Donors Giving Larger Gifts, Online And Off

10:00 PM Aug 25, 2005

Target Analysis Group has released its first-quarter Index of National Fundraising Performance (this link goes to a .pdf), which is based on a survey of a few dozen very large organizations. Though it's nothing that's going to cause you to rewrite your day planner, it's enough to make water cooler chat if your development department is large enough to have a water cooler chat.

You can see the numbers for yourself -- huge spikes for international relief organizations (tsunami) and a drawdown for the advocacy sector (folks shaking off election-year hyperactivity, perhaps). What's true almost across the board is revenue growing considerably faster than donor counts, "driven upward by larger gift amounts, and not by an increase in the number of gifts per donor." In plainspeak, people still giving just once per year, but giving $40 instead of $30.

Which in turn points -- you knew this part was coming, didn't you? -- to the influence of that ubiquitous Internet, about which conventional wisdom has it that yields per gift are noticeably higher. TAG doesn't directly address online vs. offline giving in its survey, but another recent survey does just that.

The Kintera-Luth Research survey of online giving says that online donors give 50% more than offline donors over the course of the year, and that Internet giving grew 50% in 2004 as opposed to 2003. All this confirms prodigious scientific and anecdotal evidence that online giving has mainstreamed.

For all that, only 1.2% of donations took place online. But it's not only the donation page that pulls contributions; Kintera says the Internet "influenced" nearly two-thirds of all donations. More from the report (which you can access in toto in exchange for giving Kintera your purported personal information):

The percentage of people going online to visit a website before donating is greater than that that of shoppers visiting online stores before buying ... Our data shows that more than 90% of donors who are regular Internet users go online at least sometimes before donating. Over 63% of them always go online before donating.

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