The First 90 Days Builder
A first-time donor decides whether you were worth it long before your next appeal. Answer six questions and get a dated onboarding sequence built for the team you actually have, with an owner on every touch and the draft copy already written.
No donor data. Runs in your browser. Answer about your team, not about your donors.
The sector keeps roughly one in five first-time donors from one year to the next, and the AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project has called turning a first gift into a second one the most consequential unsolved problem in the donor pipeline. Almost nobody fails at this for lack of caring. They fail because the sequence lives in someone's head, so it happens when there is time, which is never. This turns it into a calendar. If you have not scored your program yet, the Stewardship Diagnostic will tell you whether this is actually your weakest link.
Build your sequence
Your first 90 days
Take the sequence with you
The plan above is yours already. Print it, or get the working files: a calendar import so every touch lands in your calendar on the right day with the draft copy inside it, a spreadsheet for handing it to someone else, and a plain document you can paste into your CRM.
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How to actually run this
- Put an owner's name on every line, not a role. Roles do not send emails. People do. If a touch has no name, it will not happen.
- Fill the brackets before you schedule anything. Every draft has bracketed blanks where only a specific detail will do. A sequence sent with the brackets still in it is worse than no sequence.
- Do not add an ask anywhere in the first 90 days. If that feels expensive, that instinct is the reason the sector loses four out of five first-time donors.
- Run it on the next ten donors, not on your whole file. Ten is enough to find out whether you can sustain it. Fix it, then widen.
- Track only one number: how many of those ten give a second gift within a year. That is the whole scoreboard.