It is just about one o'clock.
I'm gonna go ahead and get us started.
But, one of the things I like to do
before we really dig into to all of the findings that we're
gonna go over today is let me know,
who you are and where you're tuning in from.
My name, if you don't know me, is Abby.
I am part of the team here at Neon One,
and I am really excited to be talking to you today about some
research that we have coming out at the end of the,
the end of the month.
And oh, good. You guys can hear me.
Hi, Mickey from Toledo and Beth for oh, Rolla.
I have some family near near Rolla. Okay. Great.
So I'm Abby. I'm coming to you from Central Florida.
I am gonna be sharing some new data with you.
We have some really exciting research that's gonna be coming
out at the end of the month.
I'm excited that there are so many people here from all over the country,
and I am really gonna try to keep us,
getting out of here at one thirty eastern.
This is a topic that I could talk to you all day about,
but I promise I will not do that.
So the whole idea that I wanna start with today is that we
need to build resilient communities.
You need to build a resilient community.
There's a lot going on in the world.
You are filling very important needs,
and you are working with people who love your cause and your
organization to do good work,
in the area that you serve.
So what I wanna talk about today a
little bit is how we think about donors
and how we define generosity.
So I have probably talked a little bit with you about this
before about the fact that we need to change the way we think
about donors a little bit.
When we think about people only as donors,
we can lose a little bit of their humanity in the process.
So,
my pledge to you today is I am going to use the word donors,
but I'm really gonna try to focus on using phrases like
people who donate because. I don't want us to lose
sight of the fact that a lot of the people that we're talking
about today are not only donors,
but they're volunteers and they're event registrants,
and they are getting involved with their favorite causes in a lot of ways.
We know that people express generosity in lots of different ways.
Boiling everyone down to just a donor can help can make it
possible for us to lose sight of all of those different
different expressions of generosity.
But what we need to do,
if we want to build resilient communities,
we need to understand all of the ways that our communities
support us, all of the ways they express our generosity,
and all of the ways that we can engage those people in multiple
different kind of formats.
So,
we're gonna talk about a few groups of people today.
This is a little overview of who we're gonna be talking about.
So the data we're about to go over together,
is gonna give us some insight into how almost a hundred
thousand people, specifically,
ninety nine thousand five hundred and twenty two people,
supported their favorite organizations between the first
day of twenty twenty and the last day of twenty twenty four.
Now something to note is that every person in this dataset is a donor.
Because of the nature of the data we looked at,
we are looking only at people who donated at least once in
this time period, but we can see also differences
in the way they donated,
and we can see overlapping behaviors, like people who,
donated but volunteered,
people who donated and purchased memberships,
people who got involved in multiple different overlapping ways.
So this is who we're gonna talk about today.
We're gonna talk about multiyear donors.
We're gonna about people who gave to multiple organizations.
We're gonna talk about people who planned some of their
giving in advance.
You'll notice I'm not gonna use the phrase planned giving.
I'll get into why, in a minute.
We're also gonna look at people who purchase memberships,
and then we're gonna look at some groups of people who
connect with their favorite causes in person,
in some a few different ways.
So this is who we're gonna who we're gonna touch on today.
First group I wanna look at are people who gave,
to organizations over an extended period of time.
So here, we wanna understand how someone's longevity with an
organization impacts their giving patterns.
So to do this, we divided the the ninety nine thousand
five hundred and twenty two people in our panel into groups,
and those groups were defined by the number of years someone
was active in supporting nonprofits
during the whole five year period included in the study.
Now it is important to note that these numbers are
donor focused, not organization focused.
We're not looking at someone who donated to a single non
profit for three years or four years or five years.
We're looking at people who supported any non profit over
this period of time.
So it is possible, for example, to have someone,
in this five year cohort
who gave to the SPCA,
one year, but they gave to the YMCA the other four years.
They would still be considered a five year donor because they
were giving all five years.
The other thing to remember is that these years don't have
to be consecutive.
There is a little bit of a difference in the way that
we're talking about these donors as opposed if as opposed
to talking about them from an organizational perspective.
