Hey, everybody. Like Heather said, my name is Abby.
I work with Neon One,
and I am really excited to talk to you today about a topic that
is near and dear to my heart,
and it is how we define generosity and why it's
probably time for us to rethink what we call generosity and how
we approach our donors.
Before I get super into it,
I wanted to just give myself a little bit or give you a little
bit of background about who I am and why I'm talking to you today.
I've been in the nonprofit tech sector for a little over twelve
years at this point, and I've developed a really deep passion
for understanding people who donate to their favorite causes,
what donors want from the nonprofits they support,
what motivates them, and then more importantly,
what you can do with that information and those insights.
I do a lot of writing and speaking, and,
the information that I'm gonna show you today comes from,
a a report that we published just last month.
It feels like it's been forever,
called the generosity report data backed insights for
resilient fundraising.
So I have a lot to share with you today.
But the big thing that I wanted to talk about first is why I
want to talk to you about,
what how we define generosity and what that actually means.
Question.
I see someone in the questions module say that,
they can't hear me.
Can everyone else hear me, or is it just me?
Am I is something wrong?
Oh, thumbs up. Thumbs up. Okay.. Okay. Just checking. Okay.
So let's get back to it.
We need resilient communities because I don't know if you all
have read the news lately.
The headlines are really intense.
There's economic uncertainty.
There have been conversations this year about federal funding and grants.
People are really, like, looking for ways to build
strong resilient communities of supporters who will come
together, support their favorite nonprofits,
that's you, and keep them going so y'all can offer the
really, really valuable programming and services that you do.
But let's talk first about why
resilience is so important right now.
Let me know if give me a thumbs up if you're familiar with the
Fundraising. Effectiveness Project.
Just I'm gonna share some some statistics with you from the
Fundraising Effectiveness. Project. Okay. Good.
I see some see some thumbs up. Love it. Okay.
So the Fundraising. Effectiveness Project
just published their q four twenty twenty four report.
So what this report does is it sums up a lot of the think of
it as like a report card for how the nonprofit industry was
doing at the end of last year.
By the end of last year, you'll notice we've got,
the dollars are up.
So philanthropic dollars are up three point five percent over
twenty twenty three.
However,
the number of individual donors was down,
and donor retention was down.
So when we look at this a little deeper,
we see some really interesting patterns.
What we see so what what what the they've done in this report
is they've broken down donor groups based on their gift size.
So and we they track the number of people in those different
cohorts or groups of donors based on their donation size
and how they've engaged with with folks over the last year.
So you'll notice that major and supersized donors have gone
up, but micro donors, small donors,
and midsize donors have all gone down.
You'll also notice that these three groups,
all of which have declined over the last year,
represent by far the largest percentage of donors.
So what we have here is a situation where nonprofits like
you are getting more money than they did the year before, which is good.
We don't wanna downplay that.
But that money is increasingly coming from a very small
percentage of donors who are making major gifts.
Now I am never gonna tell you that major donors are not important.
What I am going to tell you is that overreliance on a handful
of major donors can be really risky.
Because if you're relying on just a few major donors or
supersized donors,
that means that a large percentage of your revenue is
dependent upon a very small group of people.
So if something happens,
if one of your major donors decides not to make a gift or
if they choose to direct that gift somewhere else,
that means that you are you're missing out on a significant
portion of your budget.
So what the goal is is to build a small resilient community,
not a small resilient community,
a resilient community of smaller donors
where you have a lot of smaller donors.
So you mitigate the risk that is that you're facing if a
major donor doesn't make a gift for whatever reason.
So
to recap, dollars are up, and that's good,
but there's a lot of opportunity for nonprofits to
mitigate risk by building a community of supporters who
will help them be not those nonprofits be very resilient.
So what does this require?
It's very easy to say, like,
we need to prioritize building a base of smaller donors so we
can mitigate the risk of a major donor disengaging with us.
But what does that actually mean,
and how do you go about it?
The biggest thing is that we need to to change the way we
think about donors.
So if you're looking to build a stable community,
but we see in benchmarks that those individual donors that
will make up that small stable community are disengaging.
It tells us that the way we're currently thinking about
donors, treating donors,
and even defining generosity needs to be recalibrated.
I'm kind kind of a a word nerd.
I was telling Heather earlier,
I don't actually have a background in this kind of research.
My background I have a poetry background.
So I'm very passionate about words and the words we use and
why we use the words we use.
So you'll see here highlighted in orange,
the talking point that. I've been on all year.
We need to stop thinking about capital d donors,
and we need to start thinking about the fact that those
donors, those people that we talk about,
it's kind of a nebulous,
faceless concept that are all defined
just by their their philanthropic contributions.
These are people who do make donations,
but they're also people who exercise their generosity in a
lot of different ways.
And a lot of those expressions of generosity
overlap and influence each other.
So your organization may think about donors as one
block of of people and volunteers as another block of people,
and peer to peer participants as another block of people.
And there's there's not a lot of overlap in those blocks when
you are talking about, these these groups of supporters.
But our data show that the blocks aren't as well defined
as we like to think.
There's a lot of overlap and movement between them.
So when you start to grasp all of the varied overlapping
diverse ways that your supporters
show their generosity to you and show their support of your
work, you're gonna be able to retain them and engage them
more effectively.
So today, I want to talk to you about a a few different
kinds of supporters and what they do and what it means for
your organization.
So I'm gonna go over a couple different groups.
This is who we're gonna talk about today.
And I wanna emphasize first and foremost that when I'm talking
about donors here, I am talking exclusively about people who
give less than five thousand dollars annually to nonprofits.
