Your Secret Donor Hates You

Even more ominous: The next step for exasperated donors, after they’ve decided to give anonymously because they feel disrespected by their charities, is to simply stop giving. Tim has sent them a warning. He’s already revoked their right to know who he, their donor, is. If that doesn’t satisfy him, he’ll begin to revoke his gifts, because the things that led Tim to the anonymous sanctuary of online giving are the same factors that eventually cause donors to stop giving altogether. According to Penelope Burke, president of Cygnus Applied Research, the majority of American donors who stopped supporting a particular charity did so because they no longer received prompt acknowledgments of their gifts, they received no confirmation that the contributions were used as they intended, and they were given no evidence of measurable results as to what their donations had achieved.