digital channels. What do I mean by a digital channel? We're talking about web forms, email strategies, whether you're doing any yeah. Every organization has or has access to in some form, and there was an increase of 3% across the organizations in the growth of, recurring donors acquired, directly to recurring via digital channels. So it's a a bright spot, I think, that every organization can kind of pay attention to there. So here we go. We can see digital channels excelled and grew as a share of recurring acquisition in 2021 when those orgs lost face to face, but it remains a very valid and, you know, significant source. So something to consider when you look at your digital programs and the role that sustainer acquisition plays for those digital programs. K. I'm having trouble advancing here. I don't know if Did that move forward for your page? Nope. It's not moving. It didn't move forward for me. So but I can hear you. Okay. Excellent. Well, we're going to go into that first time sustainer, so those donors who are making sustaining gifts for the very first time. So our first time recurring donor trends, and then, we've got those that are acquired directly as well as our sustainer conversions. So these first my hat. I'm on top. Excellent. Alright. So so this is just to say what I alluded to kind of at the beginning here, is, to do the, we're gonna do a poll in just a second. I'll just talk quickly about the conversion here, but we're gonna ask everyone how their sustainer acquisition and conversion is doing in just a moment. But just to give you a quick sense is, as I alluded to, the largest sustainer programs are really acquiring the majority of their sustainers directly to recurring. So it's the 76% of the of, the largest sustainer programs. Their sustainers are coming in brand new first gift ever as sustainers. And the small and mid ones, it's about split, about fifty fifty between those, who are you know, half of them are conversions converting from being a single gift donor to recurring, whereas about half of them are brand new as recurring donors. So this is one of the areas I noted at the beginning is saw a little bit of a decline. 10 of the 38 organizations increased their number of conversions from f y 23 to f y twenty four, and there was a median 11% decline in the number of conversions. So if you are focusing on conversions, it is an area where we see a little bit of a softness. And I think directly correlated to the smaller pool of single gift donors that many organizations are facing. And when you look at converting, there's we one of the things we look at in bench benchmarking is our a list of the channels that are used to convert single gift donors to recurring donors. And what we're providing here is really a ranking. So it's a look at, the channels that when a donor becomes a sustainer for the very first time, what is the channel that converted them? And we're looking at web digital, kind of a generic web digital form conversion, digital ads, so any sort of retargeting to convert a donor. Staying on digital channels, email plays a role as well. But I wanna point out mail. So if organizations have direct mail, you know, having a checkbox, make my gift monthly, that or just as an education, it plays a role in conversion as well as telemarketing. So tried and true telemarketing, which has been around for a long time, continues to be it's not a huge source of, conversion, but I will say from benchmarking, there were significant number of organizations that have are seeing success in telemarketing to convert their donors. I'll also note that channels like direct response television as well as face to face, you may convert donors if you have those programs. It may not be a strategy, but it's gonna happen. And then lastly, I'll end with, this channel where it says 2% on the far right is looking at SMS marketing, text to give programs. More organizations are using them, and it is becoming a channel. It's actually went from last year 2023 being 1% to 2% in f y twenty four. So, again, apologies for all of the technology. So, hopefully, I'll find some stability in my technology here. But I wanna do a quick poll here to ask how folks are seeing in 2025, how is their new donor, acquisition for recurring donors? So acquiring donors as, as sustainers through the beginning parts of 2025. How are things looking? Are you tracking ahead of where you were at this point in time in 2024? Are you behind? Are you holding on about the same? Wanted to ask this question because I will say, one of the things in 02/2016, '2 thousand '17, view, period. A lot of organizations saw an influx of sustainers. So part of the reason for the answer the question was to see if we're seeing any influx. But looks like folks are saying about the same. So holding steady for sustainer acquisition so far. Thank you for everybody. Alright. Okay. So we're gonna talk a little bit about retention because one of the, things that we'll note, related, you you know, is looking at the retention of different pop donor populations. So let me orient you first to this chart of what we mean and what we're, focusing on when we speak to retention. If you look at the far right box where it says overall donor retention, it's looking at the share of donors that made a gift in the previous year and the percent that returned to make a gift in the current year. So on the far right, the green line is looking at all donors. So