World Central Kitchen’s monthly giving program, Kitchen Corps, has more than 80,000 active members giving over $30 million a year. That steady, recurring revenue is what allows the organization to have chefs cooking hot meals within hours of an earthquake, wildfire, or war zone. And it’s exactly why World Central Kitchen won Greatest Impact at this year’s Monthlies.

Okay, I have to be honest. World Central Kitchen is one of my favorite organizations, so this conversation was a total treat for me.

You’ve probably seen the photos. Chefs on the ground within hours of a disaster, serving hot meals to people when they need them most. But what you don’t see in those photos is everything that has to be there before the disaster hits: the relationships, the community, the funding. A big part of what makes that possible is Kitchen Corps.

I sat down with Lindsey Latham, Monthly Giving Manager at World Central Kitchen, to talk about how her team built Kitchen Corps inside an existing organization, why they structured a $500,000 match to keep matching every month, and how a newsletter with zero asks doubled their open rates. If you’ve got recurring donors who have never been named or treated as a community, or you’re just brainstorming what to do around end of year, this is a great roadmap.

---

Who Is Lindsey Latham?

Lindsey Latham is the Monthly Giving Manager at World Central Kitchen, a role created specifically in anticipation of launching Kitchen Corps as a named, branded community. She owns the strategy and execution behind the program’s health and growth, including tracking KPIs, setting acquisition targets, mapping donor journeys, running individual donor outreach, and supporting fundraising campaigns.

What makes her perspective distinct is that she inherited an already large, successful monthly giving base rather than building one from scratch, and had to figure out how to deepen loyalty and identity within a group that was already giving generously. Her work turning an unbranded base of 80,000-plus donors into a named, retained community earned World Central Kitchen this year’s Greatest Impact win at the Monthlies.

---

The Short Version: What Makes Kitchen Corps Work

If you only have a minute, this is the short version. World Central Kitchen gave an existing base of monthly donors a name and identity on GivingTuesday, then shifted its focus to retention. It launched a monthly, gratitude-only newsletter that grew from about 20% to 40 to 45% open rates. It built a four-part welcome series that ends by asking donors to share their why. And it structured a spring match so every new monthly gift is matched every month through December, rewarding donors who stay for the long haul.

Now let’s dig into the good stuff.

Why a Monthly Giving Program Makes Fast Disaster Response Possible

When I asked Lindsey what it actually takes to show up that quickly, her answer was so simple and so good: World Central Kitchen never waits for permission.

The organization is entirely privately funded by individual donors, corporations, and foundations. That means there’s no government approval process standing between a crisis and a hot meal. And that funding independence lets the team invest in relationships and infrastructure before a disaster ever strikes.

One example is Chef Corps, a network of more than 630 culinary leaders around the world. When disaster hits, World Central Kitchen can call on them to scout locations and start cooking fresh meals in the area. When the earthquake struck Venezuela on June 24th, the team was serving meals within hours, because they had worked in Venezuela before and stayed connected to the people there.

“That’s what our donors are funding,” Lindsey told me. “Our ability to move quickly because the foundation is pre-built.”

I mean, we know everything is relational, right? Monthly donors provide the predictable, reliable revenue an organization can count on between disasters, and that’s what lets them act in the moment instead of scrambling after the fact.

How World Central Kitchen Branded an Existing Monthly Giving Program

Here’s the part I love. Many of those 80,000+ donors were already giving monthly before Kitchen Corps existed as a brand. The program achieved exceptional growth without a strategy or a community identity, because the mission is so straightforward: getting people food after disaster.

Then on GivingTuesday last year, World Central Kitchen gave that community a name, a landing page, and a sense of belonging.

The biggest shift once donors had a name was leaning into what Lindsey calls a retention playbook. Funding at World Central Kitchen naturally spikes after a crisis, and the team knows it costs more to acquire new donors or reactivate lapsed ones than to keep the ones they have. Branding the program gave them a way to engage donors for the long term and, as Lindsey put it, “almost incentivize them to continue their giving.”