This is to all nonprofits.
So,
if they're donating to three different organizations,
their total contributions to those three different
organizations doesn't go over five thousand dollars.
So if you remember that slide I showed you earlier,
when we talked about, micro, small, and mid sized donors,
the cap for mid sized donors was five thousand dollars.
This is the group of people we're looking at.
So I'm gonna show you a bunch of data,
and I wanna tell you that the data comes from everyday donors
who give five thousand dollars or less.
They donated to organizations between the first of January in
twenty twenty and the very end of twenty twenty four.
So it's a five year period.
There were in this group that we're gonna talk about,
there were ninety nine thousand five hundred and twenty two.
I got a question once,
why didn't you just go for an even one thou a hundred thousand?
And we did.
And then, when we cleaned up some some outliers and some kind of
anomalous accounts,
we we landed at at just over ninety nine thousand five hundred.
And then so we looked at at the blocks.
So you're gonna hear me talk about benchmarking.
When I talk about benchmarks,
I'm talking about the whole body of supporters,
all ninety nine thousand five hundred and twenty two people.
Then what we did was we split people up into different groups.
You're gonna hear me use the word cohort.
If you're not familiar with that term,
a cohort is a group of people all defined by a shared characteristic.
So donors are a cohort.
But we're also I'm gonna talk to you about multiyear donors,
and I'm gonna go into why I choose to use that phrase.
We're gonna look at donors who supported multiple organizations.
We're gonna talk about people who plan their giving in advance.
I do wanna clarify I'm not talking about planned giving.
I'm not talking about,
including an organization in their estate plan.
I'll go more into what what. I'm talking about there.
We're gonna look at people who were members with their
preferred organizations,
and then we're gonna look at at my personal favorite group, connectors.
Those are people who attend events, volunteer,
or participate in peer to peer campaigns.
So,
I want to note, like, everyone here is a donor.
So if someone is only a volunteer but they haven't made
a gift, they're not reflected in this dataset.
But when we look at all of these different people,
we can see differences in the ways they donated.
We can see overlapping behaviors,
and then we can see how those behaviors influence their
financial generosity.
Alright.
So the first group I'm gonna talk about is multiyear donors.
Okay. So I'm gonna explain this slide a little bit.
The number so we looked at people who donated for one
year, people who donated for two years, for three years, etcetera.
There are a couple little nuances that I wanna explain here.
So here, we looked at donors.
We didn't look at the organizations they supported.
So I'm gonna I like using people's names.
So I'm gonna say, like, okay.
Somebody who was a two year donor may have given to Marine,
the first year and then given to. Erica's organization the second year.
They're still considered a two year donor even though they
only gave to individual organizations for one year.
So if that makes sense.
We looked at the number of active years.
We didn't look at the number of active years per organization.
So it is very possible for Sharon to have donated all five years,
but she would only have supported maybe an organization
for one or two years.
Another thing to remember is that these years don't need to be consecutive.
So if I donated to the. ASPCA in twenty twenty,
but I skipped twenty twenty one and then I gave again in twenty
two, twenty three, and twenty four, I'm a four year donor.
And I took this approach when we were cutting the data this way because
I people don't think about the calendar year that they're
donating in when they make a gift.
Right?
I don't make a gift because it's the end of the fiscal
year, and I suspect my my favorite organization wants a gift.
I don't consider myself a lapsed donor necessarily.
If I gave in twenty twenty,
I didn't have the money to make a gift in twenty twenty one,
but I gave again in twenty twenty two.
I'm not a lapsed donor in my own head.
I've just I've had a period of time where I couldn't make make that gift.
So I may consider myself an active donor for three years
even if I missed a year.
So that's why I've I've defined it this way.
Now all of these caveats to say,
we noticed something that 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.
So you probably know this.
This is donor retention in action.
What was surprising to me, anyway,
was just how much revenue was donated by people the
longer they stayed involved in philanthropic activities.
So only twelve percent, less than twelve percent,
gave two nonprofits all five years in the dataset.
But this eleven point seven percent of people accounted for
forty five percent of all dollars donated in this five year period.
A tiny little percentage of people donated almost half of
all of the money given to nonprofits during this during this phase.
Just around ten percent gave for four years.
They accounted for a little over eighteen percent of revenue.
This this really shows us that longevity,
the length of time with which someone is active and
supporting their favorite causes with financial donations
is a greater indicator of the financial impact that
they will make on their on their favorite causes.
Now this is probably not super surprising to you.
This is what I I did love.
I
won't I won't get too deep in the weeds here, but,
what I did want to know is that five year donors, for example,
didn't represent didn't account for forty five percent of all
of all guests just because they completed more transactions.
What they did instead was they increased the average
number of dollars they donated every year.
So this is a little bit of a tricky thing I'm gonna try to
explain without keeping us here all day.
But when I'm talking about average annual giving in this slide here,
I am talking about pure averages.
So if, where's someone new,
if Michelle gave all five years,
I just took the total amount that they that they donated
over that five years and I divided it by five to find the average.
That doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of the way
people's giving fluctuates over time.
It's really common for someone to get a lot one year and then
pull back a little bit the next year.
We saw that happen in twenty twenty.
People stepped up their giving, gave a lot in twenty twenty,
and then they pulled back a little bit in twenty twenty one.
Our five year donors here are probably not giving six hundred
and six dollars every year.
But what this does show us is that people who support their
favorite nonprofits long term tend to increase their
financial generosity over time.
