Speakers didn’t shy away from sensitive topics — whether sexual harassment of fundraisers or the perils of Trump-era political conversations with donors — at this week’s annual meeting of the Association Fundraising Professionals.
Participants also talked about ways small nonprofits can attract big donors and the latest social-media fundraising trends.
Here are some highlights:
Digital Fundraising Is Booming
Judging by the crowds that packed early-morning sessions on social-media fundraising, conference attendees seemed eager to learn more about how to reach donors online despite Facebook’s recent troubles.
CrowdRise and GoFundMe — which merged in 2017 and became CrowdRise by GoFundMe — presented new data about how people used their platform last year to raise money for nonprofit projects. Sixty-eight percent of gifts were under $50, according to the analysis.
This success, said Tre Mascola, an account executive, indicates that crowdfunding is a promising new revenue source for charities.
“We are seeing huge opportunities with these small donors,” he said. “We think that opportunity is in the billions of dollars.”
Among other findings in the report:
- Seventy-nine percent of crowdfunding campaign visitors came from mobile devices in 2017, up from 71 percent in 2015. But only 62 percent of donations came from mobile, perhaps indicating that people first encounter a campaign on mobile and later give on their desktop computers.
“That number will only go up,” Mascola said. “Increasingly, we work on our desktops and do everything else on our phones.”
- The median household income of donors who support projects by legally registered charities was $68,000. That was higher than the $61,000 median household income of all donors on the platform, which also features for-profit ventures.
- Nearly half of donors on CrowdRise by GoFundMe are ages 25 to 44. Nearly 11 percent are under 25, members of Generation Z.
At a session on Facebook fundraising, Jeff Giddens, president of the online fundraising consultancy NextAfter, said charities that are struggling to turn social-media followers into donors must stop thinking of those struggles as rejection by donors. Instead, they need to see them as solvable problems: “Donors are saying, ‘At this juncture, the cost of donating outweighs the value.’ "
Creating “thumb-stopping copy” in social-media posts and digital ads that reflect the charity’s mission can help. He pointed to Boys Town, which began offering free online parenting education drawing on its decades of experience caring for kids, and Hillsdale College, which created online quizzes about the U.S. Constitution, in keeping with its mission to teach about American democracy.
Images that don’t look like everything else on Facebook — such as a black-and-white photo in the midst of an endless stream of color — can also make potential donors pause their scroll, Giddens said.
A message that makes a case for giving — and why it’s important to give immediately — can also turn followers into donors. Giddens said copy for the Texas State Historical Association emphasized its status as “the most exclusive Texas historical club in the nation” — a counterintuitive message, given that the nonprofit aims to serve everyone. But the language helped boost its rate of converting Facebook followers to donors by 146 percent.
Tough Conversations With Donors
Fundraisers said they often have to navigate tricky political waters or other delicate matters with donors.
In a session about such tough talks, Mack Campbell, regional director of development for After-School All-Stars, noted that Lambda Legal, a civil-rights organization focused on LGBTQ issues, worked to educate donors and the public on why the organization was fighting North Carolina legislation that restricted bathroom access to transgender individuals — a fight that one donor opposed vocally.
“For us, it was a challenge in communicating on this particular topic of transgender rights to a community that has not had any education on that previously,” he said.
He said the organization held “personal, panel-style” discussions with donors led by a lawyer knowledgeable about transgender issues. Lambda often attracted new donors to the events, too, he said.
Finding Big Donors
In a session aimed at small nonprofits building big-gift programs, fundraising consultant Armando Zumaya said organizations must educate their board members about the “cycle” of fundraising — initial identification of potential supporters, then meetings, and then requests for donations.
That education is important when asking the board to approve a larger focus on fundraising — including hiring a prospect researcher who can help build lists of potential major-gift donors.
It’s also helpful to manage trustees’ expectations about how quickly big gifts can be raised, Zumaya said. The time it takes to secure contributions can vary, he said. He’s closed gifts after just a few meetings with big donors, while other contributions took years of cultivation.
Many board members, however, think that creating a big-gifts program “means wheelbarrows of cash being rolled in the front door,” he said. “It doesn’t happen quite that way.”
Zumaya advised taking board members along on donor meetings to illustrate what it takes to build a relationship with supporters.
For fundraisers searching for big donors without the aid of prospect researchers, Zumaya advises:
- Comb your donor database for people in wealthy areas who make small gifts.
- Determine if any regular donors have wealth.
- Look outside your donor rolls. Use Google to search for large contributors to other nonprofits who have not given to yours. Have a conversation with them.
- Check the boards of major nonprofits similar to yours, as most trustees make big donations to the organizations they serve. If they are not listed on the organizations’ website, find them on the group’s 990 tax form, he notes.
- Ask board members whom they know who might make big donations.
Is Fundraising a Profession?
Fundraising is in its “adolescent phase — we’re a little bit awkward,” suggested Sarah Nathan, an Indiana University researcher and panelist at a session that wrestled with whether fundraising is a profession.
People are entering the field at a younger age than they were 20 years ago, according to new data analysis by Nathan, an associate director of the Fund Raising School at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, who has been directing research on fundraising career paths and who has published a report on her findings.
Today, people take their first fundraising job at a median age of 27, she said. Twenty years ago, novice fundraisers started at a median of nearly 31 years old.
About 20 percent of today’s fundraisers acquire formal education and credentials, such as a college degree or certificate, Nathan said. The trend is growing and suggests an increasing professionalization of the field.
Audience members pointed out that despite the value placed on credentials like the Certified Fundraising Executive, or CFRE, virtually anyone can claim to be a fundraiser. One said, “There are people who raise a metric ton of money who never got a CFRE, who never joined AFP. It’s not required to be a great fundraiser.”
Another said, “The only people who ask me if I’m a CFRE are other CFREs.”
Some fundraisers in the audience said that expertise can be undervalued at a time when there’s ravenous demand for talent. One said he often sees job postings that request experience in either development or sales. At that, another audience member, apparently upset that fundraising and sales are sometimes seen as interchangeable, hissed, “The S word!”
To get more respect for their expertise, fundraisers can educate their boards about the CFRE and how formal training and credentials can improve fundraising, said panelist Alice Ferris, founding partner of the consulting firm GoalBusters and a member of the Advanced Certified Fundraising Executive board, the governing body for the senior-level version of the CFRE.
Her firm administers a survey to its client boards and finds that they often feel they don’t have the tools or training they need to be successful. Educating them more fully about the value of their staff’s fundraising expertise may help allay some of their anxieties, Ferris said in an interview following Sunday’s panel.
“If we are equipping our boards to be successful, maybe they won’t be so micromanaging,” she said.
2017 Ended on a Positive Note
Giving increased by 4 percent in the final quarter of 2017, reversing negative growth during much of the year, according to data released Monday by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.
Donations by affluent households saw huge jumps: Contributions of $1,000 or more leaped 47 percent in the last three months of 2017, compared with the final quarter of 2016.
The report gathers data from five companies that process gifts from more than 9,000 U.S. charities. It analyzed $7.6 billion in gifts from 7.7 million donors.
The project is a collaboration between the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Urban Institute.
Among other findings:
- Charities retained 46 percent of their donors from 2016 to 2017.
- Since 2012, nonprofits have improved their rate of retaining first-time donors by 25 percent.