Upgrade Your Recurring Donors With Classy’s Giving Frequencies and End Dates

At Classy, we know how critical recurring donors are to your nonprofit’s long-term health and scalability. That’s why one of our ultimate goals is to make recurring giving as flexible as possible for your supporters, as the ability to customize and self-manage their ongoing donations can result in improved acquisition and retention rates.

Download the Ultimate Guide to Recurring Giving

In April 2021, we launched new recurring frequencies to give you and your donors more options to build and execute a powerful recurring giving strategy. Now, we’ve added even more recurring frequency options: daily, weekly, and bi-weekly. 

In addition, we’re excited to announce the launch of our new recurring end dates, which gives your donors the option to select an end date for their recurring plan directly from your donation page. You and your donors can also easily edit active recurring plans to include an end date, providing greater control and flexibility.

Below, we dive into a few ways you can leverage these new frequencies and recurring donation end dates to engage and convert donors.

Recurring Frequency Use Cases: Daily, Weekly, and Bi-Weekly

These new frequency options can inspire some creative campaign ideas to engage your recurring donors in new ways. A few use cases include:

• Awareness weeks or months: Suggest daily donations during an awareness week, or perhaps weekly donations during an entire awareness month.
• Religious tithing and holidays: Offer a digital tithing option with weekly recurring donations. Daily donations can create a unique experience for supporters during religious holidays like Ramadan.
• Supporter budgets and schedules: Supporters might be more able to give on a recurring basis when the frequency matches their pay schedule. Their pay periods could fall on the 15th or last day of the month, making a bi-weekly recurring frequency option useful.

These are just a few examples. With additional recurring frequencies, your organization now has even more creative freedom to ideate and execute campaigns, calls to action, and programs that stand out and boost supporter engagement in new ways.

Pair these flexible frequencies with Classy’s new recurring end dates feature to continue cutting through the noise by providing donors with a greater sense of autonomy over their commitment to your cause.

Get a Pulse Check on the Current State of Recurring Giving

How End Dates Improve Recurring Donor Retention

Donors faced with the option to make an ongoing gift ultimately want to be able to control and manage their donation, including how long they want their recurring plan to run. They might be able to commit for only a specific length of time, or their willingness and financial ability could leave it more open-ended.

Giving your supporters the ultimate control over their recurring donation, including the ability to set its end date, can build more trust among your donor base. This improved trust can, in turn, translate into improved retention. The more your donors trust your nonprofit and feel that you’re prioritizing their giving experience, the more likely they’ll be to sign up, promote your cause, and even take additional action again in the future.

This feature also saves your staff time and effort in the long run. While conventional wisdom may tell you to not offer end dates on recurring plans to extend the life of each plan, the reality is that many donors will end up wanting to cancel at some point. Servicing all of these requests can create an organizational burden for your nonprofit, as well as ultimately lead to an unpleasant giving experience.

Allowing your donors to manage their own plans—like they’re accustomed to doing with the rest of their online subscriptions—puts them in the driver’s seat. That empowerment goes a long way towards building trust while also eliminating the administrative burden of servicing these requests.

Download the 2021 Recurring Donor Sentiment Report

Valuable Use Cases for Recurring End Dates

This feature also offers your organization more customization to execute specific campaign types where an end date can be important.

Some examples include:

• Religious events: As noted above, end dates can be particularly valuable for religious observances, like Ramadan or Hanukkah, that involve a finite, highly concentrated period of giving throughout your community.
• Seasonally-based campaigns: An end date is valuable for campaigns that run for specific lengths of time. For instance, if your organization focuses on education, you can run a fundraising campaign that asks donors to equip teachers in the classroom for the duration of a school year. Simultaneously, parents could start personal fundraising pages that ask friends and family to give a monthly donation to support their child over the course of the school year, or until they graduate.
• Sports or team leagues: The same concept applies to sports leagues. Your organization could ask for recurring donations to support a particular team or a specific season. Parents could also start fundraising campaigns on their child’s behalf, or on the behalf of coaches, and solicit recurring donations from their networks for the duration of the season. Recurring donations could also go toward a specific fund, like a team’s annual travel budget.
• Funding a particular project: If your organization is building a school, monument, or any other project over a length of time, consider requesting recurring gifts to support that build until its projected completion date.

With Classy, recurring donors have total control over their gift plan. They’re able to customize their payment frequency, the dates they’re charged, their payment method, and now the end dates for their recurring subscriptions.

We’re cooking up even more features to optimize the giving experience for your recurring donors, which we’re excited to announce in the coming months. When you give this flexibility and control to your donors, you can improve your overall recurring retention rates and set your organization up for scale.

See the Classy Giving Platform in Action