UC-2
A third of last year’s giving came from people who had never given before. Which of them are coming back?
Cohort the donors who arrived when the funding news broke, find out which acquisition sources produce sustainers rather than one-time gifts, and get a ranked lapse-risk list before the renewal window closes.
- Who this is for
- Development Director · Membership Manager
- When it comes up
- The one-year renewal window on the 2025 giving surge. For most stations that window is open right now.
Sound familiar?
Three things we hear in almost every conversation.
- “We got thousands of new donors when the funding news broke. I have no idea which ones are coming back.”
- “Total giving went up, so the board thinks we are fine. Our average gift went down and I cannot explain why that matters.”
- “I can pull a list of lapsed donors. I cannot tell you which ones were about to lapse.”
What it runs on
The data you already have.
A connector pulls on a schedule. An upload is the export you already download — dropped in, profiled and cleaned on arrival. We label which is which because there is no live connector for Nielsen, streaming providers, podcast hosts or donor CRMs yet, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
- Donor CRM export (Allegiance, Blackbaud, EveryAction)upload
- Legacy membership database (Microsoft Access)upload
- Pledge drive resultsupload
- Email engagementupload
- HubSpotconnector
How it works
From those files to the answer, in 4 steps.
Donors are grouped by when they first gave
The 2025 cohort is separated from every cohort before it, so the surge can be judged on its own terms instead of disappearing into a total that looks healthy.
cohort_retention · compare_periods
Each cohort gets a retention curve
Month by month, what share of each intake is still giving. A first-time cohort that decays faster than your historical average is the single most important fact in your fundraising year, and it is invisible in a revenue total.
cohort_retention · calculate_growth_rates
Acquisition sources are judged on what they produce
Not gifts — sustainers. A channel that brings in many one-time donors and a channel that brings in fewer recurring ones look identical in a revenue report and could not be more different in a budget.
benchmark_segments · rank_entities
Concentration risk gets a number
What share of your revenue depends on your largest donors. Sector-wide, giving rose while small and mid-sized donor dollars fell — a shape that looks like growth and behaves like fragility.
analyze_concentration · forecast_metric · detect_anomalies
What you get
On your screen at the end of it.
- Retention curves for the 2025 cohort against every prior year
- Sustainer conversion rate by acquisition source
- A ranked lapse-risk list for the phone and mail teams
- A concentration measure your board will ask about once and then track
Try it with your data.
Send us a donor export with first-gift dates. We will build your cohort curves and tell you how 2025 is actually tracking.
Free, no obligation, and the dashboard is yours whether or not you continue. Prefer to talk first? Book a walkthrough.
Questions
What people ask before they start.
+Our membership database is an old Microsoft Access file. Can you read it?
Yes. Access is a supported import format, alongside CSV, Excel and PDF. Legacy membership databases are common in this sector and the importer was built with them in mind.
+Is donor data ever sent to OpenAI or Anthropic?
Not by default, and not without an explicit change by an administrator in your organisation. New organisations start in a metadata-only mode with external processing disabled and a zero spend allowance. Every change to that policy is recorded in an audit log.
+We use a CRM you do not integrate with. Is that a problem?
No. Every donor CRM exports CSV or Excel, and that is the normal path today. There is no live connector for Allegiance, Blackbaud or EveryAction yet — we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
+What if our data only goes back three years?
Three years is enough for useful cohorts. The coverage report tells you exactly which periods are complete before you present anything, so you are never surprised by a gap in a board meeting.