Someone could have given in twenty twenty, for example,
skipped twenty twenty two or skipped twenty twenty one and
then given in twenty two, twenty three, and twenty four.
They would still be considered a four year donor because they
gave for four years.
Now we took this approach because we know that people
don't necessarily
think about their fundraising or their,
their donating behavior in terms of the calendar year when
they're giving.
Calendar years or fiscal years rarely have an impact on
someone's decision to give.
So, if we were talking from an
organizational perspective,
we may talk about someone who skipped giving in twenty twenty
one as a lapsed donor,
but they probably would consider themselves an active
donor even if they didn't give during that year,
even if it's been thirteen or fourteen months since their last gift.
So what we noticed when we when we looked at all of this is
probably not surprising to you.
There were more one year donors than two year donors.
There were more two year donors than three year donors and so on.
And you probably know this. Right?
What did surprise me was how much revenue
was attributable to people who were giving for multiple years.
So despite the fact that five year donors represented just
under twelve percent of our whole panel,
They donated forty five percent of the revenue that that
came in, in this five year period.
So what we're seeing here is that smaller and smaller groups
of people are giving more and more over time.
So this is also kind of interesting.
We saw that this happened.
We also saw that people tended to accelerate their financial
giving as time went on.
So,
we know then that five year donors didn't represent such a
large portion of those dollars simply because they completed
more transactions.
They increased the average number of dollars they gave every year.
Now this is a little tricky to explain, but I'm gonna try.
When I'm talking about average annual giving,
when I show you this graph,
what I'm I'm talking about pure averages.
So, to do that, if someone gave
money all five years,
we would take the total amount that they gave.
We would divide it by five,
and that is the average amount that they gave every year.
But that doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of the way
people's giving fluctuates over time.
So it's pretty common.
If you look at the behavior in our dataset,
it's common for someone to give a higher amount in one year and
then have to pull back a little bit the next year and then
gradually increase their giving again.
Our five year donors are probably not donating
six hundred dollars every year.
What this does show us, though,
is that people who supported their favorite nonprofits
long term tended to increase their financial generosity over time.
Another interesting thing that we found when we looked at this
group of people is that the size of someone's first gift is
not necessarily an indicator that they're going to stay
engaged for a long time.
If you look at this chart here,
you may assume that's a larger first time gift would be an
indicator that someone is more likely to support you over a
long period of time, but that's not what we found.
What we found is that for everyone,
regardless of how long they were involved in making
financial gifts to a nonprofit,
the everyone's initial or initial gift kind of hovered
around two hundred dollars across the board for every
group regardless of how long they would go on to be involved
with with, giving.
So what this tells us,
when we pull back and look at the whole picture,
what this tells us is what you have probably heard before,
retaining donors is absolutely critical to building a
resilient base of supporters.
The stability, of course, is important,
but these folks aren't just stable.
They increase their financial generosity as time goes on.
So what do you do with this then?
We we focus on retention.
The people who are in your community right now and are
actively supporting you with financial donations right now
are probably willing to increase that support over
time, but that can only happen if you are engaging them over time.
And then beyond that, because we do know that they
they are likely to increase their financial giving,
I would encourage you not only to focus on retention,
not to just keep them coming back year after year,
but to focus on cultivation and stewardship.
Look for opportunities to invite them to continue to
support your work.
Look for other opportunities to get them involved with
different forms of generosity,
and we'll look at some of those later.
So keep those things ahead in your head.
Keep them retained, but also encourage them to deepen their
engagement with your work.
Okay.
Now we're gonna look at people who supported multiple organizations.
If you have ever felt like you are competing with other
nonprofits for dollars, I hope this is encouraging to you.
Okay.
About a third of the people in our panel of donors donated to
multiple nonprofit organizations.
Interestingly, people who supported multiple nonprofits tended to make fewer
transactions than people who supported one nonprofit.
But,
so what's interesting there is that even though they are
giving to multiple organizations,
they were finishing fewer total transactions.
So that's kind of one thing to keep in your head.
But despite that fact,
despite that they were making a smaller number of transactions,
people who donated to multiple organizations
gave more dollars overall.
