Online Donations Rose Fast in Last Quarter of 2005, Charities Say

As 2005 drew to a close, online donations during the critical year-end giving season posted a big jump for many charities over the same period the year before.

Donations made through JustGive.org, a charity in San Francisco that processes online gifts, during

November and December totaled $13-million, up from $10-million during the same period the year before.

Network for Good, an organization in Bethesda, Md., whose online-giving site allows donors to contribute to any charity in the country, processed $8.3-million in online donations during the final two months of the year — an impressive showing when compared with the $4.9-million in gifts unrelated to disaster relief made through the site at the end of 2004. (The charity also received $6-million in the final days of 2004 in gifts to aid victims of the tsunamis.)

A big lift to Network for Good’s year-end numbers was a promotion known as Cyber Giving Week (http://brand.yahoo.com/cybergivingweek2005), an online event sponsored by Yahoo, which along with AOL and Cisco Systems helped found Network for Good in 2001.

Yahoo promoted Cyber Giving Week on its home page on December 25 and on December 30, and during the last week of December donors contributed $4.1-million. The Cyber Giving Week site, which highlighted 10 featured charities, linked visitors to Network for Good and provided information about charitable giving.

Four out of 10 donors who contributed as part of the promotion gave to the 10 featured charities, with Habitat for Humanity receiving the most money, while the remaining donors gave to other nonprofit organizations they selected.

Network for Good also benefited from a cheeky pro bono advertising campaign (http://www.networkforgood.org/Smiling/person2.html) created by Rodgers Townsend, in St. Louis. The message of the ads was that online giving was as easy as picking a piece of lettuce out from between your teeth or plucking an errant nose hair.

The organization sent a link to the advertisements to its supporters and promoted it on several Web logs and message boards. The advertisements were viewed more than 11,000 times, and 707 people forwarded a link to a friend.

New Approaches

Other organizations also experimented with ways to encourage donors to make holiday and year-end contributions online.

Heifer International, a charity in Little Rock, Ark., that distributes livestock to poor families in developing countries, has long promoted the idea of making charitable contributions in honor of friends and family members instead of buying presents. And now Heifer is giving its supporters a way to tell others that a gift to the organization is what they would like to receive.

Visitors to the charity’s Web site can set up an online giving registry (http://heifer.org/giftregistry) — not unlike a wedding registry — showing the “gifts” they would like to receive, such as a $20 donation for a flock of chicks or a $250 contribution for a water buffalo. They can then send out electronic cards to friends and family members directing them to the registries.

The organization’s online holiday cards — which could be used to let people know about a gift registry or about a gift made in their honor — featured animated livestock singing “Jingle Bells,” “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” or “The Dreidel Song.”

The registry feature will play a role in Heifer’s fund raising well beyond the holiday season, says Mike Matchett, the organization’s director of marketing.

“This is something that donors had requested, and were actually doing manually for quite a while,” says Mr. Matchett. “With weddings, especially second weddings or people getting married later in life, they would be setting these up and telling their friends.”

Mr. Matchett says that Heifer was “very pleased” by the amount of money that came in online during November and December, which he says was up compared to the same period in 2004. But he declined to say how much money the organization raised electronically or how many people had set up giving registries.

The Salvation Army’s Online Red Kettle program, which the Alexandria, Va., organization first tested in 2002, continued to grow, bringing in $135,215. Volunteers who signed up to be virtual bell ringers had their own Web pages from which they could send e-mail messages asking their friends and family members to make an online donation.

Seeking Corporate Sponsors

For the first time, the Salvation Army gave businesses and local groups the opportunity to sponsor kettles as well. During the holiday season, 156 businesses signed up for virtual kettles, and asked their employees, customers, and other visitors to their Web sites to donate. The organization hopes that eventually the online business kettles will help make up for the retail kettles it has lost.

“Now that’s still going to have to catch on,” says Maj. George Hood, the charity’s national community-relations secretary. “It wasn’t a barnburner at all this Christmas season, but it was a very significant step for us to take.”

Over all, online gifts to the Salvation Army grew sharply. During November and December online gifts totaled $7.4-million, compared with $4.1-million during the same months in 2004. The growth pleased Salvation Army officials since the total for the last week of December in 2004 included many gifts for victims of the tsunamis that struck South Asia the day after Christmas.

Encouraging ‘Re-Gifting’

Lutheran Services in America, in Baltimore, used the holiday to encourage donors to give unwanted presents they received to the group’s Trading Graces online auction, which is scheduled to run February 26 to March 8.

“It’s re-gifting with a cause — and without the guilt,” says Robin Milligan, a spokeswoman for the organization. In fact, one of the first items Lutheran Services in America received for the auction was a 300-pound wooden giraffe — which the group has taken to calling “Grace” — that a friend of one of the organization’s employees received as a gift.

The organization says that clothing that didn’t fit and gift cards account for most of the unwanted presents that have been donated so far.