So if you've ever wondered, like, oh, well,
is donor retention, like,
really worth the amount of effort that I'm putting into it?
The data says that, yes, it really is worth it.
Something that I also found really interesting is that the
size of someone's very first gift to a nonprofit is not a
good indicator of how much they're going to give over time.
So if you looked at this chart here,
you may assume that a larger first time gift would be an
indicator that someone is more likely to support your
nonprofit for a long period of time,
but that is absolutely not what we found.
The average initial donation for all groups of people,
regardless of how long they stayed involved,
was around two hundred dollars.
So this just reiterate something that you probably
heard people like me yell about for years and years.
Retaining donors is absolutely critical.
It there it's not only critical because you want to build a
group of sustainable, like,
long term supporters that come back and give you their their
support year after year after year.
They're not just stable.
They are increasingly generous as time goes on.
So next time you have to go to your board and you have to ask
for support for a recurring giving campaign or a donor
appreciation campaign or a donor retention campaign,
you can point to this slide and say Abby Jarvis at Neon one
found data that show that the longer we keep these people
involved, the more they will they will give us over time.
So what do you actually do with this?
Please focus on retention.
The people in your community are probably very likely to
increase their financial support over time.
That can only happen if you stay engaged with them and you
let them know why they should increase their their financial generosity.
But beyond this, focus on cultivation and stewardship.
Instead of just focusing on keeping people involved,
focus on finding new ways to invite them to support your work.
I'm gonna go into why in a minute.
But how can you get these people more involved in your work?
How can you invite your donors to connect with you in person,
online?
How can you invite them to be advocates for you and your community?
This the deeper the level of engagement you have with them,
the easier it will be to retain them.
And the longer you retain them,
the easier it will be to engage them in different ways.
So it's a it's a self perpetuating cycle.
Okay.
Let's look at people who supported multiple organizations.
Give me a thumbs up, please,
if you have ever felt like you are competing with other
nonprofits for dollars.
If you've this comes up a lot.. Lots of thumbs up. Thumbs up.
Thumbs up. Okay.
This is really common.
So if you ever feel like you're competing with someone for
dollars, I want you to know the next few slides,
I I think that's gonna make you feel a little better. Okay.
So about a third of the people in our panel of ninety nine
thousand five hundred and twenty two donors donated to
multiple nonprofits.
So this group now we're gonna go into some weird weird stuff.
They tended to make fewer transactions
than people who only supported a single nonprofit.
So even though they were giving to more than one organization,
they were giving fewer total gifts.
Now that said,
the people who donated to multiple organizations gave
more dollars overall.
So they represented about half of the revenue even though they
were a smaller group.
So this means that, I need a different name.
So Mara is giving maybe two gifts every year,
whereas I'm giving three gifts to a single organization,
but Mara's gifts are larger,
and they account for more of the total revenue given.
This group also tended to increase their giving more
rapidly than people who supported a single organization.
So and remember, we're looking at people here.
We're not looking at organizations.
So what I'm saying is that this group gave more dollars,
but those dollars were spread across multiple organizations.
But I'm also telling you that this group increased their
giving over time, so retaining people is critical.
So if you are one of the many people that gave me a thumbs
up, you feel like you're competing for dollars,
The people who are supporting multiple nonprofits are going
to give you their support.
They're going to grow their support over time.
You don't have to feel like you are competing because they are
willing and able to give to multiple nonprofits.
So here we have this group of people who are supporting
multiple organizations.
We wanted to know if this group tended to support a single
cause or if they're giving to multiple different causes.
And to understand this,
we looked at the number of organizations with different
NTE codes that they supported.
So an NTE code, if you're not familiar with it,
is a code that's given to you.
It's an IRS code, I believe,
that is it helps people identify the cause that you are associated with.
So an arts organization would have one NTE code.
A conservation organization would have a different one.
That's how we can tell the kind of causes that people support.
So what we found is that this group and their behaviors
signal to us that people generally are really passionate
about one or two causes.
So,
about sixty percent of people who gave to organizations gave
to organizations with the same cause.
Take me, for example.
I'm really passionate about conservation.
I support three different organizations that all are
dedicated to conservation.
Most of the people who gave to more than one cause only gave
to two, and then a a very small number or
percentage of people donated to three or more organizations.
So what this tells us is that people really focus their
generosity on the causes they care about,
not necessarily organizations and single organizations they care about.
So what does this actually mean?
What this means is that you probably have a large group of
people in your community,
probably about a third of your donors,
who are also supporting other organizations, and that's okay.
These are generous people.
They are dedicated to your work,
and they are willing to increase their support as they
stay engaged with you.
So what this also tells you,
and I know that you've that a lot of you are probably
actively doing this, focus on connecting people to
your mission and your work more than you focus on connecting
them to your nonprofit.
They can go support other nonprofits, and they do.
And that can be kind of a blow to our egos.
But when you remember that someone
is passionate about your work and the outcomes you make
possible and not necessarily your organization itself,
that means that you have a real opportunity to connect them to
your cause and show them how they're making a difference in
an area that they really care about by supporting you.
So I hope this is reassuring to you.
If you feel like you're competing,
please know you you're probably not competing for a limited
number of dollars.
These people are very willing to support more than one
organization, and they will do so very generously.
Okay. I said this is one of my favorite groups.
We're gonna we're gonna look at at our planners.
Now you'll notice I didn't use the phrase planned giving.
That is a phrase that is usually associated with
activities like,
estate planning and providing for nonprofits in someone's
will or their trust.
