Sector Report
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Fundraising Pros and cons of text-to-give “The technology is changing to adapt to the circumstances, which is social media,” says Steve Milcik, national sales manager, Donor Perfect Canada Inc. “So we’ve got things like mobile apps and mobile-responsive donation forms so that folks can give a donation on their iPhone without missing a beat. Everything is in cloud technology, so now you’ve got volunteers that can walk up to you at an event or, heck, at a Starbucks and take your credit card and swipe it through their iPhone
Steve Milcik and take a donation.” Milcik notes that while having more direct means of connecting with donors is a great thing, every channel has its own nuances and there are costs and payoffs to each.
Stop making it harder for donors to give John Lepp, partner at Agents of Good, believes that the urge to be charitable is a natural component of the human condition. “Human beings want to be part of something,” Lepp notes. “We want to be part of the tribe. I think giving is a way to be part of the tribe. “I always say it’s easy to complicate things, but it’s very difficult to simplify things. Our sector and our world have become so complicated, there are so many difficult processes to get through. We’ve John Lepp not made it easier for donors to give, we’ve actually made it harder—to give, to take the action we want them to take.” Lepp gives the example of a typical fundraising direct mail piece, where there are a number of decisions a recipient needs to make, even before they decide whether or not they want to give or not. He notes that even on the reply form alone, donors must decide whether they want to give a single gift and how much, whether they are interested in legacy giving or monthly giving, and whether they are interested in receiving the organization’s newsletter. If giving monthly, do they want to do it on the 1st or the 15th of the month? Do they want to use their Visa or provide a blank cheque? “There’s all these things, and basic marketing is—the simpler you make it for someone to make a decision, the more apt they are to make that decision the way you want them to make it. And so we always tell our clients to ask for one thing.” So if you are asking for $250, only ask for $250. “It’s all in the pursuit of more data, more information on our donors. Why? What’s the goal here? If you want to ask them for a monthly gift then do an appeal about monthly giving in a separate piece.”
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“The ways to give have expanded to meeting the needs of what social media has done to the world-wide giving psyche, so we have expanded to meet those needs,” says Milcik. “Text-to-give is wonderful for responsive causes, meaning there’s an earthquake and we need to do something now. We need to help people now. In those circumstances text-to-give is wonderful. “But organizations such as the Humane Society or the Red Cross, these types of organizations are looking to develop a long-term relationships as much as possible and with text-to-give you really can’t do that because all you’re getting at the end of the day is the money. You’re not getting much information about the person who gave you the money. So you can’t develop a relationship for more long-term development of increased fundraising with this one person. But you got the money! So it’s great for immediate response.”
Millennials are now force versus merely a source “Donor behavior was driven by one word in 2016, and that was uncertainty—economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, global uncertainty, personal uncertainty,” says Vincent Duckworth, partner at ViTrēo, “and that always impacts giving. People who have the ability to make significant gifts, in those times most of them will pause. They didn’t go broke, but they’ll pause. And everyone else is just struggling to get by.” Vincent Duckworth Duckworth notes that responsive charities who managed to effectively convey the urgency of their cause did well in 2016 and he believes there was a correlation between those who are less adverse to uncertainly giving more generously in the climate of the past year. Millennials also stepped up to the plate in significant ways. “I would say that we will look back on 2016 as one of the watersheds of Millennial giving,” says Duckworth. “I remember five years ago, even three years ago the common phrase was that Millennials don’t give because they don’t have any money. That’s not really true anymore. And they feel differently about uncertainty than previous generations. “One of the things we’ve noticed and one of the things we talk about is that intersection between technology and Millennials in 2016 and philanthropy. They are actually starting to become a force in philanthropy as opposed to just a source in philanthropy. As opposed to just a demographic they are considered to be now very quickly rising up into a category of a donor population that you would look at in terms of major gifts.”
February 2017