Digital fundraising efforts are almost three times as effective as phone fundraising campaigns at getting donors to give and increasing overall revenue, according to a new survey.
The BWF Groundwork Digital 2020 Digital Fundraising Survey, conducted by fundraising consultancy BWF, collected responses from 235 nonprofit institutions, nearly three-quarters of which were colleges and universities.
Digital efforts, including email, giving days, crowdfunding campaigns, and other online strategies, prompted 39 percent of all donors to give. Respondents said 29 percent of donors gave in response to direct-mail campaigns, and just 7 percent gave in response to phone-driven efforts. Face-to-face solicitation and events spurred the remainder of giving.
Ninety percent of the colleges and other nonprofits said they saw more donors give in response to digital fundraising efforts in 2019 than the year before. That compares with 57 percent that said they saw growth in giving in response to direct mail and 33 percent who said the same about phone fundraising efforts.
Eighty-seven percent of organizations said they planned to increase their investment in digital efforts to connect with donors and prospective donors over the next two years.
How they spend that will be a big question, said Justin Ware, senior vice president for digital marketing at fundraising consultancy BWF and founder of Groundwork Digital.
While the survey didn’t look at dollars spent on different types of fundraising, Ware said spending on digital fundraising tends to be significantly less than telemarketing. And those over-the-phone solicitation efforts are just not paying off like they used to, as the survey and other reporting have found. Many colleges and universities have been scaling back or ending their telemarketing programs entirely.
“The phone program is just not doing what it has been doing for them for the past two or three decades,” Ware said. While nearly half of the colleges and other nonprofits said budget constraints were an obstacle in the way of their fundraising growth, Ware says investing in digital efforts doesn’t necessarily require an increase in spending. “It’s just a matter of really balancing and reallocating spending away from channels that we’ve now seen continuously in decline over the past two, three years and allocating those towards digital channels,” he said.
He hopes the growth in digital fundraising efforts can help reduce the decline in rates of alumni giving but adds that institutions need to make sure their staffs have the skills they need to use digital tools to their advantage.
Among the other findings:
- Major donors provide the vast majority of revenue for the groups surveyed, and 92 percent said they saw an increasing number of big donors give after meeting with a development officer face-to-face. But because major donors and prospects get news and information from online sources, fundraisers should also be thinking about how to use digital tools to build relationships with those donors.
- Only 27 percent of organizations reported merging wealth and social-media data to identify new major donor prospects, but that’s twice as many as were doing so last year. However, two-thirds of those who have tried this are having success.
One BWF client, for example, conducted a Facebook ad campaign to identify new major-gift prospects who were previously unknown to the institution. That campaign identified 281 new major-donor prospects who together have enough wealth to give more than $25 million.
- Many institutions are seeing an increase in the number of donors who contribute during online giving days. Eighty-six percent said their giving days or crowdfunding efforts are increasing revenue. In 2018, respondents said that 5 percent of donors gave in response to a giving day, crowdfunding, or social campaign. In 2019, that number jumped to 20 percent. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they plan to increase their investment in crowdfunding and giving days.