In this case, I'm using the word planner to describe two distinct groups of
people with a lot of overlap.
Can't wait to talk to you about that.
One group is people who set up recurring donations.
Can y'all react if you have a recurring giving program or if
you're thinking about it?
I always love to know. Okay.. We got some yeah. Okay.
We love to see it.. We love to see it.
So one group is a is recurring donors.
The other group are people who pledge to donate to a
nonprofit, and these two groups have a ton in common.
Now these are small cohorts.
They're small groups, but together,
they achieved some really amazing things.
So recurring donors made up just shy of three percent
of our total panel,
and people who made pledges accounted for just over three
and a half percent.
That actually really surprised me.
I'm a millennial, so we really love recurring giving.
I don't really know anybody who makes pledges,
so I was fascinated by the fact that pledge makers were a
larger cohort than recurring donors.
But what I thought was really interesting here is that the
two cohorts overlapped a lot.
So almost nine percent of recurring donors also made pledges,
and more than seven percent of pledge makers also made
recurring donations.
Both groups gave above the benchmarks that we used,
based on the donation patterns of all ninety nine thousand
five hundred and twenty two people.
So what does this mean?
This means that planners,
people who signal that they plan their their financial
gifts in advance,
warrant a little extra love?
Okay. Oh, good question.. How do you define a pledge?
So a pledge is handled a little differently in our system.
So some nonprofits use a little bit differently.
A pledge is really someone indicating to a nonprofit that
they are going to give a certain amount of money by a certain date.
So a lot of times people split up or split their pledges
into multiple payments.
So,
this is just an example.
If, Maureen, you're running a capital campaign and I wanna support you,
I pledge to give a thousand dollars over the course of your
capital campaign.
I may choose to make five payments of two hundred dollars
so I can I can hit that pledge
and then and the the total pledge amount,
but spread it out?
Some people will pledge to give a thousand dollars to a capital
campaign and just make the gift all at once.
So there are a few different definitions, but at its heart,
a pledge is a a formalized promise to give a specific amount of money.
I hope that hope that clears it up.
But what this does, just like recurring giving,
this the pledges signal that people are planning their
financial gifts in advance,
and these groups warrant a little extra attention.
Now I that is not to say that other supporters don't deserve
a little extra love.
I will never ever ever tell you that.
But that does mean that this these are groups of people who
tend to financially support their favorite causes in a very significant
way, including significant financial support.
And when you communicate with these people,
do a couple of things.
Be intentional about thanking them for their support and look
for ways to get them more deeply involved in your community.
I could talk to you about this forever.
There are all kinds of, like,
cool research pieces out there that talk about how people who
plan their giving in advance and who's tend to to offer
their support over long periods of time.
That's a signal for potential major donor relationships.
That is a signal that someone may be willing to do an actual
planned gift, put you in their in their estate plan.
This is a really, really beautiful,
highly dedicated group of people.
I could talk to you about them forever,
but that's not what you're here for.
And so let's look at members.
How many of you can you give me a thumbs up or whatever if you
have a membership program?
That'll help me decide how much time I wanna spend here.
Now a lot of places oh, good. Good. Good.
Good. Thumbs up. Don't have memberships. Okay. Cool.
Well, so not everyone has has a membership,
but I I think members are some of they're not necessarily my favorite,
but they're one of the more interesting cohorts to me.
And it's also one of the largest cohorts.
Around thirteen percent of our total panel also had a
membership with at least one organization,
and this was a group that was actually really well
represented in every other cohort we looked at.
So members also attended events, made recurring gifts,
did all kinds of stuff.
So,
I love it. I love a line graph.
So members are interesting to me.
So we found that this group tended to give either at
benchmark levels or slightly below those benchmark levels.
One thing that you're gonna hear me say a lot is that data
is very good at telling you what happened.
It is not as good at telling us why something happened.
I cannot tell you for sure why people with memberships tend to
give at or below benchmarks.
So this blue line is a benchmark.
The this line here is membership giving,
and this is total giving.
So why do we think that people are actually giving a little
below the benchmarks here?
Well, we think I think,
based on some educated guessing,
that memberships tend to be more transactional than donations.
Memberships are typically associated with perks and
benefits, and that's not usually the case with donations.
I would actually love to hear from you.
If you have other ideas about why this may be the case,
you can drop your your insights in the the question module.
But I know myself, I'm a member of at my local art museum,
and I purchased that membership because I get discounts on
classes, and I get to go to events,
and I can get I can it there are some there are some perks and benefits.
I suspect that's a I mean,
that's a fairly transactional relationship here.
Now I may be willing to donate, and, indeed,
all of these people who are members are also donors,
but I may not give as much because I have a I have a
different relationship with the organization I'm supporting.
Now regardless of the fact that this group is giving at or
below benchmarks,
it is important for you to hear me when I say this.
Members are very important even if they're not giving at very high levels.
One of the reasons they're so significant
is because especially if they find really great, like,
value in the membership that they've purchased,
they can stick around for a really long time.
This is kind of anecdotal, but I asked some people once, you know,
what's the average length of time that someone remains a member with you?
And a lot for a lot of them, it was eight or more years.
Getting donors to stay engaged for eight or more years is much
more challenging.
So they may not be giving at, like, crazy levels,
but they are a very stable, reliable,
supportive group of people.
So if you have a membership program,
I would really encourage you to look for ways to keep that
membership engaged.
Recognize the support that they give you.
Recognize that they are committed to to supporting you
and staying engaged long term.
I if you are worried about asking them to donate,
please don't be.
Invite them to donate.. Invite them to attend events.