So they represented about half of all of the dollars despite
the fact that they're a smaller group of people.
So we also saw that this group,
people who supported multiple organizations,
increased their total giving more rapidly than people who
supported a single organization.
Now I'm gonna I'm gonna explain all this in a minute,
so stay with me here.
So remember, we're looking at different people,
not organizations.
So what I'm saying here is that people who support multiple
nonprofits gave more dollars
Even though those dollars were spread across multiple
nonprofits, they also increased their giving over time,
and that is another signal that retaining people is really,
really an important thing to prioritize.
So we have this group of people who are giving them multiple organizations.
We wanted to know, does this if does this group tend to support a single cause,
or do they support multiple different cause categories?
And to understand this,
we looked at a number of at the number of different
organizations with different. NTE codes that they supported.
Do you all know what an NTE code is?
Just let me know in the in the chat.
And maybe no.
So an NTE code is a is a code that helps,
categorize you by the type of work you do.
Maybe I'll just use cause categories instead of NTE code.
I think that's probably a little more clear.
So what we did is we looked to see how many different cause
categories people were supporting when they were
giving to multiple nonprofits.
So what we found is that this group
is deeply connected to the causes they care about.
About sixty percent of people who gave to multiple nonprofits
supported organizations with the same cause.
So, maybe they supported animal welfare.
Maybe they supported arts and culture.
Maybe they supported youth development.
They tended to support a single cause category even if they
were giving to multiple nonprofits in that category.
Most of those who gave to multiple categories only gave to two.
So what we see is that people really focus their financial
generosity on causes that are very close to them.
So what does this actually mean for you?
This means that you probably have people in your community.
You probably about a third of them who are supporting other
nonprofit organizations in addition to your own,
and that's okay.
If you feel competitive,
I would encourage you to examine why you feel competitive.
These are generous people who are dedicated to your work and your cause,
and they are willing to support you over time and to increase
their support as they engage with you.
What this tells us too is that focusing on connecting
people to your mission and your work is going to be more
compelling than time them exclusively to your organization.
They can go support other organizations.
They're gonna stay committed to the same cause,
and they they will go support other organizations
either in addition to you or if if they're disengaged from you,
they will they will direct their their passion elsewhere.
This can this can be a little difficult to hear sometimes
because your work is so important and what you're doing is so valuable.
What I hope you take from this is that the people who are
giving to you are giving to you because they're passionate
about what you're doing,
and the more you can deepen that connection to your cause and your work,
the more likely they will be to stay engaged with you over time.
Okay.
Now we're gonna talk about my favorite group, the planners.
Now I alluded to this at the beginning of the session.
You're gonna notice that I'm not using the phrase planned giving.
That is a phrase that is typically associated with
activity like estate planning.
The a planned giver may be someone who leaves you,
some money in their estate, in their will or trust.
In this case, I'm gonna use the word planner to describe two groups of
people, both of whom plan their giving in advance.
We're not talking about wills and trusts here, though.
We're talking about, the first group who are recurring donors,
and we are talking about the second group,
people who pledge money.
So recurring donors are planning to support an
organization on a regular basis for an extended period of time.
Pledgemakers are people who are planning on giving a certain
amount to a nonprofit at some point in time.
Both groups have a lot in common with each other.
Now these are two kind of small cohorts.
When I use the word cohort,
that can be kind of a technical sounding term.
A cohort is just a group of people who are all they all
share a a characteristic.
So recurring donor cohorts are people who are all recurring donors.
Our recurring donor cohort made up around just under three
percent of our panel.
Our pledge maker cohort accounted for a little less
than four percent.
Now despite the small size of each of these groups, both groups'
financial support to their favorite nonprofits was larger
or higher than the average that we saw across the whole panel.
So what I think is really interesting here, though,
is the extent to which both groups of planners overlap with each other.
Almost nine percent of recurring donors also make pledges,
and more than seven percent of people who made pledges also
created recurring gifts.
So people who like to plan really like to plan.
And I'm actually curious.
Do you see kind of a similar pattern
at your own organization?
Do you see a lot of people who are planning multiple multiple
forms of generosity?
