Online Giving Appeals to the Wealthy, Study Finds

Affluent people are increasingly likely to use the Internet to make their charitable donations, a new survey of nearly 3,500 donors has found.

But charities are turning off some of their biggest donors — people who give $1,000

or more, the survey found. Some charities send too many messages to donors who say they don’t want them, while others don’t take advantage of the interest many donors express in expanding their online interaction with nonprofit organizations, the survey found.

“Most charities are not paying attention,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a fund-raising consulting company in Takoma Park, Md. “The people responsible for [soliciting] larger gifts need to start taking the Internet much more seriously than they have.”

Sea Change conducted the survey along with Convio, an Austin, Tex., company that provides Web-based software for nonprofit groups, and Edge Research in Arlington, Va., which does research and polling for nonprofit organizations.

The survey, which was conducted online, was based on data from 3,443 donors who had made gifts of at least $1,000 to a single cause in the past 18 months and donated an average of more than $10,896 per year to charities. Sixty-four percent of the donors were age 45 to 64, and 57 percent had incomes of at least $100,000. The donors’ names were provided by 23 organizations that represent an array of causes, including advocacy groups, health organizations, international relief groups, public television stations, and Christian ministries.

Among the key findings:

• Four out of five donors said they had made a charitable gift online, and a little more than half, 51 percent, said they prefer to use the Internet for their donations. Some 46 percent said that they expect to make a greater percentage of their charitable gifts online within the next five years.

• Fifty-six percent said that charities send too many e-mail messages, and 47 percent said they do not read as many messages from charities as they did in the past.

• Seventy-four percent said it’s inappropriate for a charity to obtain their e-mail address from a commercial database, while 82 percent said they don’t think it’s right for charities to send them messages about another organization.

• Ninety-two percent of donors like getting year-end tax receipts by e-mail, while 83 percent want to get electronic updates on a charity’s finances and spending. Seventy-four percent said e-mail messages are appropriate when notifying donors that it’s time to renew an annual gift or to explain how a donation has been spent.

• Eighty-one percent of donors dislike messages that take an urgent tone in seeking a repeat donation.

• Forty-six percent of donors said the charity’s messages do a good job of making them feel connected to the organization, while 43 percent said the messages are well written and inspiring.

Most of the donors want more say on the quantity of e-mail they receive from charities.

In a follow-up call from researchers, one donor told them he is disappointed that charities often give him just two choices for receiving e-mail messages: “always” or “never.”

“Instead of just having me check a box that says ‘Never,’ they could actually grade it and say ‘only contact me once or twice a year, exceptional events,’” he said.

The poll results suggest that charities need to stop treating online communications with wealthy donors as little more than an electronic version of direct mail, says Mr. Rovner.

“It really behooves these organizations, particularly with these higher-dollar donors, to look into how to sort these people out,” Mr. Rovner says. “It may be OK from a financial standpoint to throw mediocre stuff at the small-dollar donors but it’s not OK to e-mail that stuff to the high-dollar donors.”

Seeking Efficiency

The survey also found key differences among affluent donors in their Internet preferences.

Nearly one-third of the donors said they were extremely comfortable when a charity develops an online relationship with them by sending e-mail messages and offering opportunities for online activism.

But another 30 percent of donors said they go online primarily for the sake of efficiency, are not very interested in more online interaction with the organization, and would prefer not to be contacted between gifts. The remaining 41 percent fall somewhere in between.

The most receptive online donors — whom the survey called “relationship seekers” — tend to be the youngest: 42 percent are 25 to 44 years old. They give an average of $11,401 a year.

A majority of relationship seekers said they will visit a charity’s Web site before making a gift (61 percent); are interested in taking political action related to a cause or in other online activities, such as forwarding a charity’s e-mail message to a friend (63 percent); and are receptive to e-mail messages (40 percent said they read all the messages they get from charities they support).

Eighty-three percent of relationship seekers value e-mail messages that, for example, tell compelling stories about people helped by the organization, while 90 percent like reviews and summaries of news coverage of the charity.

“I get lots of e-mails from all these organizations and if it’s got interesting content about their work, I’m happy to get them,” one of these donors told researchers in a follow-up call.

At the other end are people the survey called “all business” donors. They are older (57 percent are between 45 and 64 years old) and give an average of $12,698 a year.

Only 2 percent of the business-only donors said they will visit a charity’s Web site to read about the organization or an issue, while 15 percent said they go to the Web site to make a gift quickly.

In phone interviews, many of the all-business donors told researchers they rarely deviate from their annual giving plan.

With the exception of a gift receipt for tax purposes, they don’t like e-mail messages even from charities they support. Only 5 percent said they open other messages. None of the donors said they feel more connected to an organization as a result of messages sent to them.

“I personally want to be left alone,” one all-business donor told researchers. “That’s my biggest problem with the charities. You send in a check one time and you get inundated with unwanted stuff.”

Donors who fall in between the relationship-seeker and all-business categories give an average of $9,212 a year, according to the survey. They expect online acknowledgments of their gifts and also prefer to be notified online when it’s time to renew an annual gift. They have a wide range of preferences about the kinds of messages they want to receive and what they would like to see on an organization’s Web site.

The survey was conducted last fall and had a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points. It was based on e-mail addresses of big donors provided by 23 large nonprofit organizations.

The people contacted for the survey represented 1 percent of all the e-mail addresses the charities have collected but accounted for 32 percent of the annual gifts made to the charities. The report, The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect With Your Middle and Major Donors, is available free at http://www.convio.com/wiredwealthy.