Give them the opportunity to advocate for you.
And as you do, though, remember
that you wanna be thoughtful about how you approach this group.
They have a different relationship with you than
other kinds of donors might,
and their motivations may be a little different too.
So when next time you ask your membership for a donation,
think through the messaging and and how you invite them to to
get involved and why they may want to.
Alright.
The last group of people I wanna look at,
and we're gonna spend some time here because they're they're a
beautiful group.
I wanna look at connectors.
These are people who engage with their favorite causes
outside of direct financial support,
and many of these folks are engaging with their favorite
causes in person.
And when I talk about redefining generosity,
this is a lot of times the the group of people I have in my
head because,
I noticed that a lot of times people don't consider some of
these things to be donations or truly true generosity.
A lot of times we define generosity as a donation,
but it can take other forms.
Event registrants event registrations are really
interesting concept.
If we define event registration as a generous act,
what does that mean when you're planning your events and how
you're defining your generous community?
Event registrants were the largest cohort in our in our panel.
A little over eighteen percent of of this group don't or both
donated and attended an event.
This is almost certainly because events are a tried and
true method of building community and raising money.
But very frequently, when. I talk with fundraisers,
they don't necessarily consider,
an event registrant to be a a generous donor.
But when we looked at this group, we saw that over time,
they gave far above the panel benchmarks.
Now
this finding kind of begs the question, like,
are people who are more financially generous going to
events, or are events making people more financially generous?
Now that's there's not a simple straightforward
answer to that question,
but what we can very confidently say is that there
is a strong correlation between event attendance and increased giving.
I also wanna point out here,
if you notice that in the first year,
people's this is kind of standard.
People gave at around at the benchmark in the first year.
They gave a little bit above the benchmark in the second year,
and then their giving just really accelerated after the third year.
So what we can see is that people who are registering for
events and giving,
their generosity in terms of their financial generosity
really accelerates the longer they're engaged.
Great question from. Maureen. No, Maureen.
We don't have, demographic information for this group.
So I I can't make any any guesses about the average age
of this group, unfortunately.
Let's talk about volunteers.
This is fascinating to me.
Okay.
Volunteers were a relatively small cohort,
and I want to clarify why.
If your heart sank when you a little bit when you saw that
three point seven five percent of our panel are volunteers,
I don't want you to think that this means that people aren't volunteering.
All this means is that people all of this information came out of NeonCRM.
So we if you have an organization who is using a
different software to manage their volunteers,
we won't necessarily see that information.
So I suspect that the percentage of people who are
donors in this panel and are also volunteers is higher.
I just can't see that data right now.
What I loved about this is that folks in this group
generally gave at benchmark levels for around three years.
Now you'll notice in the first year,
they gave a little below the panel benchmarks.
And then right at the benchmarks in the second year,
right, benchmark in the third year.
And then again in the fourth and fifth year,
third financial generosity just really takes off.
So I have some recommendations for you.
One,
are the data global?
Brigitte, because all of this data comes from the Neon One
system, all of the data is from, nonprofits and donors.
Well, they're all from nonprofits who are based in the US and a few in Canada.
There may be some some donors represented
in this dataset who are from outside our service area.
But because the organizations that we serve are in the US and Canada,
I would suspect that the vast majority of the donors are are
in the US and Canada.
What I think is really fascinating here there are two
two big takeaways.
A lot of organizations. I work with,
have different teams managing their volunteers and their donors.
And a lot of times,
there is some trepidation on both both groups about asking
volunteers to donate.
And if you have ever wondered if you can safely ask your
volunteers to make gifts to you,
financial donations,
please hear me when I say that these people are absolutely
willing to do both.
And then as time goes on, their generosity,
as is the case with the rest of the benchmark, will increase.
So I know that there's a lot of trepidation around asking
volunteers to donate and even sometimes around asking donors to volunteer,
but we see a really strong correlation in increased giving
as volunteers stay engaged with their favorite causes.
I would also say when you take a look at this,
there this group's giving, again,
really accelerates in years four and five.
So if you don't have a volunteer retention plan,
now is the perfect time to put one together.
We talk a lot about donor retention.
There's not as much of a an industry wide conversation
about volunteer retention.
But if you retain your volunteers
and invite them to support you financially,
you can achieve some really amazing things with this group.
And then this is kind of a fun fact.
There was a lot of overlap between volunteers and peer to
peer fundraisers, which, coincidentally,
is the next group of people we're gonna look at.
Let me know by reacting. Do you run a peer to peer program?
Do any of you do that?
This was a small couple. Cool. Okay.
This was a small cohort.
This is less than one and a half percent.
And that's because I think as it's kind of indicative of the
reactions that we're getting in the in there.
Not everybody runs peer to peer.
Most people run events,
which is why that was such a large cohort.
This is a this is a relatively tiny cohort.
In fact, it was the smallest in our study.
So I do wanna clarify a couple of things before I really get into it.
Here, I'm looking at people who participated
in peer to peer campaigns as a fundraiser.
So if you're not familiar with peer to peer fundraising,
this is the the fundraising format where you have community
advocates or partners,
like Vicky here.
I wanna explain this.
Volunteers are great planned giving prospects.
That's very true.. High five, Vicky.
Please we love volunteers.
They they've done some really phenomenal things.
Okay.
So here I'm saying if Vicky is is participating in a peer to
peer event for me, she is signing up to raise money for my organization.
So Vicky will create a peer to peer fundraising page.
They will reach out to their friends, family, colleagues,
whoever, and invite them to donate to her well,
to the nonprofit through her.
