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.
Add a comment