Fundraising is still in the doldrums — but many donors continue to express a commitment to giving, despite challenging conditions.
That’s one of the takeaways from a new report that surveyed fundraisers and donors earlier this year to check the health of the nonprofit sector.
The study, conducted by Qgiv, a fundraising technology company, examines the challenges of soliciting gifts from donors in an economy that has been rocked by a pandemic, inflation, supply-chain snares, and a volatile stock market. It includes findings from a survey, fielded in March, of 292 fundraisers who use Qgiv’s technology. Forty-four percent of fundraisers said revenue from donors fell slightly or significantly over the previous three years, the study found. While the economic forecast now looks brighter than it did five months ago, nonprofits are still challenged by the high cost of goods and services and declining rates of donor participation.
The pandemic forced fundraisers to be nimble, devising new solutions to overcome shortages of direct-mail envelopes, qualified new hires, and more. In recent months, a cloudy economic forecast has been the biggest challenge, forcing fundraisers to keep pivoting. More than half of fundraisers polled — 53 percent — said their organization had changed its fundraising strategies over the previous three years to respond to economic instability and rising costs. Many nonprofits tossed out or substantially lowered their fundraising goals at the onset of the pandemic and have invested more resources in tactics that focus on giving over time, like monthly giving, and building stronger donor relationships.
The study includes a separate and much larger survey, also completed in March, of 2,007 donors who had given to charity in the previous year. Asked whether they were feeling the squeeze from inflation, 45 percent said its impact on their finances was severe and 31 percent described it as negative.
Donors are talking with fundraisers about their economic concerns, another study found. A survey of 348 higher-education fundraisers, conducted in May and June, found 69 percent of fundraising leaders said more donors are mentioning worries about the economy during gift conversations.
The economy has rattled donors for years now. A previous Qgiv survey, conducted in 2021, asked 1,268 donors how the pandemic affected their finances. While slightly more than half said it had no effect, 41 percent said it had a negative impact.
Still, donors expressed a strong affinity for giving — even when they’re short on cash. Just 8 percent of those surveyed said charitable contributions were the first item they cut when their budget gets tight. Entertainment (29 percent) and dining out (14 percent) were the top two budget items to cut. It’s worth noting, however, that enough donors decided to lessen or stop giving at the end of 2022 to produce a worrying new trend of falling donor participation and giving, according to data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.
The Qgiv survey also looked at inflation’s impact on donors’ annual giving, with 36 percent saying it had remained the same and 35 percent saying it had decreased. These responses are in line with the behavior fundraisers are seeing from donors, according to the study’s findings. Thirty-five percent of fundraisers said donor engagement and giving had remained the same “during economic instability,” and 34 percent said it had increased.
The study includes findings about how fundraisers are feeling about their jobs three years after the pandemic disrupted their work. Asked whether they would remain fundraisers long-term, 59 percent said yes and 16 percent said no. Those who planned to leave fundraising cited career aspirations (57 percent), pay (45 percent), and work-life balance (27 percent) as their motivations.
A 2022 Chronicle survey of 685 fundraisers found that 48 percent were very or somewhat likely to leave their organization in the next to years, and 28 percent were very or somewhat likely to leave the profession altogether in that time.
Some donors notice when fundraisers leave their jobs. While 37 percent of donors said they were unsure whether they’d noticed staff turnover at nonprofits they support, 35 percent said they had noticed. Among that share, 33 percent said they were strongly concerned about staff turnover. Nonprofits that struggle to find the money to boost fundraiser salaries and provide fundraising departments with the staffing and technology they need might be interested to know that 36 percent of donors said they’d keep contributing to an organization even if part of their gift went to administrative costs and not program work.
Regardless of whether or not they planned to leave their jobs, fundraisers said they felt exhausted and unsupported. Burnout and turnover are not new challenges to the profession, but they’ve been especially intense in recent years. Forty-six percent of fundraisers surveyed described their workload as overwhelming, and 41 percent said their department was only occasionally properly staffed. When asked whether their fundraising goals felt attainable, 51 percent said they mostly did, but just 28 percent were confident that they could meet their goals.
Among the other findings:
- More than half of fundraisers said in-person events were raising less money than they did in previous years. Forty-two percent of fundraisers said direct-mail appeals were down from past years, and 41 percent said the same about corporate gifts.
- Thirteen percent of donors said they had stopped giving because prices had risen so high — but 11 percent said they were giving more because of inflation.
- Thirty-one percent of fundraisers said donor engagement and giving had decreased “during economic instability.”