The pandemic economy continues to put a heavy strain on households that donate to charities, and it’s getting worse among younger donors, according to a new survey.
The number of donor households that are struggling economically increased to 24 percent, up from 22 percent in April, according to a survey conducted September 15 to 22 by the research firm Campbell Rinker. That’s within the survey’s 4-point margin of error. However, 39 percent of millennial donor households say they are struggling financially, up from 33 percent in April. The same is true of 25 percent of Generation X donor households, up from 20 percent.
The survey was sponsored by Dunham & Company, a Texas-based consultancy focused on nonprofits. It’s the latest edition of the firm’s Donor Confidence Survey, which dates to 2008. During the pandemic, Campbell Rinker and Dunham have been releasing regular updates on the survey to track how Covid-19 is affecting donor sentiment. The survey sample included 630 donors who gave at least $20 in 2019. Notably, the latest survey was conducted before the current spike in Covid-19 infections was apparent.
“Donors are showing some resilience over all — and I don’t want people to misread the data,” said Rick Dunham, CEO of Dunham & Company. “It’s not that donors don’t want to give, it’s just that they are showing a little bit of a drawback compared to April.”
One outlier: Baby boomers and older generation households reported decreasing levels of economic struggles. In the September survey, only 5 percent of baby-boomer donor households said they were struggling economically, compared with 9 percent in April. Furthermore, 35 percent of bab- boomer donors said they were likely to continue giving as they did before as the pandemic. Thirty percent of millennial donors said the same.
Among donors who expect to give less in the next 12 months, fewer now cite the pandemic as the reason. In April, 25 percent of donors who expected to give less cited the pandemic as the reason. In September, that number decreased to 12 percent.
Dunham says another edition of the survey is planned to gather donor sentiments from the fourth quarter of 2020.
