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NPT SPECIAL REPORT
EXCLUSIVE NPT/INFOGROUP DONOR RESEARCH
Two Thirds of Donors Staying Put
January to April polling shows seniors are antsy
BY PAUL CLOLERY
N
early one-third of Americans
have changed their giving
habits since January 1. With
gasoline prices increasing
24.1 percent nationally from January 1 to
April 15, and the nation’s unemployment
hitting 9 percent,some 31 percent of Americans have changed their giving. About 18
percent are giving to fewer charities.
Those are among the results of polling
by The NonProfit Times/InfoGroup. While 65 percent of
Americans said they have
been giving at the same levels
as 2010 since January 1, some
13 percent of a nationally-projectable sample of Americans
said they have given to a
greater number of charities
while 18 percent have given
to fewer. Roughly 4 percent of
those sampled did not know
or were unsure.
The polling was part of
Opinion Research Corporation’s (ORC) April 15-18 national Caravan polling. ORC is
an InfoGroup company.
Among the results:
• Women are more likely than
men, with statistical significance, to reduce the number of charities they
support in 2011;
• People 65 and older are
more likely to decrease the
number of charities they
support;
• People in the two income groups below
$50,000 were more likely than the highincome group ($100,000+) to reduce
the number; and,
• People in high-income groups were
more likely to increase the number of
charities they support.
The deepest concern is where the giving is eroding.“We have a preponderance
of older women giving to fewer groups.
Older women, often widows, are more
likely to feel vulnerable in challenging
times,” said Larry May, senior vice president for strategic development at the
Greenwich, Conn., office of InfoGroup.
“Also standing out among those saying
they are giving to fewer groups are Hispanics, and those with lower incomes and
less education. We’ve heard from some
nonprofits that renewal rates among Hispanic donors have been down,” said May.
Of those who have given to fewer char-
ities since January 1, some 47 percent said
that they are giving to between three and
five fewer groups. That means, according
to Atul Tandon of the Tandon Institute in
Seattle, that if a charity is not in the number one or two spot in a donor’s giving,
downstream organizations are in trouble.
“We are in for a year of churn with almost one-third of all donors switching
charities or concentrating on fewer charities. If you are a local charity, get in front of
donors and stay in the front.
You have an advantage.You
are real, tangible, material.
Use that to your advantage.
If you are a national charity,
drive home your mission effectiveness and drive up
your brand and donor engagement,” said Tandon.
There is a ray of good
news in the data, according
to Melissa Brown, an Indianapolis, Ind., researcher and
consultant to the Center on
Philanthropy at Indiana University. The NPT study, by
looking at the number of organizations only after determining a change has been
made, “suggests that for
about two-thirds of the population, there is not a year-toyear shift in charitable
feelings -- although their dollar amounts might change
and the specific organizations supported might
Special Report, page 20
J UNE 1, 2011
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www.nptimes.com
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change. Two-thirds of donors continue to
support the same number of charitable organizations,” she said.
Another positive sign, according to
May,“among those who say they are giving
to more organizations are those reporting
higher incomes, more education, and conversely those who did not complete high
school -- generally a much older segment.”
Donors from non-metropolitan areas led
the pack in staying put on giving, with 68
percent saying they are supporting the
same number of charities.But when they do
bail out, some 44 percent said that they
stopped giving to between three and five
organizations. Those who really have
stopped giving come from the western
United States where 31 percent said they
had stopped giving to six or more charities.
The largest percentage of donors who
have changed their giving pattern was Hispanics at 45 percent of respondents. Of
20
those who changed and are giving to
fewer, some 27 percent were Hispanic
donors, followed by 20 percent of black
donors and 18 percent of white donors.
The data show women moving to conAtul
Tandon
J UNE 1, 2011
centrate their giving to fewer charities.
Twice the number gave to fewer charities
this year than did to more charities.“Charities had better pay attention to what
women are looking for in giving,” said Tandon. They want “community and group
orientation, engaging reporting, continuous communications, an emotional connection, trust and loyalty to the
beneficiary and to the donor,” he said.
“Speak to both the head and the heart if
you want to stay on the short list.” Men,
who gave to a larger number of charities,
were less likely to change the number to
which they gave, according to the data.
When analyzed by age, donors who are
65 and older have the largest swing at 36
percent, some 25 percent giving to fewer
and 15 percent giving to more.The mean
number for charities no longer supported
by seniors, considered the backbone of direct response giving, is 3.93.
The responses in the 65 and older
THE NONPROFIT TIMES
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group are skewed from the rest of the responses when it comes to education and
wealth.These days, a college degree is considered at the level of a high school degree for the 65 and older crowd. In all
likelihood these donors are probably retired with some type of pension and Social Security income and will continue to
support a group close to their heart, said
May.That spells trouble for groups that are
third or fourth in line, he said.
According to Brown, it is not a surprise
that just more than one-third of respondents changed their giving.“There are lots
of reasons that people change their spending that are not necessarily related to the
economy. We cannot make assumptions
about the causes of the changes in the
numbers of charities supported,” she said.
Brown was managing editor of Giving USA,
the sector’s annual benchmarking study.
As an example, she explained “the Center on Philanthropy has asked in several of
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its regional studies about whether or not a
donor stopped supporting at least one
charity, and if so, why.Around a quarter of
the donors stopped supporting at least
one organization.
The single most frequent reason for
ending support was that the household
moved. Given the mobility of the American population (20 percent move in a
year), those that stopped supporting charities, especially those who stopped supporting several, could be reflecting a
change of residence more than anything”
and impacting local charitable giving.
“It will likely be a few years before we
get back to 2004 levels of giving, when it
represented a 2.2 percent of share of
gross domestic product (GDP),” said Tandon.“There are no short-cuts or silver bullets here.The current conversations on tax
treatments of donations, the cutbacks in
government spending and the sputtering
economy all point to a long, hard winter
ahead of us. I am not a doomsayer, simply,
a realist,” said Tandon.
Giving tends to lag an economic recovery by a couple years. Giving took a hit in
the 1973-75 recession and did not recover
until 1977-78, said Tandon.After the 199091 recession, giving stayed flat, in inflation
adjusted terms, until 1994. “That trend
seems to be holding true to form. Given
that job recoveries are sporadic and home
values flat to declining, the most favorable
scenario is that giving holds flat to 200910 levels in 2011-12,”Tandon said.
“We continue to live through a ‘generational failure of fundraising’ in America. Giving, as a percentage of GDP, is flat from
1969 to 2009,”said Tandon.“What does that
say about the effectiveness of charities and
fundraisers? To our industry’s detriment we
do not have enough critical analysis of the
reasons, a search for long-term solutions
and/or soul-searching going on.”
For charitable organization managers
J UNE 1, 2011
Melissa
Brown
and fundraisers, the research adds another
dimension to the image of donors as they
make choices about organizations to support, said Brown.“We see that most maintain a level of giving -- and some in
THE NONPROFIT TIMES
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higher-income groups are increasing it
this year. Those who are reducing the
number of organizations they support are
most likely to be in the lower-income
ranges (less than $50,000), which suggests
-- but does not prove -- that charitable giving is a potential financial hardship or that
people in the lowest income ranges are
more likely than higher-income families to
be relocating,” she said.
To the extent that charities can get
more information about their own donors
and what is causing them to stop giving to
an organization, the charity can develop
strategies to keep donors engaged over
time, said Brown. “These could include
asking for micro-gifts (less than $10); asking the donor if the organization can share
a family’s new address with a sister charity
in the family’s new city; or linking donors
with meaningful ways to contribute time
or expertise instead of financial resources;
and so on,” she said. NPT
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