First-time donor retention answers one question: of the people who gave to you for the very first time last year, how many gave again this year? It’s the number that tells you whether your acquisition work is building a donor base or just refilling a leaky bucket. Altru holds every gift you need to answer it, but in our experience there isn’t an obvious, ready-made “first-time donor retention” figure you can pull up. Check your standard reports and dashboards before building anything, since report options change over time, and ask Blackbaud support if you can’t find one. If nothing fits, you’ll calculate it yourself from queries. That’s very doable once you pin down a few definitions.
The formula
Pick two back-to-back periods, usually fiscal years.
- Cohort: constituents whose first-ever qualifying gift fell in Year 1.
- Retained: members of that cohort who made at least one qualifying gift in Year 2.
- First-time donor retention = retained ÷ cohort × 100.
To make it concrete with made-up numbers: if 400 people gave for the first time in FY2025 and 96 of those same people gave again in FY2026, your first-time retention for that cohort is 96 ÷ 400 = 24%.
The key word is first-ever. A lapsed donor who returns in Year 1 after five quiet years is not a first-time donor, and counting them inflates the cohort. That’s the most common mistake we see.
Decide what counts as a gift before you build anything
Every one of these choices changes the result, so write them down and keep them the same year to year:
- Revenue types. Donations only? What about membership revenue, event registrations, or the donation add-on someone made at checkout? Most organizations count outright donations and pledge payments and leave membership dues out, but members who also donate deserve a separate look.
- Pledges. Count the pledge commitment date or the payment date. Pick one.
- Soft credits and households. Decide whether retention is measured per individual or per household. If spouses alternate who writes the check, an individual-level count will show false lapses.
- Refunds, write-offs and zero-dollar gifts. Exclude them, or your cohort will include people who never really gave.
- Fiscal vs. calendar year. Use whatever your board reports on.
Building it in Altru
Step 1: Find each donor’s first gift date
This is the hard part. Depending on how your database is set up, you may have a first-gift-date field available through a constituent query or a smart field. If you don’t, build a revenue query filtered to your qualifying revenue types and pull the earliest gift date per constituent. A smart field that calculates the earliest qualifying gift date per constituent is worth setting up, because you’ll reuse it every year. If you’re not sure your fields respect the revenue-type rules above, test against a handful of donors whose giving history you know well.
Step 2: Build the Year 1 cohort
Create a constituent selection where the first qualifying gift date falls inside Year 1. Save it as a static selection once the year closes, so the cohort doesn’t shift as late batches post or records merge.
Step 3: Find who gave in Year 2
Create a second selection or query: constituents with at least one qualifying gift dated in Year 2. Then count how many constituents appear in both. You can do the overlap in a query that filters on the Year 1 selection, or export both lists and match on constituent ID.
Step 4: Clean up duplicates first
Duplicate constituent records quietly wreck this metric. If a donor’s first gift landed on one record and their second gift landed on a duplicate created by a web form, they show up as a new donor who lapsed, plus another new donor. Run your duplicate review before you build the cohort, not after.
Make it a trend, not a one-time number
A single retention figure doesn’t tell you much. What’s useful is watching each yearly cohort side by side, and checking it mid-year: how many of last year’s first-time donors have given again so far this year, compared with the same point last year? That mid-year check is when you can still act, with a second-gift appeal or a thank-you call, instead of finding out in the fall.
It also helps to split the cohort by how people came in: online gift, year-end appeal, event, or gift added during a ticket or membership purchase. Retention often varies a lot by channel, and that tells you where stewardship effort will pay off.
Keeping the numbers current
Re-running exports and rebuilding a spreadsheet every month gets old quickly, and that’s usually why this metric gets checked once a year. If you’d rather keep the cohort and Year 2 giving queries feeding a spreadsheet automatically, Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets, where the retention formula and any per-channel breakdown can update without manual exports. Altru stays where the gifts are recorded. The sheet is just a view of it.
Quick answers
Is first-time retention different from overall donor retention?
Yes. Overall retention counts everyone who gave in Year 1, including long-time donors, who typically renew at much higher rates. Blending them hides how well you keep new donors.
Should members who donate count as first-time donors?
Only if their first qualifying gift, under your own definition, falls in Year 1. A long-time member’s first donation can still be a first gift if you exclude membership dues from the definition.
Can I calculate it for past years?
Yes, as long as your revenue history is clean. Run the same steps for each pair of years and use the same rules every time so the trend is comparable.