Just let me know.
What this means for you from a you do? Awesome. Good.
I like recurring giving.
Obviously, I talked a lot about recurring giving last year,
and I love the thought that people are very intentionally
plotting how they're going to support their favorite causes.
What I would like to take or to imply here,
is that when you notice people who are signaling to you that
they're planning their giving in advance,
whether that is creating our current gift, making a pledge,
or doing something else,
make an effort to reach out to them and intentionally kind of
build relationships with them.
Look for ways to get them involved in your community and
prioritize building relationships with them.
Now that's not to say that other groups of donors don't
deserve that same level of attention.
I'm not I'll never tell you that.
But this these these are groups of people who tend to support
their favorite causes financially in a rather significant way.
So when you communicate with your planners,
be intentional about thanking them for the gifts and the
support that they are already giving you,
and then give them other ways that they can get involved.
I love Susan's comment in here. A lot, no, but some.
That that feels like a very honest answer,
and I I really like that.
Thank you, Susan.
Here's a a cool group.
How many of you have a membership program at your organization?
I'm fascinated by members.
This is not a group of people that I am as familiar with as I am donors.
We do yes. Good.
I hope this is interesting, and. I would love for you to, like,
react to what I'm gonna talk about in the chat because I'm
I'm so curious to hear what you think.
So, we do good.
Now members were we're a relatively sizable cohort.
About thirteen percent of our complete donor panel also had a
membership with at least one organization.
This is also a group that was very well represented in all of
the other groups we looked at.
So a lot of members were planners.
A lot of them attend events.
A lot of them create recurring gifts.
These are this is a really engaged group of folks.
What was interesting to me is that we found that this group
tended to give either at the same benchmark level as the
rest of the panel or slightly below them.
And I'm curious to know if you see the same pattern in your
own membership base.
Now the reason I ask that is because you're gonna hear me
say a lot that data is really good at telling us what happened.
It's not very good at telling us why it happened.
So I don't know for sure,
given the information available to me,
why people with memberships tend to give at or below
benchmarks when so many other cohorts give at slightly or
slightly higher levels.
One guess is that memberships
tend to be a little more transactional than donations.
Memberships tend to be associated with, like,
perks or benefits, whereas donations typically aren't.
So I would actually love to hear why you think this may be the case.
Do you think that,
members tend to have a more transactional relationship with
the nonprofit they're supporting?
Do we think that maybe
we need to be better about inviting members to make donations?
I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts.
So please let me know in the chat if you have any brainwaves.
Regardless of what the reason is, it is really important,
to recognize that members can stay engaged with
nonprofits for a really long period of time,
especially if they find a lot of value in that membership.
So, actually, I oh, good.. Got some comments up here.
I feel like they may feel like they have paid for a service or
access, not looking for a a relationship but access.
I think that's a really good idea.
And I like what April says here. I think I think so.
It's also a way to support on a smaller scale.
Most of our lowest level members are getting memberships
for event discounts.
I know and when I interrogated myself,
I'm a member of a local, museum,
and I bought the membership because I wanted to do what
Kelsey's members are, and. I wanted to go to an event.
I also donate, but. I haven't examined,
my donation history.
Members may assume we don't oh, this is a good one, Molly.
Members may assume we don't need donations because their
membership fees cover our overhead.
PS, it doesn't. I love that.
So for those of you who have membership programs,
here's my next question for you.
What is your average membership retention rate?
We know and, I mean, a lot of this is anecdotal.
I had a really good conversation with some folks a
couple weeks ago about this,
and I asked them the same question.
What is your average membership retention rate?
And they said they average somewhere between seventy five
percent and eighty five percent.
So what that tells us is that members,
even if they're not donating at the same financial levels that
other supporters are,
they are still a very solid base of folks to have.
Anne Marie commented seventy five percent recently lower.
That's that's right around where I was hearing people
coming in at the last the last conversation I had.
What I would encourage you to do,
if you do have a membership program and you are seeing some of these trends,
I would really encourage you to keep those constituents as
engaged as you can.
Recognize their support, of course.
