October 7, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fourteen percent of donors who gave at least $20 to charity in the previous year said that they had received a direct-mail appeal and decided to go online to give, a new study has found. By comparison, only 6 percent of donors said an e-mail appeal had propelled them to give online.
The study of more than 500 donors, conducted by the research firm Campbell Rinker, found that 37 percent of donors who give online said that when they receive a direct-mail appeal from a charity, they use that organization’s Web site to make their contribution—rather than sending a check.
The study also found that young people were more likely to give online in response to direct mail than older donors: Half of the donors in Generation X (age 27 to 47) and Generation Y (age 18 to 26) said they gave online in response to direct-mail appeals. Just 26 percent of baby boomers (aged 47 to 65), and 14 percent of those over 65, said the same.
Rick Dunham, president of Dunham + Company, a consulting company that commissioned the study and assists Christian charities with fund raising and marketing, said that the study was motivated by his company’s observation that e-mail appeals do not come close to accounting for all of the donations to charities’ Web sites.
“We wanted to understand the relation beween offline and online communications,” he said. “To what degree is other communication driving response to charities online?”
Mr. Dunham said that more and more donors are making donations in response to appeals on social-media sites as well. For example, 15 percent of donors said they had given online after they had been asked to make a donation by someone on a social-media site like Facebook. “Rather than write a check,” Mr. Dunham says, “they can go online and be done with it.”
He said the study’s findings point to the need for charities to make giving online as easy as possible for donors. But too many nonprofits still make it difficult, Mr. Dunham said, requiring donors to fill out an online registration form, for example.
“Most charities are not paying enough attention to their online giving facility,” he said. “It should be as easy as possible for the donor. Otherwise, people click out” rather than completing their gift online.