specifically, it's showing, you know, around 51% of all donors that made a gift in 2023 returned to make at least one gift in 2024. So it you know, and then the orange line at the top is showing the overall retention of sustainers, much higher rate. And then the retent the blue line is showing the retention rate of single gift donors. So thus that higher retention rate. We move over to the left and look at multiyear retention. Retention. The higher multiyear retention, in the 80% part for multiyear sustainers. And then that, you know, in the holding steady in the 50% range for multiyear single gift donors. And on the box for first year retention on the far left, you can see kind of the same tighter trends, but I wanna distinguish some of the metrics we're seeing here. The green line is showing that overall first year retention. The donor was new in 2023, what percentage returned to make a gift in 2024. And we can see roughly about 20% annual retention for single gift donors. The orange line for sustainer retention is actually a slightly different metric, and it's looking at donor retention rate in month 13. So if somebody is acquired as a sustainer, for example, in April of twenty twenty three, it's measuring if they're still giving us a sustainer in April of twenty twenty four. And you can see it overall dipped to 47% month 13 retention for 2024. So it looks like sustainer retention declined, but it's important to understand the nuances here. So first of all, here is that thirteen month retention for donors acquired as sustainers. So that 47% I just showed you was for sustainers and donors who made both sustainers and single gifts. If donors made only sustainer gifts, that thirteen month retention rate in month thirteen for '20 '20 '4 declined to 49%. Now think back to that new donor section where I talked about the loss of that face to face channel in f y twenty one twenty and twenty twenty one, and you can see when that channel was not available, sustainer retention went up. And when it returned, sustainer retention went down. So let's break that out. So for face to face and door to door thirteen month retention in f y twenty four, it was 37. So it's held steady somewhat between 2023 and 2024. And I actually think that that's a very positive sign for orgs investing in face to face because what we saw in, over the last two years is incredible growth in that channel. So the volume's increasing, but retention is holding steady. For digitally acquired sustainers, so across that mix of digital channels, we actually did see a little bit of a dip in that retention rate. Went from 61% to 59%, whereas it had solidly been in the mid to upper 60%. So as that channel also grew, we did see a little bit of a dip in retention. But compared to face to face, you can see this population has incredibly strong retention. Now if I compare single gift donor retention to the for web digital channels, my guess is that we'd probably be about 20% or lower. So, donors acquired online as a sustainer have incredibly strong retention. And if we break this out by sector for web digital retention, we can see that there are some variations by sector. The environmental sector in particular saw a decline as well as societal benefits. So kind of advocacy related organizations are the two sectors in particular that saw a little bit more of a decline in the retention of their sustainers than others digitally acquired sustainers than there are others. So I couple final slides here to go through about this, and I I apologize again, and thank you for your patience as we manage the technology here. But as we close out here today, just a couple of quick slides about the the standards providing stability and supporting organizations for the long term. Ultimately, all of these metrics show is with what does things look like? What do things look like over time and many years after, after a sustainer's act or single gift donors are acquired? So this is a snapshot here of if a donor was acquired as a sustainer during f y twenty two, '50 percent of them were still giving in f y twenty four. And if a donor was acquired as a single gift donor in f y twenty two, '15 percent of them were still giving in f y twenty four. And the cumulative value, so adding up the value over time, so year one, year two, and year three, a recurring donor in year three has returned $405 versus a single gift donor, a hundred and $61 at the median. And take it out even further, five years. So f y twenty to f y twenty four, '30 '8 percent of recurring donors were still giving versus 10% of single gift donors. And for that value, the value of recurring donors in year five jumps up to $616 versus a hundred 96. So thus, just showing that cumulative value, strong cumulative value of the recurring donor population. And, again, as you're half a sustainer program, one of the things we should preach and if you're trying to make the case internally across your organization is patience because the cumulative impact of sustainers is significant. And I'll close with this data slice as we look at the cumulative count of donors, the median count of donors who have been sustainers to the organizations for three plus years. The count was immediate 32,000 donors across our 38 orgs, but look at the impact of that revenue. That cumulative giving, it's up to, over $12,000,000 up from about $8,000,000 4 years ago. So building a sustainer base is providing that stability in