The surprising top three ways people give money
- Thu, October 21 2010
- Filed under: Fundraising essentials
Russ Reid just sent me this interesting data from their Heart of the Donor study:
—Collection boxes (e.g., Salvation Army kettles or countertop piggybanks) at 64% and direct mail at 61% clearly stand out as the most common methods of giving—the majority of all donors have used one of these in the past 12 months.
—34% of donors have made a gift online. And more than 1 in 4 have given through a presentation at their job or place of worship. (Note: This does not include giving to the church itself.)
—Most interestingly, the average donor used 3 of these 10 channels over the last 12 months (e.g., 55% of donors who gave online also gave via mail, and 20% gave to a phone call).
I agree with their conclusion: “This type of donor behavior strongly urges simultaneous multi-channel communications with donors to maximize revenue.” Or as I’d put it: Connect with your supporters in many ways, online and off, if you want to build the deepest connections.
Comments
This is so true!
We have to look at as many ways as possible of connecting with people, because people are not going to just magically find our websites, or suddenly want to text a donation to us.
Direct mail is one way, events are another. grants are a third, and so on.
If you want to learn more about the many different ways people give money, check out my website, http://wildwomanfundraising.com.
Sincerely,
Mazarine
The channels you describe are the “of course” work that must be done when marketing fundraising. But today, raising the small money as well as the mega funds are not just about the channels. They are about creating the BIG IDEAS that motivate donors. It’s about the BIG IDEAS that will engage them intellectually, emotionally and in a peer group. It’s about the BIG IDEAS that will move virally on the internet and through a community, from influencer to their networks. The channels don’t work without BIG IDEAS. To be a nonprofit marketer today is only minimally about the “of course” work of channels. It belongs to the people who know how to create big viral ideas.
The statistics on which age groups are choosing which channels is a very important part of interpreting this information. In a nutshell, the younger the demographic the more important the online, text and social media related channels become. Taken together with the knowledge that Gen X & Y comprise a larger population than the Boomers, investing more energy into these channels is very important indeed. While I agree that multichannel is critical—precisely because it allows individual constituents to choose how they wish to interact with charities—it is perhaps more important to move rapidly into the emerging channels in order to properly engage this rapidly emerging constituency.
I am really shocked that the most popular way of giving to charity is collection boxes. There are so many scam artists on the streets nowadays I would probably only trust a large organisation’s website.
I’m sorry to see that gift catalogues are so low. Over the past couple years I’ve seen more organizations pass them out at christmas time, and I have shifted my holiday purchases because of them.
Maybe we will see a rise in popularity for gift catalogues in the future?