Donor Communications: How to Build a Plan That Keeps Donors Giving
Most development offices have an appeal calendar. Spring appeal, a newsletter in the summer if there is time, the fall event, the year-end push, and an acknowledgment run in January that catches up on whatever slipped. Written down on one page, it looks like a plan. Lived out over twelve months, it is a schedule of asks with quiet stretches in between, and those quiet stretches are where donors decide whether they are staying.
The sector-wide numbers suggest those stretches are expensive. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a joint effort of the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday, reported that charitable dollars grew an estimated 5.0% in 2025 while the number of donors fell 3.6%, the fifth consecutive year of decline. Overall donor retention moved from 43.1% to 43.3%, and retention of brand-new donors stayed essentially flat. The report describes converting a first gift into a second as the pipeline's unsolved problem.
I know how a communications plan gets away from an organization. I spent years in ministry raising money, and our plan was whatever had to go out before the next deadline. What I have learned since is that the work you schedule for the space between the asks tends to matter as much for retention as the appeals themselves.
An Appeal Calendar Is Not the Same Thing
A donor communications plan is a written schedule of everything a supporter hears from you across a year: what goes out, who receives it, what each piece is trying to accomplish, and who is responsible for sending it. The appeal calendar is one column inside that document. Most shops have built the column and called it the plan.
The pattern shows up clearly in the aggregate data. M+R's 2026 Benchmarks study found that a typical nonprofit email subscriber received 50 messages over the course of the year, and that 31 of those were fundraising appeals while 9 were newsletters, with two advocacy messages and a handful of engagement or other sends filling out the rest. Total email volume rose 15% over the previous year. Whatever any of us wrote in a strategy document, the ratio our donors actually experience is about three fundraising appeals for every newsletter.
This is not a failure of effort. Development teams are small, and the appeal is the piece with a number attached to it. Nobody asks in a board meeting what the acknowledgment letter raised. So when the week gets tight, the ask survives and the thank-you note, the update, and the phone call are the things that quietly fall off, one at a time, until the only voice the donor hears from you is the one asking for money again.
A useful plan gives every piece of donor communication one of four jobs: thank, report, connect, or ask. If a piece is not doing one of those, it probably does not need to exist. And if three of the four almost never appear on your calendar, the plan is really a solicitation schedule wearing a nicer name.
A donor communications plan runs on the same handful of pieces every year — the acknowledgment, the impact update, the newsletter, the check-in. That is the kind of work worth building once and reusing, rather than rewriting from scratch each time the calendar comes around.
Want to develop your fundraising skills? Take a look at my Claude Skills page.
Explore the Skills
The Four Pieces Nearly Every Plan Is Missing
When I look at a communications calendar that is not working, the appeals are usually fine. What is thin is everything else. Four pieces carry most of the weight, and each one is small enough for a one-person shop to do well.
The acknowledgment. This is the first thing a donor receives after deciding to trust you, and it sets the tone for everything after. Penelope Burk's research for Donor-Centered Fundraising included an experiment in which board members called donors within 48 hours simply to say thank you. Those donors gave 39% more the next time they were solicited than donors who received no call. Speed and warmth carry that moment, and polish matters less than most of us assume, which is why the thank-you letter is worth more attention than most organizations give it and less production than most organizations fear. A 48-hour standard, a real signature, and a sentence naming what that specific gift makes possible will carry a first-year donor further than a redesigned template will.
The impact report. Somewhere between the gift and the next ask, a donor is quietly asking what happened to their money. If you do not answer, they answer for themselves, and the answer is rarely generous. This is where impact storytelling earns its keep as retention work. A short, specific, honest impact report — one program, real numbers, one person's story, including what did not go as planned — does more than a glossy annual report that arrives eleven months late.
The regular update. The nine newsletters in that M+R average are the closest thing most donors have to an ongoing relationship with your organization. They are also, in a lot of shops, the piece written last and skimmed least. A donor newsletter people read to the end is built around what the reader gets out of reading it; a quarterly recap of organizational activity is usually where they stop. It can also be short. Four hundred words that someone finishes will outperform two thousand that nobody opens.
The listening. This is the piece almost nobody schedules. Asking donors what they want to hear from you, how often, and through which channel takes one short survey and a handful of phone calls, and it will reshape the rest of your plan faster than any benchmark can. What your donors would tell you if you asked is usually more practical than what we assume: fewer emails, more specifics, and a clearer sense of whether their gift mattered.
Building the Plan on One Page
The plan itself does not need to be long. One page, built in an afternoon, will outperform a twenty-page communications strategy that nobody opens after the retreat.
Start with segments, not channels. You do not need many. New donors in their first year, repeat donors, monthly donors, major donors, and lapsed donors is enough for most shops, and segmenting for a small shop is more about deciding who gets the extra touch than about building elaborate lists. First-year donors deserve the most attention here, since that is where the sector keeps losing people and where first-time donors disappear before anyone notices they are gone.
Then set a frequency for each segment and write the number down. Something like: every donor hears from us monthly, and no more than a third of those touches carry an ask. Monthly donors get a quarterly impact note and one ask a year. Major donors get a personal contact every 60 days that is not a solicitation. The specific numbers matter less than having them, because without a number written down, the appeal calendar tends to expand until it fills the year.
Grid the twelve months with four columns: what goes out, who receives it, which of the four jobs it is doing, and who owns it. Ownership is where these plans usually die. A piece with no name next to it does not happen in a busy September. If your calendar already includes a 90-day stewardship plan, this grid is simply that discipline stretched across the year.
Then decide what to stop. Adding four new pieces to an already full calendar is how good plans quietly fail. Something has to come off. In most offices there is a newsletter nobody reads, an event that eats a month for a modest return, or a printed report that costs more than the gifts it inspires. Cutting one of those funds the rest.
Then keep the page somewhere the whole team can see it, and revisit it once a quarter rather than once a year. A communications plan that lives in a folder becomes a description of what you meant to do. One that sits next to the appeal calendar tends to survive a busy October, which is where these plans usually get tested.
The donors who stay with you for a decade through steady, honest communication are often the same people with the capacity to make a gift that outlives them — and that conversation tends to open naturally once the relationship is already there.
Interested in learning more about how a whole life insurance policy could benefit your nonprofit? Connect with a team member at Sage & Main.
Connect with Sage & Main
Where to Start This Week
If this resonates and you are looking at a calendar that is mostly asks, here is what I would do first.
1. Print last year's sends and mark each one. Thank, report, connect, or ask. The ratio will tell you more in ten minutes than a planning meeting will in two hours.
2. Fix the first 48 hours. Read your current acknowledgment out loud. If it sounds like a receipt, rewrite it this week, and ask two board members to call five first-time donors each. It costs about an hour, and it changes the first impression every new donor forms of you.
3. Schedule one impact update with a date and an owner. Not an annual report. One page, one program, sent to everyone who gave in the last year.
4. Call ten donors and ask. How often do you want to hear from us, and what do you actually want to know. Take notes. Let the answers set the frequency in your plan instead of guessing.
You can do all of this without new software or a communications hire. The harder part is the decision itself, and it only has to be made once: the messages between the asks belong on the calendar, with a date and a name beside each of them. Do that, and the next appeal letter lands with people who already know what their last gift accomplished, which is a very different conversation than asking a stranger you happen to have met once. It also costs a good deal less than reactivating lapsed donors you never needed to lose.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.