They are valuable, probably kind of long term members with you.
Recognize their support,
and then give them other ways to get involved.
Ask them to donate. Invite them to attend events.
Give them the opportunity to advocate for you.
And as you do, though,
be thoughtful about how you're approaching them.
Let's see.
I can't remember who said it, but remember that, like,
they they are probably coming at
this from a slightly more transactional mindset than pure donors.
They may have this it's not bad.
That means that their relationship with you is just a
little different,
and their motivations may be a little different too.
You'll want to address those slightly different motivations
when you are inviting them to get involved in other ways.
Now the last group I wanna look at are our connectors,
and I really had a hard time coming up with a name that
described these folks very well.
Connectors are people who engage with their favorite
nonprofits outside of direct financial support.
Many of those forms of generosity are
involving actually connecting with their favorite causes in person.
So the first group we wanted to look at were our event registrants.
How many of you are running events at your organization?
I this is our largest. We are good.
This is the largest cohort of donors,
around eighteen a little over eighteen percent.
Ann Marie, you're running a hundred events a year.
Oh my gosh. Whew.
See, that is why this is probably our largest cohort of supporters.
A little over eighteen percent of the of the panel also
registered for an event.
Now, when we looked at this group,
we and we wondered why it was so large,
it's probably because of what you all are telling us.
This is a tried and true way not only to raise money,
but also to build community.
So when we looked at our event registrants,
we found that over time,
they gave far above the panel benchmarks.
What I really love is if you look at,
people who donated for one year and people who donated for two
years, they gave pretty close to the panel benchmark.
But in year three, it just really accelerated.
Now this finding, like a lot of our other findings,
kind of begged the question.
Are people more financially generous because they attend
events, because they're connecting with us in real life,
because they're hearing impact stories and seeing facilities
and and engaging with folks that way,
or are people who are already financially generous more
likely to be the ones going to events?
There's not a simple answer to that question.
But what we can say confidently is that there is a strong
correlation between attending or at least registering for
events and giving financially, generously.
Kelly has one of their largest events coming up in June.
I am so proud of you for being here with that on the horizon.
I know events can be an absolutely tremendous amount of
work, and I'm very excited that you're here.
Okay. Next question.
How many of you have volunteers,
working with your organization?
Our volunteer cohort was a small but mighty group of people.
This was a little over it was about three point seven five percent.
I'm glad we see so many volunteer,
volunteer people in here.
That makes me really happy.
What I loved about volunteers,
and I'm curious to hear what you think about this,
they gave at or around benchmark levels for the first
three ish years,
and then they really accelerated their giving in
years four and five.
So I'm curious, actually.
Do you invite your volunteers to donate?
Do you invite them to donate in a way that's different than the
way you engage people who are not volunteering?
The reason I ask is because this is a group of people that
are not only generous with their finances,
they're also generous with time,
and they're generous in giving you access to their skills.
If you are not intentionally building a volunteer retention
plan, now is the perfect time to start.
The other thing I really love,
and we're gonna touch on this in the next slide,
there is a lot of overlap between volunteers and people
who participated in peer to peer fundraising events.
So, actually, speak of peer to peer
fundraising events,
how many of you run peer to peer fundraising campaigns?
This is the smallest cohort in our study. We do oh, cool.
Ruthie and Rhonda.. Awesome. I love that.
This is the smallest cohort in our in our panel.
One thing I loved about this group is that,
they did tend to give above panel averages.
However and I'm curious to see if you see this trend in your
own in your own community.
They tended not to be
they their their giving tended to be fairly static for the
first few years that they were engaged,
and then the longer they were engaged,
it kind of accelerated.
And I'm curious to see, if you see that same pattern.
What this signals to me is that there might be opportunity
to improve participant retention year over year,
and then to steward those people a little more
intentionally, especially if they're also volunteering.
The other thing that I would love to hear your thoughts on
is if people are,
giving at a more static level because
they are so involved,
and then if that involvement encourages more financial
generosity later down the line.
Curious to hear your thoughts. Okay.
The big thing that I want you to take from this is that
generosity doesn't always show up in transaction reports,
and especially if you are using lots of different tools to
manage different activities.