So I'm talking about participants,
not donors who gave to people like Vicky.
I'm talking about the participants, not the donors.
So one thing that was really fascinating here, and I wish, again,
I had more time to dig into all of the crazy nuances here,
but peer to peer participants tended to give above panel averages.
So you can see that in this line.
But if you look at the report itself where I'm able to go
into much more detail,
their annual giving remained really static for the first
three years that they were engaged.
So this shows a pretty pretty upward curve when we look at
their total giving over time.
But when we looked at,
year one giving, year two giving, and year three giving,
it all stayed static, whereas most other cohorts,
it went up every year.
We also found that most peer to peer participants,
even if they stayed engaged with a nonprofit over time,
they only participated in a peer to peer event one,
maybe two years.
So what this indicates to us is that there is probably a lot of
room to improve participant retention
and to steward relationships with those participants.
So I won't get on a peer to peer soapbox.
What I will say for those of you who run peer to peer campaigns,
you probably know how much work it is to get a new participant
up to speed, familiar with your fundraising platform,
encourage them to actually start sending emails and
posting on social and talking to their friends.
It's a lot of work to get them kind of going.
When they come back, though, they're much more effective.
They're much more confident.
They tend to raise a lot more money.
So if you are running peer to peer
campaigns and you see, like we do,
that people tend not to stay engaged up to the first year,
what you can what you can glean from that is that you can put a
little extra effort now into giving those first time
participants a really cool, very engaging experience.
And when they come back,
not only will they increase their donations to your
nonprofit that they make alone,
they'll also be more effective as peer to peer fundraisers.
So a lot of room to improve there,
especially if they're volunteering.
We saw a huge percentage of these peer to peer participants
also were volunteers.
So anything you can do to deepen relationships with this
group is gonna be Hoove you on several levels.
Okay. So what does this all mean?
These connectors may not show up in your
transaction reports.
Your peer to peer participants may not kind of
sparkle when you run a a transaction report.
Your volunteers may not show up in those transaction reports at
all because unless you're counting,
volunteer hours as, actual donations,
they won't show up there.
Just out of curiosity, can y'all
estimate the average dollar value of a volunteer hour?
I wanna see how close you get.
Anyway, so the tricky part is that these
folks are not necessarily your biggest donors.
They're not necessarily your recurring donors,
although there are certainly recurring donors in here.
But if you are defining generosity
as the dollar amount of financial gifts that you receive,
you may be missing out on engaging these really beautiful
groups of people who are showing you generosity,
but not in ways that are neatly captured in a in a financial report.
Sharon, you are right on the money.
It's, like, thirty three dollars and change.
So when you have these volunteers who are giving you,
like, many hours of service,
they're giving you a substantial gift if you if you look at it,
in terms of the average dollar amount that that's worth.
So
I will tell you now that getting a complete picture of
how all of these people, your event registrants,
your volunteers, your peer to peer participants,
getting a complete picture of all of the ways they support
you can be really challenging,
especially if you've got different teams managing each
of those activities.
And if you can't easily, like, pull a report,
that looks at all of these things.
However, I do wanna tell you that there
is a lot happening in this group.
Your volunteers may only only be giving small amounts,
but when you look at the almost thirty four dollar an hour
value of their contributions, like,
they are significant donors.
When you are meeting up with someone at a an event and
you have a a really neat conversation with them,
you may be inspiring future financial generosity.
It just hasn't happened yet.
So as you are as you're building these connections with your connectors,
do everything you can to get one complete picture of the
people in your community in the various ways they're supporting you.
You're never this is hard for me to say because I am a perfectionist.
It's never gonna be perfect.
You're never gonna have a complete look at everything
that everyone does all the time.
But what you will find is that your event attendees and the
people who volunteer for you and the people who raise money
on your behalf are willing to support you in overlapping ways.
But if their generosity isn't seen
and celebrated, they will disengage from you
and from your work before they reach your full potential.
When we looked at those those volunteers and we saw that they gave, like,
our below panel benchmarks for the first three years,
we know that their giving takes off in year four and five.
But if they're not recognized and celebrated in the first
couple years that they're engaged,
they won't ever reach the potential.
And this isn't again, like, it it's never gonna be perfect.
But what I hope you take from this is that when you are planning,
donor cultivation and donor retention efforts And when you
are looking to acquire more new donors or
reengage people who have supported you in the past and
aren't doing that now,
look at all of the different cohorts of people who are
supporting you and all of the overlapping ways they do so.
You will find some really remarkably generous people
whose generosity doesn't necessarily show up in your
most recent report.
But if you reach out to them in a personalized way that sees
and acknowledges and celebrates all of the ways they give back to you,
you're going to have more effective fundraising campaigns just overall.
Now I wanna end with something that I find really beautiful,
and then we'll have probably ten minutes or so for questions.
So I wanna end with something really beautiful.
And if you're if you've been,
doomscrolling on social media as I am prone to doing or if
you've been reading the news or even if you're just having a
stressful day, I hope this makes you happy.
People are even more generous than we can capture in this report.
I spent months and months parsing through spreadsheets
with a lot of other people,
putting quantifiable data together and building charts
that tracks people's generosity.
But there is so much more happening than we can capture,
and I am I assure you this is true at your organization too.
The data we included in this report
shows us how people's financial generosity
grows over time,
especially as they engage with their favorite causes over a
long period of time,
and as they engage with those causes in multiple different ways.
But this only tells us part of the story.
Because all of this data comes from Neon one systems,
we only see what our users put in our system.
