Frequency Of Giving
I was browsing through the interesting ‘dashboard’ on online giving compiled by Network for Good and published monthly by the Chronicle on Philanthropy.
The latest update reported 20% more donors and 20.9% more donations in June 2017 over June 2016. My first reaction was … great to see this sizeable bump in the number of donors — perhaps the ‘Trump bump’ Roger wrote about last week.
My second reaction was to jump to the conclusion that the nonprofits reported via Network for Good must not be increasing the frequency of giving by their existing donors, because the increase in number of gifts basically mirrored the increase in number of donors.
That focused me on the chart below, reporting the distribution of donors by giving frequency (click to enlarge):
Given the push toward monthly giving that many in The Agitator family have been advocating, I calculated the percentage of total donors who were giving at least once per month (technically, given the data as organized, everyone giving 10 times per year or more) — 36,463 out of 1,350,234 donors, or 2.7%.
29,596 donors were in the monthly giving ‘sweet spot’ category of 10-14 gifts per year, or 2.2%.
Still way too low a percentage.
How does your nonprofit compare?
Tom
P.S. It won’t be until we see the October 2016 (the last ‘pre-Trump’ giving month) to October 2017 comparison that the full extent of the ‘Trump bump’ becomes more visible … at least as evidenced by online giving via Network for Good. Looking forward to that!
One response to “Frequency Of Giving”
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Being a public media organization, we definitely saw a Trump Bump in the last year. Our focus with this unusual opportunity was on member acquisition and Sustainers were our top priority. We saw a higher than usual sustainer percentage, hitting over 65% of gifts during our February drive. Around 75% of those sustainers were new donors. Our messaging on air was developed to drive this kind of giving.
If I’m getting this high a sustainer rate, with higher average giving and higher retention, I’m more ok that the frequency of gifts might not have increased.
Sustainers have been the top priority of our membership program over the last seven years, and we’ve seen their ranks grow from about 5,000 in 2010 to 55,000 currently. That’s about 40% of all our donors, and about half of our revenue.
Because we’ve gotten such a high percentage of these new donors on board as Sustainers, we hope to see less of a hit to retention. However, we’re developing special cultivation for these donors to remind them of why they joined in… proof of performance, demonstrating what their support makes possible.