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Imagine you meet someone. The conversation is interesting, you like what they stand for, and you appreciate how they show up in the world. They care about many of the same things you care about. So when they ask if you'd like to have dinner sometime, you say yes.
The date goes well. Not perfect, but good. You leave feeling optimistic. Maybe even a little excited. You think there might be some potential there.
And then you don't hear from them.
A few days pass. Then a week. Then two. Three weeks later, a message finally arrives:
"Thanks for dinner. Want to buy me another?"
Most of us would not consider this a particularly effective relationship strategy.
In fact, if this happened in a romantic comedy, this would be the moment when the main character's best friend grabs their phone and says, "Absolutely not. We are not calling them back."
Yet something remarkably similar happens every day in fundraising.
As an industry, we spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to find the right people to ask for a first gift. We build predictive models, create donor personas, purchase lists, run acquisition campaigns, and optimize landing pages. We celebrate every single donor who says yes. And we should. The first gift matters.
And then we ghost them.
The campaign ends. The report gets written. The acquisition numbers get analyzed. And the donor—the actual human being who just raised their hand and expressed belief in the mission—often receives surprisingly little attention.
Maybe they get a receipt. Maybe they get a thank-you letter. Maybe they hear from the organization again a few weeks later. More often than not, the next meaningful communication is another fundraising appeal.
The result is predictable. Most nonprofits lose the majority of their newly acquired donors before their second year.
Think about that for a moment. Imagine if three out of four first dates never led to a second one. At some point, we would stop blaming the dating pool and start asking harder questions about what happens after the first date.
Fundraising often has the opposite reaction. When retention declines, we focus on finding more prospects. When revenue slows, we increase acquisition efforts. When donor counts fall, we search for more names.
The truth is, development teams are not in the fundraising business. They are in the relationship business. Fundraising is simply one of the ways those relationships express themselves.
Yet much of our attention is focused on starting relationships or increasing the "long-standing" ones, while comparatively little is focused on building them.
Over the last decade, I have spent much of my time studying long-term donor values. At first, I thought I was studying revenue. What I eventually realized was that I was studying relationships.
Across hundreds of thousands of donors and dozens of nonprofit organizations, the same pattern kept appearing. The organizations with the highest donor value were not necessarily better at tactics deployed in year 5. They were better at year 1.
The strongest predictors of long-term donor value were not found in sophisticated major gift programs or elaborate stewardship strategies years into the relationship. They showed up much earlier—in the speed of a thank-you, in whether a second gift happened within the first few months, in whether a donor was invited into recurring giving, and in whether someone made a personal connection before the relationship had a chance to fade.
These moments may seem small, but they compound. A slightly better first-year experience becomes a higher retention rate. A higher retention rate creates more opportunities to deepen the relationship. More opportunities create more giving. Over five years, what looked like a small difference becomes a dramatically more valuable donor.
The first gift is not the finish line. It is simply someone agreeing to a first cup of coffee. And just like almost every meaningful relationship in our lives, what happens after that first meeting helps determine how deep the relationship becomes.
But if nonprofits are really in the relationship business, an obvious question follows:
How do we measure the strength of those relationships?
Measuring What Matters: The Relationship
Fundraising has no shortage of metrics. We track response rates, conversion rates, average gifts, return on investment, cost per donor acquired, email open rates, and countless other indicators. Most of these measurements are useful. They help us understand how individual campaigns, channels, and tactics are performing.
The challenge is that most of these metrics focus on moments rather than relationships.
A response rate tells us whether someone reacted to a specific appeal. An average gift tells us what happened during a specific transaction. Even return on investment is often used to focus on a single campaign.
While those numbers are important, they don't tell us what ultimately matters most: whether the majority of our donors choose to stay and build a relationship with us over time.
Imagine evaluating a marriage based on the first month.
That is why I became interested in long-term value.
Long-term value, often shortened to LTV, measures the total amount a donor contributes over a defined period of time. In our research, we use a five-year window because it provides enough time to observe meaningful donor behavior while remaining practical for planning and analysis.
What makes LTV valuable is that it shifts our focus away from individual gifts and toward the entire relationship. The first gift still matters, but instead of asking, "How much did this donor give today?" we begin asking, "What did this donor ultimately become?"
Did they give again? Did they become a recurring donor? Did they increase their giving over time?
Long-term value helps us answer those questions because it measures the outcome of the relationship, not just a single point in time.
Over the course of my career, I've analyzed LTV, looking at every possible cut and angle: How does first gift impact it? How does a channel, an offer, an audience, a list, or even a donor's age impact a donor's value over time? I am always looking for ways to predict what a donor will become.
One such prediction tool is what we call the growth factor.
The growth factor measures how much donor value expands over time relative to the donor's starting point. In simple terms, it tells us how effectively an organization grows a donor's revenue after acquisition. If an organization has a higher growth factor, that means donors are staying longer, giving more frequently, upgrading their support, or some combination of all three.
Essentially, it measures the strength of an organization's cultivation efforts.
When we compared growth factors across organizations, a clear pattern emerged. A small group consistently outperformed the benchmark. Their donors grew dramatically faster over time—roughly 40 percent faster than the median organizations.
Naturally, we wanted to know why.
Were they attracting wealthier donors?
Were they more successful at securing major gifts?
Were they better at promoting monthly giving?
What we discovered was that the biggest differences were not found in year 5. They were found in the earliest stages of the relationship.
The organizations with the strongest donor growth were significantly better at helping donors survive the first few years on file. In other words, the path to higher long-term value was not about maximizing generosity later in the relationship. It was about nurturing relationships early on.
The First Gift Is Just the Beginning
Which brings us back to that first date.
We spend so much time trying to convince someone to say yes that we sometimes forget what happens after they do.
But the data suggests that what happens next may be even more important.
The thank-you. The first impact update. The invitation to become more involved. The opportunity to make a second gift.
These aren't simply steps in a communication plan. They're opportunities to build a relationship.
And one of the first places to put that thinking into practice is your welcome series.
Is Your Welcome Series Ready for January?
Join us on October 26 for our upcoming webinar, Is Your Welcome Series Ready for January?, where we'll explore how to make those first interactions more meaningful and build a stronger foundation for long-term donor relationships. Register here!
