May 16, 2002 | Read Time: 1 minute
Donors stop giving to charities for lots of different reasons, and understanding those
motivations plays an important part in retaining contributors, fund raisers say.
To help evaluate why donors leave, Adrian Sargeant, a professor at Henley Management College in Greenlands, Henley-on-Thames, England, asked 1,000 lapsed donors from each of nine U.S. charities to select from a list of reasons the ones that best described their decision. Mr. Sargeant conducted the survey while he was a visiting professor at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the Center on Philanthropy.
Based on the findings, Mr. Sargeant encouraged charities to do more to let their donors specify the nature of the communications they receive — such as allowing them the option of receiving a charity’s newsletters but not its direct solicitations — and letting them choose how often they want to hear from a charity. Simply put, he says, “It’s just listening to what individuals want and then being damn sure to do what they say.”
Following are the top 10 reasons that donors in the survey selected for ending their giving:
1. Feeling that other causes were more deserving (26.5 percent)
2. No longer able to afford support (22.3)
3. No memory of ever supporting the charity (11.4)
4. Donor still supporting charity by other means (6.8)
5. Donor relocated (6.7)
6. Death (5.2)
7. Charity’s communications were inappropriate (3.6)
8. Charity did not remind donor to give again (3.3)
9. Charity asked for an inappropriate donation amount (3.1)
10. Charity did not inform donor how contribution was used (1.7)
For a free copy of the survey results, contact Mr. Sargeant at adrians@henleymc.ac.uk.
