Charity Web Sites Spur Offline Gifts

As charities see their online fund-raising totals rise and they experiment with new ways to spur electronic

giving, they are also realizing that the Internet can play an important role in driving offline gifts.

For many groups, especially those that aren’t raising money for disaster relief, a Web site’s ability to persuade donors to mail or call in a gift may be more significant than the amount of money that actually comes in electronically, says Nick Allen, president of Donordigital.com, a technology consulting company in San Francisco. “The first thing so many people do if they want to check out your credibility or your program is look online,” he says.

Several of his charity clients had donors tell them that the organizations’ Web sites were deciding factors in their decisions to make large offline gifts. One donor, he says, told the organization to which he had given $180,000 that he had looked at the charity’s Web site as well as those of its competitors, and decided where to donate based on what he learned from the sites.

That kind of logic doesn’t surprise Elvin Ridder, U.S. coordinator of ministry development for Campus Crusade for Christ International, in Orlando, Fla.

He believes that contributions that are inspired by the Internet but come in through traditional channels are a side benefit of online giving that too many organizations underestimate. Campus Crusade for Christ received $50,000 from a donor who knew about the organization, but said he made the decision to give while reading its Web site.

And it’s not just five- and six-figure donations that start on the Internet but arrive in the mail.

During a six-week period in December and January, Campus Crusade for Christ received checks totaling $80,000 in response to information on the group’s Web site about its work in Afghanistan. Even though the donations came in through the mail, the organization knows that they originated with the Web site, because it created a special code that appeared only in the mailing address listed online with the Afghanistan material.

“We still find there are a lot of people who just flat-out will not give their credit-card number over the Web site. Period,” says Mr. Ridder. “That’s one of the reasons why we always give the address, because they’ll turn around and they will send in a gift through the mail.”

Some Still Skittish

In the 2001 fiscal year, 8,000 donors used mail-in donation forms printed out from the American Diabetes Association’s Web site to send in $563,071 in donations. In comparison, electronic gifts made through the site totaled $509,336.

Kathy E. Lowe, the Alexandria, Va., association’s national director for online services, agrees that skittishness about online security is part of the reason why many donations triggered online still come in through the mail or via telephone. Another factor she points to is the size of some gifts. Last year, one of the mail-in forms was accompanied by a $10,000 check. “I mean, how many people are going to charge $10,000 to their credit card?” she asks.

But then she pauses and remembers what might be a sign of things to come: a $7,500 gift that came through the diabetes association’s Web site in 2001.

She says, “That’s our largest online credit-card donation that we’ve had, which frankly shocked me.”