Many Midlevel Donors Are Being Ignored, Report Finds

Title: The Mid-level Donor Crisis

Organization: NextAfter

Summary: Despite the fact that they give more than the average person, many midlevel donors are falling into a communication “black hole.” Nonprofits often do not have communication strategies tailored to these donors, which sometimes means that charities stop reaching out to them after a couple of months.

NextAfter, a fundraising consulting firm, made online donations of $1,000 to $5,000 to 37 nonprofits and monitored the communication received from them by email, direct mail, and phone for 90 days. Many charities were removing this segment of donors from their small-dollar donor lists yet didn’t classify them as major donors, so they received inappropriate appeals or none at all.

Among the findings:

• Only 1 percent of charities called their donors who give $1,000 or more to say thank you. The study’s authors suggest that calling donors may help organizations stand out and help increase the value of the donor’s gift.
• About 69 percent of organizations put their charity’s name in the sender line of an email; only 31 percent used a person’s name. Emails with only an individual’s name in the sender line were often more effective. In one experiment, an email from an individual sender saw a 21 percent increase in the open rate and a nearly 59 percent increase in the number of people who clicked through to the call for action, compared with an email that listed both the CEO and the charity’s name in the sender line.
• About a third of organizations did not use a personalized salutation in its donor communications. In a test with the National Breast Cancer Foundation, using an individual’s name in an email increased the click-through rate 270 percent compared with a version of the message without a personalized salutation.
• The majority of nonprofits in the study send one to three communication pieces to midlevel donors during the 90 days after a gift was made. Among the organizations that communicated one to three times with donors during that period, 85 percent of those correspondences were sent in the first 30 days, after which communication dropped off.