So I'm gonna pick another so if Barry is using
a a different platform to manage peer to peer fundraising or volunteering,
if those two systems aren't syncing or if you guys run your
reporting differently or if it's managed by different teams,
we may not have a complete picture of all of the things
that those ninety nine thousand five hundred and twenty two
people are doing.
There are probably more volunteers in there than we know about.
There are probably more multiyear donors than we can identify.
There are probably more people who are giving to more
nonprofits and giving even more every year over time than we can see.
There also are a lot of people who give to you
but aren't like this group is.
They haven't made a formal donation.
So if you have a group of volunteers,
if you're Vicky and you've got a huge volunteer base,
but they're not necessarily making a financial donation
that you can capture in a transaction report,
you may not be able to really put a pin in the actual
generosity that they're expressing to you.
And then the other thing that. I think is really beautiful is
that generosity is not always tangible.
It's really hard for us to capture some things neatly in a
cell in a spreadsheet or capture things neatly in a CRM.
You may have people in your community that can't volunteer,
and they don't have the finances to give to you right now.
But they can engage with you on social media,
and that boosts your visibility and the algorithms.
They can talk to their friends and family about this really
cool nonprofit that they've encountered and encourage their
friends and family to donate to you.
They may be advocates for you in their workplace.
They may be signing petitions for you.
They may be, like,
showing up at events and bringing their friends and
family, and those people become donors,
and we can't capture that.
There's so many different facets of generosity that are
not neatly captured, that are not delineated in this report,
and I hope that that is beautiful to you.
I think if we start kind of broadening
the scope of how we look at generosity and then invite
people to engage in different ways,
we as a sector can achieve some really beautiful things
no matter what happens.
And I wanted to I should have said this at the beginning.
If you notice, this started in twenty twenty and this went through twenty twenty four.
During that five year period, people faced a pandemic.
They faced economic upheaval.
They faced an election.
They faced all kinds of natural disasters.
They face personal challenges.
But no matter what happened,
people were generous over and over and over again.
Your community is generous too.
So if you are afraid of inviting people to support you in other ways,
if you are worried about asking your volunteers to give,
or if you're worried about asking your recurring donors to
attend an event, I hope you remember.
Those people are generous.
Please give them the opportunity to show you that generosity.
Alright. I left about ten minutes for questions.
If you wanna get a copy of the report,
there's so much information in there.
Here's where you can grab it.
I'll make sure you're gonna get an email from me too,
that will include a link to this report so you can look at it.
Okay.
Let's see. Heather, do we have some questions we can get into?
There's a couple that popped in starting with Andrea.
Did you see that one?
Yeah.
In your data, what trends or data separation did you have for people who
donated anonymously versus with name or company recognition?
Andrea, I love that question.. That's such a good one. Okay.
So the way we did this,
when we pulled all of the the transaction information for all
of these thousands of donors,
what we did is we anonymized everything.
So we don't see names.
So anonymity wouldn't really have any any role here.
What we had instead was, an ID.
And if I am correct,
and I will double check myself on this, but I believe,
the universal donor ID, which is the same across everybody,
would be the same regardless of whether or not they indicated
that they wanted their gift to be made anonymously or not.
I will also look.
I believe we stripped out, company gifts,
so we remove corporate gifts.
These are in the way our system captures things.
These are individuals, not companies.
So, we didn't run any kind of
analysis on people who chose to give anonymously versus people
who gave, with like, who gave publicly.
But I can say that because we were looking at a universal
donor ID and not names, the anonymity issue,
doesn't really impact the trends and findings that we
that we talked about here.
Let's see.
Barbara has a good one about doing a retention
and sending gifts.
Is there a benefit to sending recurring donors,
small thank you gifts, like notepads,
or is that looked at as an as unnecessary spending by a small nonprofit?
It depends.
I think, Heather and you may have
insight that I don't.
We didn't dig into this specifically here,
but when we looked at,
recurring giving in the past, so last year,
we did a study on recurring donors.
We didn't necessarily look at that,
but we did notice that the motivations
for people who chose to make recurring gifts were all,
either emotional connections to a cause or, like,
personal connections to a cause.
So
what I think is more effective,
if you wanted to do something to reach out to your recurring
donors and keep them engaged, I mean,
maybe you could do something like notepads,
but what would be more valuable and more effective, frankly,
would be reaching out to them in a way that reiterates the
connection between your donor, the cause they care about,
and the impact they're having.
So I will tell you this.
I am a recurring donor to a number of different organizations.
I don't I wouldn't really be super excited about a notebook
or something small.
I've got chalk keys all over my office.
But what I do love is one of those three organizations
sends me a handwritten,
note card, like, once or twice a year.
Nothing fancy, just a little note card.
And they they are the the first group I think of when I
think about my recurring gifts.
I recently had my card compromised.
I had to to freeze it and get a new one,
and they were the first people I went to to update my payment information.
If you want to give your recurring donors a token of
your appreciation or or something like that,
I think instead of doing something like a gift,
like a notebook or or something,
I think what would be more effective,
what would speak more effectively to their
motivations is something like that.
A a card with a note that just sincerely thanks them for their support,
and tells them what is happening because of that support.
Just real quick.
About five years ago, I pulled thirteen thousand online donors.
Only one out of five said they wanted any kind of gift at all.
Four out of five said use it towards program.
And then yesterday,. I'm a monthly donor,
and I just got a letter that was signed by board members.
And that made me feel good, and I actually thought,
I'm gonna increase my donation.
