Sustainer relationships are critical to a nonprofit organization’s long-term financial health and mission success, and we suspect this will become even more important in 2025. Building successful sustainer programs provides a predictable revenue stream and creates an opportunity to cultivate deeper donor engagement, ultimately leading to higher lifetime value. Through Revolution CRM, ROI Solutions helps our clients automate transaction processing, exception handling, and failed transaction recovery to increase donor satisfaction and reduce manual work.
A quick, unofficial review of completed recurring transactions processed in Revolution CRM across our clients in 2024 shows almost 19 million individual transactions, representing $300 million. In 2023, it was just under 13 million individual transactions for around $225 million. That’s a 30% increase in transactions and a 25% increase in dollars. We onboarded several new organizations to Revolution CRM in the last year, which explains some of the growth; however, a cursory review also shows program growth across many of our clients.
In 2025, we’ll continue working with CDP to expand benchmarking efforts, including growing our inaugural sustainer benchmarking program, which included ten organizations split between public media and other types of social impact organizations. At the heart of Benchmarking Insights is a Tableau-based benchmarking report utilizing the combined CDP/ROI Solutions technical infrastructure to provide a robust set of fundraising data points. Participating organizations represented over 9 million sustaining gifts and $160 million in contributions over the last 12 months.
Connecticut Public solved its unreliable renewal processes by migrating from Salesforce to Revolution CRM, automating constituent outreach through Engaging Networks, fixing members’ PBS Passport access issues, and recapturing significant revenue. In fact, Connecticut Public saw an annualized recapture of over $80,000 in sustainer revenue in its first few months after going live!
Sustainers comprised 57% of The Humane Society of the United States’ revenue last fiscal year. In an overall fundraising environment where new donor acquisition has slowed, it has been cost-effective for HSUS to leverage our MiLo Intelligence predictive machine learning models to increase sustainer loyalty and convert one-time donors to sustainers.
Our partnership with FlexPay adds a new and improved solution to reduce involuntary sustainer churn caused by card payment system issues that result in false declines. Nonprofits frequently see an average 9% decline rate on legitimate recurring payments. This new integration is just starting to bear fruit for our early integration adopters.
We’re still crunching the numbers to look at overall trends from 2024, but we predict that in 2025, sustainers will continue to play a vital role in most of the organizations with whom we work. If you have issues effectively managing your sustainer programs, Let’s Talk!
