Seismic cultural changes have fundamentally altered donors’ motivations and will shape their giving decisions in the years ahead, says Alan Clayton, a senior executive at the Good Agency, a London consulting company that specializes in nonprofit communications.
Speaking at the International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands, Mr. Clayton offered views in a session entitled “The Changing 21st Century Donor.”
Propelled by a tripling of the world’s population in the last 85 years, the spread of wealth, and the explosion of online communications, society has made a “digital leap,” he said. Since the mid- 1990s, he said, “people hungry for communication and knowledge suddenly got access to communication channels” that are flattening traditional social hierarchies among entire populations.
In the past few decades, Mr. Clayton said, marketing research has shown that people’s primary needs have changed. Until recently, he said, a majority of consumers—and donors—were motivated by “sustenance” needs involving themselves, their families, and their immediate communities.
To illustrate, Mr. Clayton cited market studies in which people give varying reasons as to why they want to, or are, eating less. In 1950, two-thirds of respondents, mostly parents of baby boomers, said they were eating less because food is expensive. Today, he said, a majority of respondents give “outer-directed” reasons for eating less (“they want to look better on holiday”) or “inner-directed” reasons (“they feel better”).
Mr. Clayton cited research that his company and others have done to identify charitable preferences among donors who indicate that they are motivated by sustenance, outer-directed, or inner-directed needs. A higher proportion of older donors, he noted, are motivated by sustenance needs and in some cases, a charity has an even split among those donors and younger supporters.
Donors motivated by sustenance needs tend to support causes they have an immediate connection to such as care for the elderly, animal groups, and local hospices, Mr. Clayton said.
But baby boomer and younger donors are increasingly motivated by outer-directed needs or inner-directed needs, he said, the latter of which tend to be associated with the desire to improve conditions among others with whom the person has no direct connection. They are more likely to support international aid organizations, human rights groups, and environmental causes.
Such donors, said Mr. Clayton, again citing market research, are concerned with finding “meaning in life,” which he defined as boiling down to the desire to be satisfied with “the things I did and the people I loved.”
Mr. Clayton gave several examples of charities that have improved their fund-raising returns by focusing their advertising and marketing efforts around those sentiments.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in the United Kingdom, for instance, has scrapped its primary appeal—sending donors a bird feeder for their yard in exchange for a donation—in favor of a more nuanced message. The new appeals focus on getting donors engaged in protecting bird habitats (and the planet at large) for future generations, said Mr. Clayon.
He showed one advertisement featuring a photograph of a child with the caption, “I don’t want to grow up in a strong economy if there are no sparrows in it.”
