Title: “The State of Modern Philanthropy: Examining Online Fundraising Trends”
Organization: Classy
Summary: Giving Tuesday donors are younger than you thought, people who give via mobile devices are older than you thought, and those who make regularly recurring automated gifts are more than five times as valuable to nonprofits as donors who give piecemeal, according to a new report by the fundraising software company Classy.
The study dives into proprietary data covering 2.5 million donations to the more than 3,500 organizations that use Classy’s fundraising tools. Among key findings highlighted by Ben Cipollini, the company’s director of engineering and data insights:
- Donors who favor mobile devices for online giving have a median age of 36, only a year younger than those who typically use a desktop computer. That means organizations must not only ensure their websites are mobile-responsive (half of online visits to nonprofits are from mobile devices); they should also design mobile sites to appeal to older as well as younger generations, Cipollini says.
- Giving Tuesday donors have a median age of 25 and appear motivated to continue their support. They are 10 to 15 percent more likely to give again than those who contribute to an organization for the first time via a friend or relative’s peer-to-peer campaign. They are also more likely to give again before the next Giving Tuesday than end-of-year donors are to give again before the end of the following year. The report calls Giving Tuesday “an unparalleled opportunity to acquire and engage donors” and asks nonprofits to consider whether they are doing enough to prepare for the event and connect with donors afterwards.
- Seventy-six percent of giving to peer-to-peer campaigns goes through individuals’ fundraising pages rather than the recipient organization’s campaign page, a figure Cipollini says is higher than he would have guessed. The upshot: Nonprofits need to make sure they’re doing enough to help volunteer fundraisers succeed. He recommends that groups help peer-to-peer participants optimize their social-media presence, encourage them to share information with each other, and steer them toward optimum times to reach out to their networks (for example, not on weekends).
- People who sign up for monthly or other automatically recurring donations give 440 percent more over their lifetimes than people who make one-time gifts, singly or in an irregular series — another number Cipollini says took him by surprise. The value of a typical recurring donor is also 40 percent higher than that of a supporter who sets up a personal fundraising page for a charity, according to Classy’s formula for calculating what it terms the “lifetime return” for different types of donors. The report nudges nonprofits to assess whether they devote enough resources to recurring-gift programs.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include a link to the Classy report.
