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Large Gifts via Online Giving
I didn't believe it myself until I saw it first hand. We were analyzing results of an e-mail we had sent on behalf of a client and we spotted what appeared to be a single donation of $50,000 by an individual in California. We double-checked with the client, a major national organization, who confirmed that the gift was legitimate. It turns out that this was a donor who had given $50,000 off-line a year ago, and therefore had gotten into the e-mail list of our client. The e-mail we sent them was the only point of contact immediately preceding the gift, and the code assigned by the web donation matched that assigned to the e-mail. A phone call by the grateful nonprofit to the donor revealed that the donor thought "it was time to give again." Would the gift have come in to the client anyway, without the e-mail? Probably. Unless, of course, some equally compelling e-appeal from another nonprofit arrived shortly before. Another major nonprofit reported an equally interesting circumstance. They were receiving large gifts of odd amounts every two weeks from the same donor. The amounts were for $1,572.81, $1,371.44 and amounts like that. They suspected either a technical glitch in their system or some sort of fraud, but contact with the donor revealed that he was making good on his own commitment to tithe, or give 10% of his income to charity. The donor was faithfully going online and entering a gift for 10% of his sales commission checks every pay period. Kintera found that nine percent of the nonprofits responding to their recent informal online poll said their website generated a single gift of $1 million and over. Another four percent received a donation of over $100,000, and 13 percent reported a gift between $10,000 to $99,999. On the other end of the spectrum, 27 percent received a donation between $100 to $999, and the largest group, 31 percent, said their largest gift was less than $100. The e-appeal our client sent asked for "a gift of $100 or even more." That one donor certainly met that request! These high-dollar gifts indicate several things to me. First, your biggest supporters are probably online, and probably eager to hear from you more often, including via e-mail. Second, they do not distinguish between your internet presence and your other channels of communication. Therefore, it's important to maintain a consistency between them. Also, you should bear in mind that these high-dollar donors probably have the same expectations of service from you online as they do offline. In other words, you had better look at your automated "thanks for your online gift" email and make sure it would be as welcomed to a $100,000 donor as it would be to a $10 donor. While you're examining that, make sure you ask your techies to trigger an e-mail to you whenever a gift over a certain amount is processed by your website. That way you can pick up the phone, or send an e-mail, and find out what's moving your donors! October 2003 | ||