But I think I would have been annoyed had they sent me a notepad.
Yeah.
What well, no. Because I didn't get that as a gift.
I made a I made an additional donation to the organization
that sends me handwritten postcards,
and I won a raffle from them.
But the raffle wasn't it wasn't a a gift.
It was it was a little bit different.
So I guess I was about to say, like, oh, there, yeah,
there is a time and a place for it.
But I guess at that point, like,
I didn't donate to get in the raffle.
I donated because I care about them a lot,
and then I just happened to win.
So the it was a little bit different.
But, yeah, I I I don't have them on my desk.
I usually have them on my desk,
but I keep those note cards forever.
Like, if you look at my refrigerator,
I think I bought two or three of them on there.
So if any of you ever, if you are like Maureen, you're like,
the letters from the board members, amazing.
The handwritten card's phenomenal.
Your donors will be delighted.. We don't get cool mail.
I get junk mail and, like,
mail that belongs to the person who lived
here ten years ago.
If you send somebody a handwritten card,
you're gonna make their whole day.
I promise.
And one other quick thing,
because you said something before the webinar.
When I got that note,
this is a small nonprofit here in Tucson that lost federal
funding recently.
So I thought, wow.
They're really stepping it up with the donor retention.
I I think you had some good insight before we went live
about your experience in talking with fundraisers,
how they're reacting to that and, you know,
being smart about proactively doing new things.
Yeah.
So that's something that has been really top of mind for me,
not only this year, but but recently.
So before before we started the the session,
Heather and I were talking about,
the headlines this year around the federal funding freeze and
how that was impacting nonprofits.
And, initially, we were kind of afraid that that would dissuade
nonprofits from investing in tools that help them with their fundraising.
Right?
Because if you are worried about a a decrease in funding,
spending money on a good fundraising platform or donor
management platform can be very intimidating.
However, what we noticed was that a lot of folks looked
well, two things.
One, a lot of folks realized
putting all of your proverbial eggs in a single basket,
in this case, federal funding,
but this applies to a lot of other things, is dangerous.
There is risk in only relying on one or two revenue streams.
That's why I was talking about the risk of over indexing on
major donors earlier.
So what we're looking at right now is that we're in a period
of time where whether or not you're receiving federal funding,
the industry conversations that are happening are reminding
people that putting too many eggs in one basket is tricky
and looking for ways to build your your supporter
base and then get those supporters more involved in
other ways is a really important part of building a
sustainable and resilient nonprofit.
So,
that's kind of why I would've been on this hype train about,
like, look for all of the ways that people are supporting you.
Because if you are constant and I mean,
I'm sure this is an issue for many of you.
I'm sure that you are stressing about new donor acquisition,
and you're always looking for ways to grow your supporter
base, but you already have a really beautiful,
highly engaged group of people who are actively looking for
ways to support their favorite causes,
and they're willing to do so right now.
So I I think that's really exciting.
The other thing that. I wanted to point out
and will you do me another favor?
I love the the emotion the reaction thing.
Will you give me a thumbs up if you have been worried about
asking your supporters for support right now?
That's something that. I've been hearing a lot.
Times are hard. I'm afraid to ask people to support us.
I want to share two pieces of insight with you.
So when I kind of alluded to it earlier.
Y'all remember in twenty twenty when COVID was really big?
I heard a lot from a lot of nonprofits, like,
we don't really wanna ask, for support right now.
Times are scary. People aren't spending money, blah blah blah.
What we actually saw is that nonprofits who did a good job
communicating the need that they face,
which I'm sure all of you are facing needs right now,
and the impact that people can make by donating,
their their fundraising just went through the roof.
People are generous. We are we are all generous people.
And one of our reactions in scary times is to give
ourself a feeling of control or agency
by taking action.
And for a lot of people,
that action that they take when times are hard or scary is
supporting a cause that they're really passionate about.
Another thing that is fairly recent,
and this actually comes from GivingPulse,
which if you're not familiar with GivingPulse,
I highly recommend you check it out.
It is, it's part of the GivingTuesday
data commons program.
They asked a question recently,
of their donors, and they asked, like,
if you had been solicited more,
if you had been asked to give more,
would you have given more?
And seven percent of people said yes.
So people are willing to give money.
They're just not being asked.
And then another piece I got,
I think it was from the giving polls,
they found that people are saying that
fundraising is down.
But what when they looked closer,
what they found is that nonprofits are asking for
support less frequently.
But when they do,
the response from their community is higher than it had been.
So responsiveness is going up,
but nonprofits just aren't asking.
So if you were worried about asking your community for support,
whether it's financial donations or volunteer hours or
whatever it is, remember, people are telling us that they
are willing to give.
They are looking for ways to take back a sense of control
and agency when everything feels out of control,
and channeling their generosity to their favorite causes is a
valuable way to do that.
And we're seeing that when nonprofits are asking,
they are getting support at higher rates than before.
So please reach out to your community. Let them help you.
They are looking for ways to make themselves feel better,
and you can you can give them that outlet.
Perfect.
I think that's a that's a that's a perfect way to end.
This was really insightful.. Thank you so much, Abby.
Of course.
She does a lot of reports.
You should go to Neon One, look at their email report.
I cite it in all my webinars.
She goes through miles and miles of data,
uses that head of hers and her poetic mind,
and and compiles it all in a report.
So I'm gonna get this recording together,
send it to you and your coworker,
and then you all will get that out within about forty eight hours.
Right?
Perfect. Yes.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate you, and I appreciate everyone
coming in today.
Alright.
Alright. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.