If you’re sitting on a base of recurring donors who have never been named, this is your sign. They’re already there. They’re just waiting to be seen.

When Should a Nonprofit Hire a Monthly Giving Manager?

I get this question all the time. When is it time to hire someone (fractional, part time, or full time) to focus on your monthly giving program, instead of leaving it on the plate of your ED or development director?

Lindsey believes the answer is right now. She admitted she’s a little biased, but honestly, I’m with her.

Her role was created in anticipation of launching Kitchen Corps. As Monthly Giving Manager, she owns the strategy and execution that keeps the program growing and healthy: tracking KPIs, setting acquisition targets, mapping donor journeys, doing individual donor outreach, and supporting fundraising campaigns. Having someone dedicated to this one pathway of donors is what lets World Central Kitchen deepen engagement and create real community.

I really hope we start seeing an uptick in sustainer and monthly giving roles across the sector. (I’m definitely going to go dig into the data on this one, because I’m so curious.)

How a Newsletter With No Ask Doubled Open Rates

In May, Lindsey launched the first Kitchen Corps newsletter. It goes out every single month and includes exclusive content: staff spotlights, stories that might not be shared anywhere else publicly, answers to donor questions, and sometimes recipes the field teams have served in their kitchens.

The first two issues had around a 20% open rate. Since then, it’s held consistently at 40 to 45%, with strong click-through rates too.

The newsletter never includes an ask. Lindsey created it solely as a stewardship piece, focused on gratitude. Yet every month, one or two donors reach out on their own to increase their monthly gift or leave a gift in their will to World Central Kitchen.

“It was not designed to do that,” Lindsey said. “But I think when people are able to engage with your organization in ways they wouldn’t be able to as a one-time donor, it just creates that sense of belonging.”

The structure is simple and consistent every month. It comes from a real person (the sender reads “Lindsey, World Central Kitchen”), opens with a short introduction and a preview of what’s inside, and then includes three to four content blocks. Lindsey built that format by doing a deep dive on the newsletters she receives as a monthly donor to other nonprofits and asking herself what made them so interesting, inspiring, and valuable.

This is why I have a folder in my inbox called Newsletters I Love. Anytime an email has a great subject line, beautiful design, or a message that really lands, I tag it so I can go back and get reinspired when I’m drafting my own. Highly recommend everyone create one.

Why a Monthly Renewing Match Beats a One-Time Match for Retention

This has come up in so many of my recent coaching calls, so I was thrilled to dig into it.

Most matching gift campaigns work the same way. A donor gives, the gift gets matched once, and the urgency is over. World Central Kitchen did something different with its spring acquisition campaign. The team structured a $500,000 match so that each new monthly gift made during the campaign is matched every month through the end of the year. The campaign ran in April and May, and the match runs through December.

The reason comes down to retention being the real work. “Instead of a one-time match, which creates urgency but is over after that single gift, we wanted it to mean more for longer,” Lindsey explained.

She was also really honest about the tradeoff. You give up the immediate payoff. Over an eight-month window, a lot can happen. People cancel for various reasons, attention moves on, and there’s a real risk of losing monthly donors before the match is met. To manage that, the team leans on its retention playbook: consistent touch points, keeping donors apprised of their impact, and reminding them the match is still happening.

I love this because it goes right back to the values of the program. It goes beyond meeting one urgent moment. It’s saying, stay with us, because you’re the heartbeat that lets us show up at a moment’s notice.

What New Kitchen Corps Members Receive: A Four-Part Welcome Series

Stewardship starts the moment someone joins. New monthly donors receive a four-part automated email welcome series.

The first email is a video from Chef José Andrés himself, welcoming them to Kitchen Corps and sharing why monthly giving matters so much. A week later, an email from Lindsey outlines the benefits of being a monthly donor and what to expect. Another email encourages donors to see whether their employer will match their gift. And the final email asks donors to share their why: what brought them to World Central Kitchen, and why they decided to give monthly.

How do donors share? They just reply to the email. There’s also a button that opens a new message with the address already filled in.

