Trends in the Fundraising Sector

Takeaways
MacLaughlin:

• “When you look at what you do in your consumer life, there’s a tremendous amount of research that goes on online. I research HDTVs online, but I don’t buy it online. I still wanna go to Best Buy and see it, feel it, touch it, which makes no sense, but people behave that way.”
• “If you want to find out why online or offline isn’t working, ask where online lies in your organization. If it still sits in IT or it sits in online marketing and communications, I would guarantee you’re underperforming in your fundraising results.”
• “Facebook is not your mailing list. Write that down.”

Craver:

• “A little more than a third of gifts given online are generated by direct mail and other offline communications. A survey of DonorTrends shows that between 85 percent and 90 percent of first-time donations are made after research on a website.”
• “The reality of the use of the Internet for fundraising is that so far it has proven itself most effective on disaster relief, of being a quick collection basket ready to take in funds, and it’s being used by the health care or the disease charities pretty effectively for peer-to-peer fundraising. The rest of it has not been particularly glowing. And part of it, originally, the problem started with the lack of trust of doing the transaction on it. Then it became a matter of what type of info, what type of an appeal was sent.”
• “Part of the problem in the online was in its own making. We had a decade basically lost of kids who were hired because they could make this thing glow in the dark, but they didn’t know a damn thing about the principles of direct-response fundraising. And that’s just now being corrected.”
• “The last survey we did, 82 percent of donors, regardless of age, trusted a direct-mail appeal from an organization they knew as opposed to 46 percent the Internet.”
• “The importance of online and other channels is to keep track of it and see what’s happening. It just requires the somewhat maddening discipline of understanding where these people are coming from and what they’re giving in response.”
• “The one area demographic that most organizations ignore, and I think it’s a mistake, is what I call a recruiter or a missionary. These are the people who will reach out to friends. A friend recommending a nonprofit is the most solid lead generator or conversion effort you can make. Organizations don’t pay enough attention to them. They can spread the word, and they are important because they give 2.5 times more annually than non-recruiters. The demographics of these folks are a little younger but not much than the average donor. The thing that sets them apart is they use social networks more so you can run services about how many friends they have, etc. There’s plenty of data to enable you to do this.”