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At face value, this feels like a reasonable ask.
If a donor commits to giving monthly, they likely want their full gift to support the mission. Most donors understand that processing gifts comes with costs. Some are even willing to go a step further and cover them. And from an operational standpoint, the barrier is low; most donation platforms make it easy to add a simple checkbox.
So why not ask?
The donor can always say no. And when they say yes, average monthly revenue goes up.
The problem is what happens after the signup.
What we’ve found is that donors who choose to cover credit card processing fees are less likely to retain as monthly donors. In other words, a small, well-intentioned UX decision may quietly undermine long-term value even as it delivers a short-term revenue boost.
We Dug Into the Data
A client recently mentioned something that caught my attention: that monthly donors who choose to cover the credit card processing fees seem to cancel more often. That felt counterintuitive to me. If a donor is willing to go above and beyond to cover fees, you would expect them to be more committed, not less.
That curiosity led me to dig into our data.
However, because most databases don’t include a clear flag indicating whether a donor selected “cover the fees,” we had to think carefully about how to construct the analysis. We focused on:
- Monthly sustainers only
- Credit card recurring gifts only
- Donors who started giving monthly within the last 2–5 years
- Cancellation, defined as no recurring gift recorded for three months
- Only client organizations that actively offer “fee coverage” on their donation forms
- Client-specific fee calculations to determine the exact “fee-covered” ask versus the standard ask for comparison
Using those rules, we compared retention between donors who gave standard amounts and donors who gave amounts that matched a fee-coverage calculation.
This resulted in a sample of just under 3,500 recurring donors.
What the Data Showed
Across this group:
- Fee-covering donors: 43.3% cancellation rate
- Standard-amount donors: 40.1% cancellation rate
That difference was statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.
Even more telling: 8 out of 10 clients showed higher lapsing among donors who covered fees.
What This Means for Fundraisers
Here’s the uncomfortable math: Fee coverage adds 3–7% per gift, but a 3-point increase in cancellation among monthly donors compounds fast.
This doesn’t mean “never ask donors to cover the fees.”
It does mean testing before assuming it is the right path forward.
If you offer fee coverage to monthly donors:
- Compare retention cleanly between those who select it and those who opt out
- Don’t look at just order completion between the two groups, but also at long-term attrition rates
- Evaluate long-term value when looking at tests, not just immediate net revenue, to take into consideration both retention and average gift
The Bigger Lesson
This isn’t really about fees. It’s about remembering that every user-experience decision is a retention strategy, whether we intend it to be or not.
What boosts response today can quietly erode value tomorrow.
And in recurring programs, tomorrow is where the long-term value lives.
