Donor Retention within the Child Sponsorship Branch of the Non-Profit Sector a case study of Compassion Nederland
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2021-08-19
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en
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Abstract
In recent times non-profit organizations face an increasing amount of competition and must adapt more business-like approaches (Weerawardena et al., 2009). An important area to focus on is donor retention (Sergeant, 2013). Though literature is available on donor retention within non-profit organizations, there has been a lack of research on dynamic relations within donor retention and donor retention within the child sponsorship branch of the non-profit sector.
The objective of this research is to understand the dynamic relations between key variables within the child sponsorship branch on the topic of donor retention in order to find policy implications for this specific branch of the non-profit sector. The methods of Group Model Building and data analysis were conducted for the case study of Compassion Nederland, a child sponsorship non-profit organization.
The research concluded that in line with the non-profit sector in general, Commitment, Trust, Satisfaction, Identification and Quality of Service are key variables for donor retention within the child sponsorship branch of the non-profit sector. However, the branch has some additional key variables, namely Commitment to the Sponsored Child and Availability of Information from the Field. The addition of the dimension of ‘Commitment to the Sponsored Child’ to Commitment seems to be a huge advantage for the child sponsorship branch of the non-profit sector. However, donor retention through commitment to sponsored child also creates an obligation to provide the donor with specific information on the child, hence the variable of ‘Availability of Information from the Field’. The link between a donor and sponsored child also creates a vulnerable and difficult point in time when a sponsored child leaves the project. This is reflected by the fact that exits (when a sponsored child leaves a project) are the number one reason for lapse within Compassion Nederland.
Policy implications for non-profit organizations in the child sponsorship branch are to invest in the quality of service and the use of Business Intelligence and segmentation tools, ensure that information about the sponsored children’s well-being and progress is provided by the field and communicated to donors and to strive for a high commitment of donors to the organization as well as to the sponsored child.
Suggestions for further research include testing the theoretical model and assigning weight to the relations and feedback loops present. The second suggestion for future research would be to continue along the lines of this research and deepen the knowledge of donor retention within the child sponsorship branch. This can be done by exploring the key variables that are specific to the branch as found in this research. The third and last suggestion for future research would be to explore the two variables of the commitment to the sponsored child and the commitment to the non-profit organization and how non-profit organizations within the child sponsorship branch can achieve a balance between the two.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen