This week we are concluding our list of points from the Global Trends in Giving Report that we started in our previous blog. We hope you find it a useful tool to hone your fundraising strategy and focus your efforts on what could bring you the greatest donations.
- Communication
There seems to be a fine line between badgering people for money, and staying in regular contact. We’ve said before, people tend to not be impressed with knocks on the door or phone calls at odd hours of the day or evening. But what the data from this report did say is that donors will be more likely to give repeatedly if they receive regular communication, with information showing the work that the organisation are doing.
Donors appear to be willing to keep giving money, but they do want to see how their donation makes an impact. So let them know what their money has gone towards, and how much good it has done.
They don’t need to see charts and numbers, they want to see an impact story of how their money has made a difference. - Online Trust
Your website plays a big part in gaining people’s trust. Quite often, your website is the first impression that a person gets of a company or organisation. If it’s not organised well, user friendly and official looking then people won’t deem you as professional and thus may not trust you enough to give you their hard earned cash.
And it’s not just the presentation of your website, but the domain name as well. Research suggests that people trust websites and email addresses more when they end with .org.
So it makes a lot of sense to invest in your website and make sure all of your email signatures are consistent and professional. - Generational Differences
Think about how different you are to your parents – How do/would they give to charity and how is that different to yourself?
Fascinatingly, there are differences even between how Millennials and Generation X donate compared to Boomers. The latter are more likely to give to a Facebook campaign, whereas the former are more motivated to donate to crowdfunding campaigns.
This just highlights how important it is to really understand your target donor, and how matching your fundraising campaigns to how they are more likely to donate could improve how much you raise. - Typical Donor
We spoke last time about the ‘typical’ donor and what interests in general people who donate tend to have. The report also found there does appear to be a main ‘type’ of person when it comes to the donor community.
Of course, every organisations donor’s are slightly different, but in general you may find that they are religious females with a liberal ideology who tend to give between £50 and £500 on a yearly basis.
Causes that really tend to pull at their heartstrings are those regarding children, health and animals.
All of this sort of information helps massively when you are preparing marketing material, communicating your cause, creating fundraising strategies, and selecting event dates.
Take a look at the data you have on your donors and adjust your marketing and fundraising strategies accordingly.
Hopefully this list will have given you some points to think about. The most important thing is to really learn about your donors, take notice of them, understand them and be grateful for them.