Charities Make Aggressive Efforts to Lure Generous Donors Online

Brown University’s annual fund is venturing into new territory. The annual fund never asked for more

than $5,000 in an e-mail appeal, but this month it will send solicitations seeking gifts of $10,000 to $75,000, depending on the donor’s giving history.

The new approach to soliciting major donors marks a significant departure for the university, one that its fund raisers finally seized upon after flirting with the idea in years past. For some reason, says Tammie L. Ruda, executive director of the Brown Annual Fund, in Providence, R.I., “this year it came up, and we all seemed ready.”

Suddenly, many other nonprofit organizations, like Brown, are also ready to start courting major donors online. The trend reflects the larger role that online giving now plays in many charities’ overall fund raising.

In The Chronicle’s annual survey of online giving, 66 large charities reported that they use e-mail and the Web to court major donors. Of the 183 organizations in the survey that reported the largest donation they had ever received online, 19 groups said they had received gifts of $100,000 or more, while three said they had received donations of $200,000 or more.

A study published in April that looked at Internet contributions at 21 national charities found that gifts of $1,000 or more made up just 1 percent of the organizations’ total number of online donations in 2007 but that together those gifts accounted for 20 percent of the amount raised online (The Chronicle, May 1). The study was conducted by M+R Strategic Services, a Washington fund-raising consulting company, together with the Nonprofit Technology Network, in Portland, Ore.

Online Contact

Defenders of Wildlife is another group that has stepped up its efforts to draw in big gifts online.

The Washington organization has seen a growing number of its supporters make their first large donation to the group over the Internet. Eight months into its 2008 fiscal year, 41 percent of the people who have donated a gift of $1,000 or more for the first time made that contribution online.

So for the last two years, the group’s online and major-gifts fund raisers have worked together closely to determine the best mix of e-mail communications — newsletters, advocacy alerts, and solicitations — for major donors to receive.

Too often charities stop sending e-mail messages to donors who make a substantial gift, which is a big mistake, says Jeff Regen, vice president of online marketing and communications at Defenders of Wildlife.

“The point is they made a major gift online, and so, clearly, something was successfully done online and you don’t want to stop doing that,” he says. “You want to supplement or augment it.”

The Alzheimer’s Association, in Chicago, has created a special Web site for members of its Zenith Society, which is composed of donors who have given more than $1-million cumulatively to the organization. Zenith members help decide what material should be included on the password-protected Web site.

“Many of them are particularly interested in research, so they wanted to make sure that there was a section on the site that had really current updates in research,” says Angela Geiger, vice president for constituent relations at the health charity. “They want timely information.”

Courting the Middle

Despite its increasing use as a means to lure bigger donations, the Internet is not likely to play a central role in landing blockbuster gifts, says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a research and consulting company in Takoma Park, Md., that specializes in online giving. Instead, he says, the real potential is in charities using technology to build closer ties to mid-range donors, people who give $500 to $10,000.

“They’re too valuable to use the same kind of assembly-line methods people use for direct mail,” says Mr. Rovner. “But they’re not valuable enough to be in someone’s major-donor portfolio, where you’ve got one person who’s managing 15 or 20 or 30 major donors.”

In March, Mr. Rovner’s company, together with Convio and Edge Research, published a study that looked at wealthy donors’ attitudes toward online giving (The Chronicle, April 3). The survey found that 51 percent of the donors surveyed — those who have donated at least $1,000 to a single cause in the previous 18 months — prefer to give via the Internet.

Donors who give between $1,000 and $5,000 already play an important role in online fund raising at CARE, the international relief group. In 2007, such donations accounted for a little more than a quarter of the $4.3-million the Atlanta group collected online.

CARE has formed a committee to identify ways that the organization can strengthen its relationships with mid-range donors, and the Internet is key to those discussions, says Toby A. Smith, director of online communications.

One option under consideration: setting up special online discussions, in which employees working overseas could talk about their programs and answer donors’ questions. But figuring out how to proceed isn’t easy, says Mr. Smith.

“The question remains, Can you make them give more or at higher levels by offering these kinds of things?” he asks. “Can you maintain them by offering these types of things? Are we losing them now by not offering these types of things?”

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York, is currently trying to strengthen its ties to nearly 7,000 donors who have made gifts between $499 and $5,000, up from 2,500 in 2005.

Of the people who give that size donation, 73 percent made their first donation of such a sum online, giving an average of $767.

The organization is testing whether the offer of a matching gift will encourage others to make online contributions. In December, one of its major donors offered to give $50,000 for an online matching-gift challenge, which brought in a total of more than $632,000.

Betsey Fortlouis, the group’s senior director for member communications, says the organization was pleased by the results of the challenge but that it’s difficult to tell how important the match was in attracting gifts because so many donors plan to make year-end gifts anyway. The organization is planning additional tests.

If those are successful, she says, “we could take it to other major donors and say, ‘Hey, when you give us a gift of $25,000 or $50,000, this gift really means $100,000 if you allow us to use it this way.’”

Old and New

As charities look for ways to encourage donors to make larger gifts online, the organizations must adapt proven offline techniques, say fund-raising consultants.

Using donors’ previous giving history to decide how much to ask them to give in response to an e-mail solicitation — a staple of direct-mail fund raising — is particularly important when making a high-dollar appeal, says Sarah DiJulio, an executive vice president at M+R Strategic Services.

“The person who’s going to give you $50 will give you $50, and if you ask them for more, you might get a slightly higher gift, but not very much of one,” she says. “But when you ask a $1,000 donor or a $5,000 donor for something larger, you’ll see a much better return on that.”

But the techniques that charities use in the mail to make donors who give larger gifts feel special — better paper, first-class postage, and customization — don’t work for e-mail messages, says Nick Allen, chief executive of Donordigital, a consulting company in San Francisco that specializes in electronic fund raising.

“You could certainly personalize it, but adding ‘Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick,’ doesn’t necessarily convince anybody that it’s personalized in the age of computerization,” he says.

In fact, says Mr. Allen, several of his clients are taking the opposite tack in e-mail messages to major donors than they do in postal mail, stripping their appeals of colorful images and the organization’s logo.

“To make an e-mail look more personal,” he says, “you have to make it look just like a one-to-one e-mail.”