Home / Blog / Most donor relationships dont end, they’re starved.

There’s a plant in my house that’s older than my entire career in fundraising. It has survived heatwaves, holidays and at least two occasions when I forgot it existed. It survives for one reason only: a small, boring feed and water, access to sunlight, and protection from the cold.

Watering it again just now, it struck me that it’s the best description of stewardship I have.

Because most donor relationships don’t end. They starve. Nobody decides to neglect a donor; the appeal calendar just eats the year. The contacts a donor receives are timed to our need for money, not to their relationship with the cause. And then, three years later, we run a reactivation campaign for people we quietly stopped watering.

If you want to know whether your organisation has a stewardship rhythm or just good intentions, three things to look at this week.

First, pick ten groups of ten donors and count the contacts they got in the last twelve months that asked for nothing. Not newsletters (electronic or printed or otherwise)… actual moments of relationship: a thank you with substance, an update on the thing they funded, a question about what they think. If the answer is mostly zero, the rhythm doesn’t exist.

Second, ask who owns the rhythm. If stewardship lives in one brilliant fundraiser’s diary and leaves when they do (and they do leave), you have a person, not a system.

Third, find out what happens on the anniversary of someone’s first gift. In most charities the honest answer is nothing, because nobody designed anything to happen.

Rhythm is unglamorous. It never makes the board pack. But donors who stay for decades aren’t held by campaigns; they’re held by the small, regular nurturing. The charities receiving legacies in twenty years are the ones running that rhythm now.

IF you want to talk about getting that routine back into your fundraising system and you’re serious about looking at putting profitable fundraising back on the table, then Fundraiser In The Room has some more capacity from 2027 so let’s talk now, not when it’s too late to recover from.