Charities should consider making their fundraising tactics more community-focused to help slow down the decline in donors, suggests a new report from GivingTuesday. The report also found a positive worldwide trend: People who are less polarized are more generous to charities.
“The Giving Bridge: A Look Back at 2023” examines charitable giving around the world. The report pulls data and trends from three research projects GivingTuesday conducts: the Global Omnibus Survey of donors in seven countries, the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, and the GivingPulse. The report notes that U.S. charities struggled to retain donors last year.
“U.S. nonprofits generally saw continuing significant declines in donor participation, continuing a worrying trend,” the report says. “Donor retention is down across all variety of dimensions: size of donations, number of donations, and frequency of donations.”
To counteract this trend, the report suggests nonprofits spend more time “inviting enough different kinds of people into its support ecosystem, whether as donors, volunteers, or advocates.” Woodrow Rosenbaum, GivingTuesday’s chief data officer, says this means nonprofits need to think differently when they approach supporters.
“This requires a mindset shift in a lot of organizations,” he says. “It’s a less transactional strategy for engagement. It’s much more about building community and support, as opposed to strictly about financial donations and solicitation.”
Rosenbaum argues that people want to feel connected to a community and that their contributions matter to the organization. Providing volunteer opportunities is a strong way to help supporters feel connected to the cause, the report says. It also provides data on volunteerism in seven countries. The highest level of volunteerism is in Kenya, where more than 90 percent of all generations participate. In the United States, millennials (56 percent) and Gen Z (53 percent) have the highest volunteer participation.
The report found that people are still generous, even in the face of declining donations but that they view generosity as more than just money. The report says people like to give both formally to registered charities and informally to individuals and nonregistered groups. While some donors perceive a real distinction between formal and informal donations, others view giving as giving and make little or no distinction between formal and informal giving. Rosenbaum says those in countries where there was a strong culture of giving tended not to view formal and informal giving differently. In the United States, this was true mostly for younger donors.
“The younger you are, the more likely you are to consider giving to a political campaign as not different from giving to charity,” he says. He adds that young people aren’t thinking about the type of entity they give to but more, “How do I deploy my resources to make change that I would like to see?”
To capture the hearts of donors who feel this way, Rosenbaum says it’s important for nonprofits to “demonstrate that my organization is an opportunity for you to do good.”
Less Polarized People Are More Generous
Charities had expressed concern to GivingTuesday researchers that polarization could impact giving. To figure out if this was the case, researchers added questions to the Global Omnibus Survey that asked donors about their attitudes on giving toward those whose beliefs, politics, or lifestyles they don’t agree with. Based on the answers, donors were categorized as least polarized, medium polarized, and most polarized. The report found that those who were least polarized were most generous to nonprofits, but it wasn’t clear if giving caused people to be less polarized or less polarized people were more generous.
“My personal expectation is that there’s a duality there,” Rosenbaum says. “People who are less polarized in their views are more likely to be generous, but also generosity and generous action tend to reduce polarization. I suspect it works both ways.”
Rosenbaum says GivingTuesday hopes to do more research on this moving forward. The report adds: “One conclusion that nonprofits might draw is that they play an important role in reducing polarization — it might also be in their longer-term financial benefit.”
