Back in January, Roger cited M+R’s “What the Heck Just Happened?” post about subpar year-end results.  Now, M+R is back with answers in a preview of their always helpful benchmarks.  The full post is up here and is well worth a read.  Some answers to our burning questions:

Did the tax law change mess things up?  Probably.

 For those unfamiliar, we reviewed the potential negatives and, well, not positives, but at least not-negatives of the 2017 tax bill that increased non-itemized deductions, meaning fewer people would itemize and take advantage of tax-deductible donations.

If it did hurt things, it would most likely do so among those who are making larger gifts, as the change most impacted those in the six-figure range.

So M+R looked at $500+ gifts and found those decreased 9% in December, at the same time that overall gifts increased 2%.  Since (spoiler alert for tomorrow’s post) large gifts are the only thing that’s increasing in philanthropy right now, something likely happened that caused fewer large gifts at year end.

That something could have been the tax bill.  It could have also been economic uncertainty about trivialities like “would the government ever open,” but the decline started as early as Dec. 11 before the government shutdown.  It could also have been the stock market decline in December.  But I’ll ask y’all: are you seeing an uptick in online giving now that the stock market is going up again?

Did the Trump Bump slump?  Kinda.  We were down year-over-year.  But as M+R points out, we’re still up 39% over 2014 – -this may be just a pull back to a normal increase.  Others have reported a leveling-off among those nonprofits focused most on Trump.  We talked about this in 2017 – there will be a time when the Trump Bump ends and we must save for it by investing in knowing our donors.

Are donors jumping the end-of-the-year ship for Giving Tuesday?  No, or at least not substantially: 2-3% of end-of-year donors made a gift on Giving Tuesday instead of end-of-year, but that’s been consistent over the last three years.

So some solid analysis from M+R here; hope it helps you look at your own program.  I’ll add one more item of note from M+R’s data:

We are doing a worse job of retaining our end-of-year donors.

In 2016, 43% of online donors who gave at year end in 2015 gave to Giving Tuesday, year-end, or both.  In 2017, that dropped to 40%.  Last year, it was 38%.  So our online retention of year-end donors (for year-end and year-end adjacent campaigns) has dropped about 10% in the past two years.

And before you start berating your digital staff, this isn’t unique: not to digital, not to year-end.  Retention is down all over, except one area. 

We’ll talk more about that Wednesday.

Nick