Landmark study reveals online giving hat trick: donor experience, December and disaster
- Wed, December 08 2010
- Filed under: Fundraising essentials
I’m ecstatic to announce the release of The Online Giving Study: A Call to Reinvent Donor Relationships.
This landmark study of nearly $400 million in online giving across charitable websites, giving portals and social networks reveals important insights about digital philanthropy: People seem to give more when the online experience is intimate and emotionally coherent, and they also give online for reasons of convenience, especially at the end of the year and during large-scale disasters.
The Online Giving Study, from Network for Good and TrueSense Marketing and sponsored by AOL, found generous procrastinators donate in droves on December 30 and 31. More than 20% of all giving for the entire year occurs in the last 48 hours of the calendar year.
The study covered $381 million in online giving through Network for Good’s platform, including 3.6 million gifts to 66,470 different nonprofits from 2003-2009. As a colleague of mine remarked, this research has been like giving birth - painful but worth the results!
Key study findings include:
•Fundraising is still about relationships. I always say this, but now I have lots of data to back me up. Just as the strength of the donor-charity relationship heavily influences offline giving, the online giving experience has a significant impact on donor loyalty, retention, and gift levels. Small improvements to the online experience can make a big difference in donations.
•Giving on social networks is significant, but donor loyalty is highest on charity websites that build strong connections with donors. Personality matters on these websites: The loyalty factor for donors acquired through generic giving pages is 66.7% lower than for donors who give via charity-branded giving pages.
•Analysis of cumulative online giving (i.e., giving added up over time) via different pages powered by Network for Good shows that donors who gave via charity websites started at the highest level and gave the most over time. Those who used giving portals started lower and gave less over time. Those who used social giving opportunities gave the least initially and added little afterward.
•Recurring giving is a major driver of giving over time and should be strongly encouraged in the giving experience.
•Online giving spikes during the month of December and large-scale disasters. During disasters, donors are more likely to consider new giving options, while in December, they’re more likely to give based on relationships with the charities.
•A third of all online giving occurs in December, and 22% of annual giving happens in the last two days of the year. Online giving (by dollars) on December 31 is concentrated between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. in each time zone.
•Online giving happens largely between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays. People give during work hours. There’s even a drop in giving during the noon hour. Most giving comes from the East and West coasts.
The full study and accompanying data, including stand-alone charts, are available at our study website. You can grab our charts, share our data and discuss the results!
Comments
I look forward to reading the full study. The key learning points provide good food for thought. As some may see on-line giving as counter to traditional non-profit relationship building, this study suggests that on-line giving is simply a different dimension or type of donor relationship. My sense is that many smaller non-profits are not thinking about their on-line presence in that way. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for such an instructive article, although we are not a non-profit as a social enterprise focused on helping the poor in rural communities we have common goals in a philanthropic effort.
One specific project we have is relying on donations with rewards in return. It is a learning process for us so thank you for your intelligent insight.
Some really interesting data here that will take a while for me to digest. I found the part on chairty branding and giving particularly interesting, I never would have thought that a branded website would have such a large impact on the user.
Thanks for advancing my understanding on this complex issue.
My sagacity is that numerous less important non-profits are not opinion on the subject of their on-line incidence in that technique.
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