a moment when organizations are probably searching for a lot of stability. It may take time, but they are can become a core base, of support for organizations. And we'll see if there are any questions here, but this is just to close us out on areas of what we'll be looking at throughout 2025 and beyond is, you know, do need to pay attention to having fewer single gift owners available to convert to recurring. It's a key part of growing sustainer programs is converting those single gift owners. And if the pool is smaller, it's, you know, gonna be, you know, what could that impact be over time? Also important to pay attention to what is the role of new channels. Some organizations may be investing in programs like connected TV, you know, the shift to YouTube television, Hulu, and so forth in using connected TV as linear TV market shift. You know, that could, you know, create a different dynamic for organizations. And also the role of texting or SMS giving either for cultivation as well as the giving source. And then finally, I didn't touch on it, but one of the things we hope to look at in our research moving forward is the impact of payment methods that orgs use. PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, even direct debit EFT. You know, what can those shifts in payment methods do, you know, and how can that help grow recurring giving programs? So don't know if we'll we'll have I think, if there's, another poll, if anybody is interested in asking or looking for, more information about benchmarking. But I'll just, pause to see if there are any questions or comments. I think there might have been one question here. I'm not sure. If there were any questions. Okay. I see one question here from Lawrence. For the programs that experienced growth and new donor recurring, were there specific strategies that help them achieve that growth? I would say overarching theme for those that saw growth is organizations that make sustainer acquisition a priority. So, for example, are they willing to test it in their web forms? Are they willing to kinda defaulting to sustain or ask? Are they, looking at the, you know, are they taking, you know, sustainer forward approaches in all their pieces? I would say creating an an environment for sustainers is not just about putting it in one mail piece. It's about kind of weaving it into a piece of your overall fundraising programs and the the groups that kind of made that a priority are the ones that help them achieve that growth. So hopefully that helps. For the donors acquired through mail, were they rent take acquiring lists, or was this from donors who weren't already giving on file? So the mail comment, I should clarify, that was, specific, specific to existing donors who converted from being single gift donors to recurring via mail. So probably, mostly, these orgs were using the valuable real estate in their mail pieces to promote recurring giving either with an insert or something on their reply form. So rather than renting or requiring lists, I think that comment was specific to donors who were already on file in creating that opportunity, for giving there. Is there a difference between the retention rates of a $5 a month and a $500 a month donors? Great question. So there is we do, at benchmarking, dive into some of the differences in the retention by what we say origin gift level, so first gift amount. We to be honest, we don't do a lot of analysis in the $500 a month kind of high end range. Where we kind of cap out is about a hundred dollars a month, and we do see I would say we do tend to see slightly higher retention, for the hundred dollar a month sustainers than a $5 a month. Although there tends to be a lot lower volume of those. Of course, they're incredibly valuable, but just, kind of looking at that. And then, Lawrence, in terms of pipeline development, wonder if you measured over time the difference in how quickly a sustainer moves up giving levels as compared to nonsustainers. Do they escalate their giving faster? So interesting question there. Now I think the as it relates to pipeline, one of the things we do measure with our benchmarking participants is the percentage of sustainers that upgrade their monthly average gift. So, you know, if you're a $10 a month, what's the percentage that upgrade in a year? The golden the best of the best are about, 10% of their sustainers upgrade, their average gift. So that is one of the ways we somewhat measure it. Separately, we haven't really done a comparison of the sustainers versus non sustainers other than a competition that's kind we wanted to look at them as their different types of giving. But over the one of the things that we can do in benchmarking, and I'm sorry. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, is we can do comparisons of long term value of perhaps a $10 a month sustainer at year five versus a hundred dollar new donor at year five and do comparisons rather than that broad sense. So that's something we can include in a webinar for next year. You gave me an idea. Alright. I think that's all I see for questions. I hope I didn't miss anything. But I again, I'm just gonna say it one more time. I apologize for those technical difficulties. And, thank you for your patience as we work through this. Thank you to my colleague, Megan, for jumping in at that moment, and I hope there were some metrics in here that you find valuable for your organizations. So thank you.