Donors motivated to counteract what they see as threats to causes like the environment, women’s rights, and immigration are likely to continue giving big in 2018, according to a new study.
Eighty-six percent of people surveyed who said they gave in response to perceived threats in 2017 — what the researchers call “reactive” giving as the Trump administration took office — said they plan to keep supporting charities at the same level or more than they did last year.
Slightly more than one in five donors said their giving was spurred by their reaction to political and social events last year.
Nearly half of reactive donors were likely to choose a cause before selecting an organization to support; only 22 percent said they were responding to an appeal from a charity.
While the news media has often depicted the donations as “rage” gifts, that is not the key motivation, researchers found. Hope (cited by 63 percent of reactive donors) and empowerment (58 percent) were far more likely emotional triggers than anger (26 percent) or anxiety (16 percent).
Curiosity about donor motivations was a major reason Edge Research, a marketing-research firm that serves nonprofits, wanted to study “rage giving,” say Edge principals Lisa Dropkin and Pam Loeb.
“That was our central question,” Dropkin says. “We wanted to poke into that: How much is rage, and is that sustainable? Are people pulling [motivation] from another well?”
The findings indicate that charities need to balance appeals to what Loeb calls “gloom and doom” with stories of impact. An all-outrage strategy, can backfire, Loeb says.
“One thing we’ve heard is that donors can get anxious and exhausted by you and start to tune you out. There has to be some kind of affirmation.”
The new data comes from an online survey of 895 U.S. donors conducted at the end of December.
Millennials and Generation Z
Although donors of all ages and political identities made gifts in response to the Trump election, the pool skewed young and Democratic. Fifty-three percent of reactive donors said they were Democrats, a finding in line with previous studies. (Sixteen percent said they were Republicans, and the rest claimed no political affiliation.)
Twenty percent of reactive givers were first-time donors. People born from 1981 on — millennials and Generation Z — made up 31 percent of all reactive donors, by far the largest share of any age group.
These young donors, Dropkin says, may have cared more about the overall cause than about the specific organization they supported.
“You need to do work to introduce yourself to these young donors. You can’t assume that these are like older donors, who have a name in their heads, who grow up hearing about you and have just gotten old enough to write you a check. These are donors who are saying, ‘I’m going to give you a try.’ "
Among other findings:
- President Trump remains a key driver of reactive giving for Democrats and independents: Roughly half of both groups said statements by the chief executive triggered their giving. For Republicans, an increase in attitudes contrary to their beliefs and values was the No. 1 reason for giving reactively, cited by 45 percent.
- Reactive donors are most likely to come from the South (40 percent) and Midwest (22 percent).
- Twenty percent of reactive donors are African-Americans, compared with 14 percent of donors over all.
- The top three causes most likely to benefit from reactive giving are poverty and homelessness (supported by 24 percent of donors) and LGBTQ issues and the environment (tied at 18 percent).
- Sixty-one percent of reactive donors said they believe their gifts will be only “somewhat effective” in helping organizations achieve their goals.
That last finding should be taken as a warning to charities, Dropkin says. “If I was an organization that got a big old influx of donations in 2017, I’d want to make sure I was showing those new donors the impact of those gifts.”
Loeb says these new reactive donors need close attention in 2018 and beyond: “Are they responding to new appeals? Are they renewing at the same levels that multiyear donors are? Make sure you understand who they are and why they give.”
