A couple of small items caught my attention lately regarding online fundraising, mostly because they re-raised in my mind the question of what actually constitutes ‘online fundraising’.
One was a short blog post by Jeff Brooks, Why it’s hard to raise funds online. Citing Smart Insights Digital Marketing blog, Jeff says it takes:
- 3 seconds to get their attention with your subject line and the from line
- 5 seconds, once they’ve opened your message, to draw them in.
- 7 seconds to get them involved, on the way to taking action
Jeff’s comment: ” If you thought the mailbox was a cutthroat place, it’s nothing like the inbox.”
What Jeff is talking about I would indeed term online fundraising. You initiate the pitch online and you close the contribution online. That’s the real deal.
On the other hand, I saw these survey results reported in the Chronicle of Philanthropy saying that ‘online giving’ was higher than most expect amongst older donors, with 51% of recent donors age 60 and over in this survey saying they had made ‘online donations’.
I wonder what was actually being said by these donors … Did they respond to an appeal delivered (one way or the other) digitally? Or did they merely use the convenience of going online to complete a giving transaction initiated via some other channel … most likely direct mail? I suspect what’s being reported as ‘online fundraising’ is more of the latter, and this I consider ‘online fund capture’, not online fundraising.
If you think this is just a semantic difference, I urge you to go back and read my recent post, Are Online Fundraisers Stealing Credit?
I note that the Chron item also reported that a quarter of donors said that at least once they had started to make a gift online but not finished the process. That’s leaving a lot of money on the table, however you regard the lost transaction!
If your direct mail team delivers 100 prospective donors to your website, but 25 fail to complete the online transaction, I hope the accountability for that disappointing performance is being placed on the right shoulders! Or should I say silo?
Tom
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All the more reason that fundraising budgets & forecasts need to be integrated across channel, so that revenues are shared program by program (renewals, appeals, etc) no matter which channel donors choose to use.
Multichannel back matching shows us donors do cross-channels, so our budgets & reporting should reflect that.
Is it channel conflict or cognitive dissonance? It is sometimes very hard to tell.
There is way too much philosophical debate on which channel should get the credit for the gift. This is mostly fueled by organizational silos or incentives that nonprofits have put in place.
Here’s the reality: Donors are multichannel. They receive messages across multiple channels and they give across multiple channels. They don’t care about your org chart or who gets credit for the donation.
The problem is that many nonprofits are still organized around single channels each doing their own thing, with their own strategies, their own data, their own donors, and their own systems. That’s broken and really costly.
Ultimately, you want to use the right number of channels to drive the right people to take the right action using the most effective and satisfying giving mechanism as possible.
If that means a direct mail piece and a check, then great! If that means a phone call and an online donation, then fantastic. If that if a tweet, an email, a QR code, a website, and a donation for, then so be it.
And if you’re looking at donor behavior across channels, then you will begin to see some trends in what channel mix works best for different types of donors. Oh yeah, did I mention that donors don’t all respond the same way to the same channels? One size fits all approaches are as doomed as single channel tactics.
Statistically speaking, online donors are much more likely to switch to become offline donors. About 32% of online donors will become offline donors compared to only about 3% of offline donors switching channels. Your results may very. Always be testing.
No one channel should get all the credit or all the blame. You succeed or fail based on how well you do these things together.