At GivFlow, we’re huge fans of recurring donors – let me tell you why.

Look, we don’t need to write a 500 page essay on this topic. I think we could probably agree that;

→ Recurring donors allow you to forecast better. → They give more consistently. → They give more contributions throughout the year.

I think those are fair statements. What about this statement, though?

→ Recurring donors give more dollars throughout the year as a whole.

If you agree with those, stop reading! If you don’t, let me show you why these 2 things are true. Before I do that, let me just say that we know not every church is concerned about collecting more dollars. Our job as a church is to grow and lead disciples – we understand that. However, we also understand that sometimes that effort takes dollars.

Why recurring donors give more than non-recurring donors.

We have access to a lot of data that you don’t. When we initially launched, we quickly noticed that the churches that were succeeding (from a giving perspective), had more recurring donors. So we dug deeper and started a discovery process. Let’s look at this random sample church we pulled for last year’s giving data (2024).

| Type | Donors | Donations | Average ($) | Total ($) | | Non-recurring | 1623 | 8,942 | $641 | $5,737,942 | | Recurring | 596 | 14,923 | $161 | $2,409,147 |

I can hear some of you cheering right now – see, told you! You’re wrong! OK. OK. However, this first calculation isn’t correct and let me tell you why. We initially categorized all donations as recurring or non-recurring. However, we should have first categorized the donor as a recurring or non-recurring donor and then categorized gifts as from a recurring donor or from a non-recurring donor. Why? Well, think about it. A lot of non-recurring gifts are end of the year or special occasion giving. However, just because that gift is technically a non-recurring gift, it might come from someone that has a recurring gift – recurring donors are bought into your giving ministry and they understand the value of giving.

In addition to this change, we also removed outlier gifts, as well as non-unrestricted fund giving (obvious reasons). We found a lot of bigger gifts are usually made by a donor who gives once a year – at the end of the year. Keep in mind, these folks aren’t who we are targeting. Every church usually has this donor and in our case, they were making our non-recurring donors look like they gave more than they actually did.

How does that change the data?

| Donor Type | Donors | Average Per ($) | Total ($) | | Non-recurring | 476 | $3,328.91 | $1,584,565.21 | | Recurring | 575 | $4,201.76 | $2,416,017.29 | | Difference | 99 | $875.85 (26%) | $831,452.08 (52%) |

Focus less on the total difference as the recurring donor group had almost 100 additional donors giving. However, look at the average cumulative giving per donor. This church showed a 26% increase in recurring donors vs non-recurring donors. What if I told you this was on the lower end of a lot of the churches we sampled?

Check out this church;

| Donor Type | Donors | Average Per ($) | Total ($) | | Non-recurring | 115 | $1,685.18 | $193,795.76 | | Recurring | 427 | $3,395.32 | $1,449,804.4 | | Difference | 312 | $1,710.14 (100+%) | TOO BIG TO CALC!!! |

Obviously, there’s a reason why we didn’t lead with this example – a 100% increase is almost too good to be true. This church has focused on recurring givers for a long time, and they’ve clearly seen success. With the new GivFlow automation feature to convert non-recurring donors to recurring donors, we’re making it even easier for them.

Why does my church need GivFlow automations?

Well, the short answer is you don’t. At the end of the day, if your church is operating just fine, you might not need GivFlow automations. However, we know that dollars, when used appropriately, are powerful when it comes to the great mission. Dollars can increase your church’s reach and help grow disciples. Moreover, giving can be hard for a lot of folks – GivFlow automations is designed to intuitively help communicate with donors to help grow your giving using your data and the collective data of GivFlow. GivFlow automations does two things for your church;

→ communicate more – most churches just don’t have the time to do this, we do.
→ communicate better – we send email via your authorized domain increasing trust and deliverability.
→ grow giving – literally. Recovering failed donations and more recurring donors will increase your giving.

Enable automations in GivFlow today. If you’re not a current user, we would love to show you GivFlow and the automations feature!