Fearlessly Designing Next-Gen Sustainer Programs

In Part 1, we saw how the glory days of easy data-driven fundraising ended around 2008 — then, Lazarus-like, returned for two more years during COVID.

They aren’t coming back.

At least not in the same ways.

And that’s okay because this new era is one made for “responsibly fearless” adventurers and creators like you.

Not sure you’re an “adventurer” or “creator”?

You certainly can be, if you want. Everything you want in your career, calling, and impact — and everything your nonprofit organization desperately needs you to do — is on the other side of your fear.

Creating a remarkable sustainer experience is a great place to start that journey.

Why your sustainer program should be remarkable

Part 1 left off having identified the problem that far too many organizations have sustainer programs that simply aren’t remarkable.

This is a huge problem — because if your sustainer program isn’t remarkable, there are quite a few remarkable sustainer programs out there for your audience members to join. Sure, your donors like what your organization is doing, but they also love what a bunch of other organizations are doing. Trust me — my colleagues and I talk to your donors all the time. You think they only care about your cause, because they’ve given to you a few times?

They care about a lot of causes, actually, and especially the organizations that care to give them an amazing experience — an encounter with God, the mission, and the beneficiaries unlike anything they can get anywhere else.

If you’re just doing some version of the same old data-driven sustainer program that every other organization is doing — that conventional combination of: most popular single gift offer turned monthly, a few benefits you think the audience should like, and a safe name that somehow survived the naming committee — then your audience is going to smile, nod, and join another sustainer program by an organization they love who is designing a more remarkable opportunity.

Caring about people is the key

What does that “more remarkable design” look like?

Some real-life examples from our recent projects include: a mobile multimedia interactive adventure, a moving story of life-change masquerading as a serialized love story, a card-writing kit that brings hope to hurting people, an intentional journey of a perspective shift that we can see and measure, and all kinds of unique “thank-yous” and affirmations.

Whether sophisticated or simple, the most fundamental piece that is so often missing from the design process is the very intentional involvement of your audience members in the design of all of your key experiences and especially in your sustainer program.

Your audience members aren’t data. They aren’t segments. They aren’t personas. They aren’t test results.

They’re people.

People created in the image of God. People with imaginations and loves and dislikes and joys and sorrows. People of infinite complexity, contradiction, worth, and possibility.

People you ought to know as people, not just as data.

A.G. Lafley, when he famously turned around P&G, discovered that the main reason that their success rate with consumer products had declined so badly was that their product researchers had stopped knowing the customers as “whole people” and were simply depending upon survey and transaction data.

Your organization’s sustainer program is, for your mass market audience, your top “product.” Or it certainly should be.

The way of “responsible fearlessness”

Your sustainer program should be the focal point of your relationships with mass market donors and prospects. It’s the means by which you can give them the best experience with your organization. And, obviously, more-than-doubling their lifetime value and annual retention means that — in return — they provide your organization with dependable funding, even in times of (dares to peek at national headlines) economic recession.

And that’s where “responsible fearlessness” comes in. Data-driven fundraising has been a wonderful and valuable discipline for decades, rightly winning the trust of nonprofit leaders at all levels.

The problem is that data-driven fundraising has been so successful that our sector no longer knows how to do anything else. We don’t know how to build products. We don’t know how to create experiences. We don’t know how to attract new audiences.

Worse, we’ve actually become fearful of trying anything that can’t prettily map back to clean data and empirical results. If they aren’t promised a specific ROI, in advance, too many of today’s leaders won’t accept any of the risk inherent in building a remarkable new experience their audience will love.

Data must stop serving as leaders’ only source for discerning what donors, volunteers, and advocates will love. Involving people — whole people — can do so much more to help us design remarkable sustainer programs and other experiences.

Bringing your audience into experience design as whole people doesn’t mean leaving behind discipline. Far from it! By no means should anyone chuck data-driven fundraising and embrace shoot-from-the-hip creativity. Any leader who hesitates to invest in wild ideas because they’re “creative” or “on-trend” isn’t being fearful but simply wise.

Human-centered design is a true and rigorous discipline for reliably developing new experiences that people love.

As such, human-centered design (and more specifically, our own affectionately named “Human-Centered Everything” process) enables leaders to be both fearless and responsible.

Hence our call for leaders to be “responsibly fearless.”

Working within the human-centered discipline, we can develop remarkable new experiences — including fresh, meaningful, desirable sustainer programs with appealing impact, and unique involvement opportunities — that will serve these wonderfully generous people, and our organizations, for the long term.

Meet your people!

On Tuesday, June 27, at 10:00 AM PST, Paige Walthall and I will introduce you to a number of your audience members, primed to become monthly sustainers to your organization and organizations like yours. You’ll hear directly from those donors about what kinds of motivations and experiences fire their desire to participate in monthly giving.

Hearing directly from the audience is a highlight for every project we do. Because your audience members are awesome, unique, and lovely people, we can all gain much unexpectedly rich inspiration from them in order to create a remarkable new experience that they will love.

Our clients love hearing from their audience. You will too.