May 1, 2011 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Four in five donors plan to give at least as much in 2011, if not more, than they did in 2010, according to a new study of more than 17,500 donors that provided one of the first real signs that charities can soon expect donations to rebound after the nation’s four years of economic pain.
The study, based on data provided by donors who support a range of charities across the country, including arts, education, and social-service groups, showed that only 7 percent of donors plan to decrease their gifts this year, down from 17 percent in 2009.
Perhaps most surprising, the study found that the majority of Americans will make their 2011 donations online rather than through the mail, in response to telemarketing calls, or other techniques. And the study found that donors are getting increasingly frustrated by overly aggressive and costly appeals, prompting researchers to caution fund raisers that the conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of frequent solicitations may be wrong.
Internet Surges
Online giving is now such a strong habit, the survey found, that donors at every age level prefer it. More than half of donors 65 and older said they would give online, the first time a majority in that age group said they would give via the Internet.
Three-quarters of people 35 to 64 said they would give online, while 86 percent of those under 35 prefer to give that way.
The survey was conducted by Cygnus Applied Research, a Chicago fund-raising consulting firm that asked 34 charities to send the survey to their donors.
The researchers also asked questions of some 3,500 donors who were current or recent nonprofit board members to learn more about their giving patterns and how charities could help them do a better job of fund raising.
The Cygnus study, which interviews far more donors than many other giving studies, has been conducted two previous times—in 2009 and 2010.
Cost Savings
Donors said that a chief reason for giving online is that doing so saves the charity money, since it’s cheaper than other fund-raising methods.
In answering several survey questions, donors made it clear that they consider it important to help charities cut costs and are irritated by overspending on appeals and too-frequent solicitations.
The anger toward oversolicitation was so strong that the researchers who conducted the study said they felt “compelled” to challenge fund raisers who say “that asking more frequently makes more money.”
The researchers added: “A significant majority of donors cannot be influenced to give more often by an increase in the number of solicitations over a 12-month period, but they can be influenced to give less money or less often or stop giving altogether.”
Donors 65 and older were most likely to stop giving because they had been asked too many times. “While it may be that fund raising could get away with oversoliciting this demographic 10 or 20 years ago, the times have changed,” the survey authors wrote.
What’s more, the high cost of direct mail led more than half of all donors to say they would give less or not at all through the mail in 2011.
Most donors in the survey also took a dim view of token gifts such as address labels or calendars included in direct-mail appeals.
Although 77 percent of donors said they had received such gifts in appeals they were sent in the past two years, only 18 percent liked them.
Sixty-three percent of the donors said they did not want to receive trinkets of any kind because their cost eats into contributions.
The concern donors expressed about fund-raising costs, whether accurate or not, should show charities that it is unwise to send direct mail or other nonelectronic appeals to people who prefer to give online only, says Penelope Burk, president of Cygnus.
Sending such donors direct mail or adding them to a telemarketing campaign, she says, only calls attention to the fact that the charity is using an expensive way to raise money,
Indeed, 49 percent of the donors who preferred online giving said that receiving other appeals would cause them to give less or stop giving to a charity altogether.
Giving Trends
Among other key findings:
Young donors plan to step up giving. Among donors who plan to increase their giving this year, a bigger share of the under-35 donors (39 percent) said they would contribute more than did middle-aged (27 percent) or older donors (14 percent).
The youngest donors certainly have more room to grow than their older counterparts. They gave far less last year on average ($1,174) than middle-aged people ($10,012) or those who are older ($12,861).
But, the researchers wrote, “fund raisers should not measure the importance of their younger donors by current gift value alone. Younger donors scored significantly higher on willingness to engage, to give more, and to give in ways that are more cost-effective for fund raising.”
Social networks aren’t yet key for big gifts. Nearly 70 percent of donors have at least one social-media account, but most of them don’t use Facebook, LinkedIn, or other networks to follow charities.
People who don’t follow charities on social networks give more ($4,750) than those who do ($3,434).
But the survey still found signs that social networks will become a major influence.
Eighteen percent of donors with social-media accounts said they had made a gift after following one or more nonprofits on Facebook or other networks, the researchers wrote, so it’s clear that “social media will play an increasingly important role in fund raising in the future.”
Women give less than men. Women gave an average of $7,933 last year, while men said they contributed $12,313.
Such differences were true at every income level, even among people who gave $10,000 or more: Men gave an average of $53,179, while women donated $51,070.
Older donors give to more causes. Donors 65 and older are much more likely than middle-aged donors to give to numerous charities. Twenty-three percent of the older donors said they supported 20 or more charities, while only 9 percent of the middle-aged donors did.
Religious donors give more. Twenty-four percent of donors described themselves as “actively religious,” and they gave much more than other donors in the survey.
Last year, for example, actively religious donors under 35 contributed five times more than donors that age who described themselves as “not at all religious” or “somewhere in between.” Actively religious donors were also more likely to volunteer and to serve on charity boards.
Older, wealthy donors tend to be loyal supporters. Donors 65 or older, those who gave more than $10,000 to charity last year, and donors whose annual incomes topped $200,000 were the most likely to have contributed to a charity for at least five years.
An executive summary of “The Cygnus Donor Survey: Where Philanthropy Is Headed in 2011” is available free online. A copy of the full report may be purchased online or by calling (800) 263-0267.