If you are using one system for volunteers and a different one
for peer to peer and a different one for donations,
it can be kind of hard for you to get a real clear picture of
all of the ways these people are supporting you not only
online through actual donation transactions,
but through volunteering and raising money for you and and
connecting with you at events.
This is also especially hard, I think,
if you have multiple teams managing your interactions with these groups.
But what I want you to take from this is that people who
are supporting you in these ways are deeply dedicated to
your cause and are looking for opportunities to support you.
I love what Shay called out here.
Peer to peer retention and stewardship is so challenging.
We find a lot of folks who wanna give once to support a
friend or a family member and then lose interest when that
person is no longer fundraising for us.
That is really hard,
and that is one of the trickiest parts of peer to peer
fundraising, and it's absolutely true.
So what does this mean?
This means that if you can if you can,
do take steps to get a complete picture of all of the people
who are supporting you.
These folks, your volunteers, your peer to peer fundraisers,
and even your event attendees are willing to support you in
overlapping ways.
But especially with people who are raising money for you
through a peer to peer event or even volunteers,
if that generosity that they're showing you,
even though you can't really capture in a transaction
report, If that generosity isn't recognized or celebrated,
it is more likely that they will disengage from you before
they can reach their full potential.
So love them. Show them a little extra love.
Now we're right at time, so. I'm gonna go through this next,
step really fast before I give you an opportunity to sign up
to get this research.
I wanna end on something beautiful.
I know that I just shared a lot of data with you in a very
short period of time.
So and that can be overwhelming.
I want to give you something encouraging that I hope will
give you some some feel good feelings for the rest of the day.
People are even more generous than we can capture in this report.
The data that we looked at does show that there are
people who are exceedingly generous.
They will grow their generosity both financially and
nonfinancially over time,
but we can only capture part of people's true generosity.
This data does not include people who are doing other
things in other platforms.
We may have someone who's donating only to one nonprofit in this dataset,
but they're giving in a lot of different other places.
We may have supporters who
volunteered every week for years and years,
but if they didn't make a single donation transaction,
their generosity would not be neatly captured in this report.
And what we didn't capture,
and a lot of you may also be looking for ways to understand
this, we have a hard time capturing forms of generosity
that don't neatly fall into a category in a CRM or a database.
We can't look at things like people who sign petitions for
you and people who talk about you to their friends and family
and people who boost your visibility on social media by interacting
recommend your services to people who need it.
We are looking at a very small slice of generosity,
and we're finding some really beautiful patterns in the way
that generosity grows and changes over time.
Regardless of whether or not people are
captured in this report,
regardless of whether or not people are supporting you by
advocating for you or supporting you in non financial
ways, people are generous.
Please give them the opportunity to show you that
and celebrate that generosity at every opportunity you have.
Okay.
That was a lot.
I'm gonna answer some questions if you have any,
but I did wanna offer this this is a very high level,
look at some of the key findings from the report that
we're gonna be publishing at the end of the month.
If you would like to be on the list to receive that report
when it goes live, this QR code is where you can go, to do that.
Actually, I am going to,
make sure in the follow-up email that I'm gonna send you
tomorrow morning,
I'm gonna include a link that you can click to,
to get your name on the list.
That email is going to go out tomorrow morning.
You're gonna get a link to this recording.
You're gonna get a link to the slides.
You're gonna get a link to where you can do the QR.
So if you are like. Jeanette or Janet,
my phone also really has a hard time with QR.
Don't worry.
I'm gonna send you the link tomorrow so you will not miss out.
Just keep an eye out on your email for me.
Okay.
I know we're out of time.
Are there any questions. I can answer for you?
I do wanna thank each of you for being so talkative in the chat with me.
I always love actually having conversations with people
instead of just running through numbers.
So, I'll keep an eye out on that,
just for the time being.
But, thank you all so much, for being here.
I know, especially those of you who are planning events and running
campaigns, I know that you're extremely busy,
and I really appreciate you being here today to to
celebrate how generous people are.
Alright, everyone.
Thank you so much. Bye.