This is such a great tip. The moment you send someone to a new landing page outside their inbox, you’ve created friction. Keep the conversation in the medium they’re already in so they can go right back to what they were doing. Super powerful. And don’t sleep on that employer match email, either. I know organizations that have ended up with a triple match because of it.

My bonus tip, which Lindsey is now taking back to her team: those “why I give” answers are a goldmine for segmentation. If you’re collecting donor motivations, put them to work.

How the Program Grows Between Emergencies

Outside of crisis moments, World Central Kitchen runs a few campaigns dedicated specifically to monthly giving, like the GivingTuesday match and the spring acquisition campaign. And the team is careful to never ask the same people for the exact same thing.

Fun backstory: my husband and I gave to World Central Kitchen during the LA fires (we used to live in Los Angeles), so I got the email when the team set a big, audacious goal of 20,000 new monthly donors on GivingTuesday. I loved it so much I broke it down in a LinkedIn post, and two members of the WCK team reached out to me afterward, so open to sharing and learning. That’s how this whole relationship started. Peer learning, you guys. It works.

Beyond those campaigns, a lot of the growth is evergreen. Social media ads run in the background, and the team optimizes its online donation forms, including testing versions that show the monthly option first. And because retention is strong, the donor base compounds on its own.

Right now, Lindsey’s team is testing more personalized outreach based on where each donor’s gift goes. If your monthly gift is restricted to a certain country or response, you might receive an update just about that work. It’s more meaningful for the donor, and it means the team isn’t sending every email to all 80,000 people. (Our inboxes thank them.)

The goal, as Lindsey described it, is simple and hard: make every one of those 80,000+ members feel like someone is paying attention to them specifically.

---

What This Means for Your Organization Right Now

To wrap us up, I asked Lindsey what she’d tell a nonprofit with recurring donors who have never been named, branded, or given a stewardship plan, especially as we head into end of year.

Her advice was so human. Sit down with the teams doing the work of your mission. Listen. Start listing out all the ways you are inspired by what they do. Lindsey found that the stories that performed best, both in the newsletter and in fundraising appeals, were the ones she chose because they inspired her personally.

“When you’re passionate about your work and you listen and you trust the mission, it’ll come off in the stories that you’re telling,” she said.

She also recommends using this season to start thinking about what to call your community. Launching Kitchen Corps on GivingTuesday was a great strategy for World Central Kitchen, and end of year is the perfect time to give your donors an identity of their own.

Lindsey, congratulations again to you and the entire World Central Kitchen team on your Greatest Impact win!

---

FAQ: Monthly Giving Retention Strategy

What is World Central Kitchen’s monthly giving program called? World Central Kitchen’s monthly giving program is called Kitchen Corps. It launched as a branded community on GivingTuesday and has more than 80,000 active members giving over $30 million a year.

How does monthly giving help World Central Kitchen respond to disasters? World Central Kitchen is entirely privately funded, so recurring gifts provide predictable revenue between disasters. That lets the organization build relationships and infrastructure in advance, including its Chef Corps of 630+ culinary leaders, so it can serve meals within hours of a crisis.

How did the Kitchen Corps newsletter improve open rates? The newsletter grew from about 20% open rates in its first two issues to 40 to 45% by sending consistent, exclusive, gratitude-focused content from a named staff member, with no fundraising ask. Lindsey Latham built the format by studying newsletters from other nonprofits she personally supports as a monthly donor.

How is World Central Kitchen’s matching campaign structured? During the spring campaign, a $500,000 match was structured so each new monthly gift is matched every month through December, rather than a one-time match. Lindsey Latham said this monthly giving retention strategy rewards donors for staying long term rather than only creating a single moment of urgency.

When should a nonprofit hire a monthly giving manager? According to Lindsey Latham, as soon as possible. A dedicated monthly giving manager owns KPIs, acquisition targets, donor journeys, and stewardship, which deepens engagement and improves retention.

And stay tuned for next May’s Monthlies during Monthly Giving Awareness Week. Your program could be next!