Midlevel donors, who give $1,000 to $10,000 annually, are extremely loyal. While they’re unlikely to move into the ranks of major donors, they are good prospects to increase their giving within that range and help organizations through lean times, according to a new report.
The report surveyed 5,900 midlevel donors across 36 organizations, sussing out their key traits and what motivates them. The research was conducted by Sea Change Strategies, a fundraising consulting firm, in partnership with Edge Research.
“They’re really steadfast,” Mark Rovner, a principal at Sea Change Strategies, says of midlevel donors. “They’re not going to write a $1 million check, but they’re going to be with you. That makes them worth investing in.”
The report found a variety of shared characteristics that can help fundraisers court midlevel donors, retain them, and move their giving up a notch.
“They may go from $1,000 to $5,000,” Rovner says. “They may still be midlevel, but they may be substantially more lucrative.”
Midlevel Donors Are Older but Started Early
The report found that 53 percent of midlevel donors have been giving to the charity they support for 10 years or more. These donors also tend to be older; the lion’s share are either baby boomers (61 percent) or members of the silent generation (21 percent). Only 13 percent are Generation X, and 5 percent are millennials and Gen Z. Fifty-nine percent of the donors identified as women, while 39 percent identified as men, and 3 percent chose not to answer.
It’s important to understand that midlevel donors have been with your organization for a while, says Alia McKee, principal at Sea Change Strategies. The survey found most midlevel donors connected with their favorite causes when they were young; 72 percent engaged with their cause by the age of 39. The bulk of those people (42 percent) connected at age 20 to 39, while a smaller share (19 percent) connected in their teens, and the remainder (11 percent) found their cause at age 12 or younger.
The data shows it’s important to court younger donors, even if there isn’t an immediate payoff, because people are making lasting connections to charitable causes when they’re young, McKee says. She says she worked with a group that started a young-professionals club for donors but disbanded it after a year because the revenue return wasn’t high enough. McKee cautions against that.
“Folks are measuring long-term engagement in 12-month cycles,” she says. “They’re making strategic decisions to cut those programs because they’re not seeing the return versus really taking a long view at what that relationship will look like when that donor ages into their prime giving years. Consider their lifetime value, including midlevel planned gifts, IRA gifts, all of the constellation of activities that folks will age into if you can keep them.”
Nearly a third of midlevel donors have made a bequest to a charity, and 23 percent are considering it. The survey data also pins down a good age range for fundraisers to begin approaching people about charitable bequests.
“Before they’re in their mid-50s, people aren’t thinking about it at all,” Rovner says. “By the time they’re in their early 70s, they’re good. They’ve decided their plans. So it’s somewhere in that window when they’re ready to think about it. That’s when that conversation needs to happen.”
Forty-six percent of midlevel donors reported a net worth of more than $1 million, and as a group, they are also incredibly reliable during economic ups and downs. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they maintained their donation amounts during the previous two years, a period of high inflation and economic uncertainty — and 8 percent said they increased their giving during that time.
While donor-advised funds are quite popular to talk about in fundraising circles, only 20 percent of respondents said they had them. Another 8 percent said they were considering starting one.
Lori Hutson, who runs Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s midlevel donor program, the President’s Circle, has found midlevel DAF donors to be extremely fruitful, netting “close to $15 million” in revenue.
“It’s becoming a very, very popular tool,” Hutson says. “I’ve had donors tell me some of the reasons why they give their DAF is because you can be philanthropic throughout the entire year, or you can set it as an annual gift set for the same time every year to your favorite charity. And you already have your tax receipt.”
3 Kinds of Midlevel Donors
The report identified three types of midlevel donors: all business (41 percent), donors who are happy to be left alone and renew gifts with minimal stewardship; engagement seekers (32 percent), who want more activities to interact with the organization and are most likely to say they plan to increase their giving; and hands-on donors (27 percent), who are personally involved in multiple ways and are most likely to make a major gift at least once.
The good news for nonprofits is that the all-business donors are pretty happy giving on their own terms, according to McKee and Rovner. All-business folks may open emails, but they don’t answer phone calls and don’t participate in activities. Once fundraisers identify the all-business donors, they can focus on the engagement seekers, who likely need the most stewardship because they want to be more involved.
“These donors have engagement expectations,” Rovner says. “A lot of them need attention to stick around. Because they want more engagement, because they want to tell you what they think, you have a better chance of finding out what makes them tick and what might make them feel more connected.”
Figuring out how to provide the right type of stewardship is one of the most important parts of managing a midlevel-donor program, says Barbara Camick, who heads the Golden Circle midlevel giving program at the Best Friends Animal Society.
“We have some people in the Golden Circle who don’t really want someone calling them on the phone. They don’t want a lot of extra attention,” she says. “Then there are other people who really want to engage. My biggest challenge is to be able to find those people who are willing and interested in moving up and give them the type of relationship they want with the organization.”
Rovner and McKee recommend that fundraisers survey and talk to donors about what they want in terms of engagement, as well as offer them many opportunities to engage and see who responds. Camick has been doing that with monthly surveys of Golden Circle members and midlevel prospects.
“That has been a really wonderful way for us to not only get people to self-select, raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, I want to be more involved with the organization’ but also to collect wonderful information from their responses,” she says.
The average largest gift given by engagement seekers was $11,659. This was less than the average largest gift for hands-on donors, which was $18,728. However, Rovner notes that engagement seekers are some of the best prospects because they “are the group who, by a statistically significant margin, said they were likely to increase their donations.”
With the right stewardship, he says, they could become hands-on donors or increase their gift within the midlevel.
In an age where organizations are paying the price for an overreliance on major donors, now is the time to take the findings from the research to start or jump-start midlevel giving programs, McKee says.
“Midlevel donors make up 1 to 5 percent of the donor file and give 25 to 35 percent of revenue,” she says. “If you’re a smaller organization, I would definitely make sure that midlevel was a part of your membership or grassroots program. If you’re able to retain those midlevel donors, potentially upgrade them within midlevel, you’re going to move the needle on your fundraising program exponentially.”
