Recurring Giving for Everyone: From Scaling Some of America’s Biggest Programs to Scaling the Sector

Written By Dave Raley

Is recurring giving really just a game for the giants… or is the playing field finally open to everyone?

This week on the Sustainable Giving Podcast, Dave Raley sits down with Steve Froehlich, Chief Customer Growth Officer at GoFundMe.

Steve's career started with door-to-door canvassing to pay his way through college. From there it was Greenpeace (where he helped launch one of the first U.S. street canvassing programs built entirely around monthly donors, back in 2000), the ASPCA, and then ALSAC/St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where his team grew annual fundraising from $700 million to more than $2.8 billion. Now Steve has an even bigger canvas: not just growing one organization, but growing generosity itself.

Dave and Steve unpack a big idea they share: recurring giving may have been pioneered by the biggest organizations in the world, but its future doesn't belong only to them.

Key Topics They Cover:

  1. Openers, organizers & optimizers

    A framework from Steve's former colleague Melanie Hannock. Openers take an idea from zero to one, organizers from one to ten, optimizers from ten to a million. Steve's an optimizer, Dave's an opener, and every org needs all three.

  2. "We're topped out"

    Steve's favorite phrase! When a big program starts to plateau, he goes back to the direct response basics of list, creative, and offer, and works to clear the next bottleneck before it shows up (think: clearing the runway for a 747).

  3. It's not just for the big guys anymore

    The subscription economy, lower-cost channels like connected TV, and new tools have dropped the barrier to entry. Steve argues recurring giving may matter even MORE for smaller orgs that can't afford to start every year at zero.

  4. The 25% tipping point

    Across GoFundMe Pro's nearly 5,000 nonprofit customers, organizations getting 25% or more of revenue from recurring donors see mid-teens compound annual growth, well ahead of those that haven't hit that mark.

  5. Growing generosity itself

    Charitable giving has hovered around 2% of GDP for decades, and fewer households give each year. Steve's take? We don't have a generosity crisis. Philanthropy is a learned behavior, and people need to be invited in with tools that make giving easy.

Also in this episode, they talk about:

  • The early days: checking credit card charges by fax machine and running pledge programs that felt like a collections agency

  • An early ASPCA test: 10 one-time gifts at $75 vs. six monthly gifts at $20, and the short-term sacrifice of investing in the long game

  • Giving as identity, from card-carrying members to bumper stickers, and why sustainers let you share impact without always asking

  • Dave reads "The System We've Inherited" from the Sustainable Giving Manifesto

  • Take heart! It can take five to seven years to bend the curve, so stick with it through those white-knuckle early years

What would change for your organization if a quarter of your revenue was already committed before the year even started?

Key Resources:

Special thanks to our team at Sustainable Giving: Tom, Kirsten, Victoria, and Abigail.

Dave Raley
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Beyond the Benchmarks: What Recurring Donors Actually Want