Easier Said Than Done: 25 Random Things About Fundraising

If fundraising were a person, and he or she was on Facebook, I’d tag her/him with the nasty “25 Random Things” meme. We’d learn some surprising things about fundraising. But since fundraising itself is a mute nonentity, I’ve taken the job upon myself …

1. The oldest recorded fundraising appeal was written by St. Paul around A.D. 55. It’s an appeal to a group of church members in Greece to help impoverished church members in Jerusalem. The appeal is a masterpiece of donor-centered fundraising, spending most of its words describing the benefits of giving.

2. Race and ethnicity are not good predictors of charitable giving. Age and sex, however, are strong predictors: Women give more than men, and older people give more than younger people.

3. Someone who regularly attends a house of worship is twice as likely to give to charitable causes as someone who seldom or never does. The churchgoer gives 100 times as much to charity per year — including 50 times as much to nonreligious causes.

4. Measuring by percentage of gross domestic product, the United States gives more to private charity than do any of the world’s nations. The U.S. is followed by Israel, Canada and Argentina. The most generous European nations — Spain, Ireland and the U.K. — give less than half of what the U.S. gives on a percentage basis.

5. The most read part of a fundraising letter is the P.S. That’s why the professionals always use the P.S. to restate the letter’s call to action, rather than for the traditional afterthought.

6. Mail recipients spend more time looking at the back of the envelope than the front. Think about it: You have to face the back toward you in order to get the envelope open. A tricky way to take advantage of this is to put the recipient’s address (or the window that displays it) on the flap side of the envelope.

7. A pleasant orange scent applied to a direct-mail package does nothing to improve fundraising results.

8. More often than not, an envelope with no message on the outside gets better fundraising results than one with a message. I don’t think this is because nothing is better than something, but because most teasers are so lame we’re better off without them.

9. Most enclosures added to direct-mail packages suppress fundraising results. One of the smartest tests you can do is to remove enclosures. It not only lowers cost, but very often also improves response.

10. Direct-mail testing does not yield universal principles. It only tells you specifically what happened in your test. Only a fool or a charlatan will claim otherwise.

11. The more recently a donor gave, the more likely it is she’ll give now. “Resting” donors from opportunities to give for some period after they’ve given is one of the most revenue-negative strategies around.

12. When donors are offered choices — about how you communicate with them, where their money goes or almost anything else — their giving measurably increases. Even when they don’t exercise any of the choices offered (as most don’t), their giving is greater than the giving of those not offered any choices.

13. Typos improve fundraising results. I’m sorry, but I can’t prove that. Seriously, I can’t count the number of times we discovered an egregious typo, then waited in horror for donors to voice their wrath and confusion by not responding in droves … only to experience instead an unusually high level of giving.

My theory: Once someone finds a typo, she pays a lot more attention — and that dramatically improves the chance she’ll be moved by your message and give.

14. The working poor are the most generous Americans, giving the greatest portion of their incomes to charity of all U.S. economic groups.

15. Wealthy Americans follow in generosity, giving slightly less than the poor do on a proportional basis.

16. The rest of us? We’re way behind. But there are so many of us that the bulk of charitable giving comes from middle-class donors.

17. Donors are all-around excellent people. They are significantly more likely than nondonors to give blood, help the homeless with food or money, give up their seats to others, give directions to strangers, or return mistaken excess change to cashiers.

18. Donors also are more tolerant and open-minded than nondonors. They are less likely to be prejudiced against members of other races and religions. Compared to nondonors, they have a more favorable opinion of all kinds of groups, including labor unions, big business, environmentalists, feminists, welfare recipients, Congress and the military.

19. There is no objective evidence that there is any such condition as “donor fatigue.” Donors give extraordinarily in times of extreme need, like the Indian Ocean tsunami or Hurricane Katrina. “Fundraiser fatigue,” however, is all too real. Fundraisers routinely grow tired of urgent messaging and drift away from it, then blame the resulting drop in response on the donors. This unfortunate habit costs the nonprofit world billions of dollars a year.

20. The return on investment for charitable giving is $3.75 to the dollar. That is, for every dollar a donor gives to charity, she eventually becomes $3.75 wealthier. It’s not clear whether the dollar given directly causes the $3.75 return, but the correlation between the two is so strong and consistent that it’s obvious they are connected.

21. A dollar given to charity doesn’t just enrich the donor; it also adds more than $19 to the gross domestic product. That’s an almost unbeatable level of economic stimulus. Giving is patriotic!

22. Givers are more happy than nongivers. They’re 43 percent more likely to say they are “very happy.” Nongivers, on the other hand, are three and a half times as likely to say they’re “not happy at all.”

23. Givers are more healthy than nongivers. They are 25 percent more likely to say their health is excellent or very good than are nongivers.

24. Being a donor can transform your life.

25. So can being a fundraiser.

(Author’s note: Most of the demographic and sociographic facts given here are from the book, “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism,” by Arthur Brooks.) FS

Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle and keeper of the Donor Power Blog. Reach him at jbrooks@merkleinc.com