Charities are losing contributions by not paying more attention to the latest academic studies on giving, a leading researcher told fund raisers Tuesday at the annual gathering of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
“Research should be informing professional practice” when it comes to figuring out what drives donors away and who is most likely to make a gift, said Adrian Sargeant, a consultant and professor of fund raising at Indiana University. He offered a roundup of recent studies on giving.
For example, Mr. Sargeant said, he has found that women, not men, give the most to charity. Previous research found that men gave more money to specific organizations than did women with comparable assets or incomes, he said. But women distribute their gifts among more organizations. Once all the gifts are tallied, he said, women have the edge.
Mr. Sargeant also said that many charities are driving donors away from making online gifts by the way they have designed their Web sites. He sought to make online gifts to 50 organizations and found that he had “real problems” with at least 10 of the groups. For example, seven organizations refused to accept his online credit-card gift unless he provided them with a phone number, he said. “Is a phone number so important that you’re willing to lose a gift?”
Research also shows how charities may be hurting their direct-mail efforts when they swap lists of their low-dollar donors with other groups, he said. Gifts from a donor to an organization decline an average of 10 to 15 percent once the organization gives that donor’s name to another charity, he said. That’s because low-dollar donors will begin spreading the same amount of money among more organizations.
Such donors also often drift away from the organization they originally supported, he said, as a result of the increase in solicitations. “People see themselves as being slowly inundated with requests.”
The loss of those donors may be more important than charities realize, he said. Evidence shows that loyal donors who make small gifts during their lifetimes to a particular organization are more likely to leave it a sizeable bequest. Charities that swap names and lose the chance to build donor loyalty may be forfeiting some bequests later on, he said.
“Don’t look at the initial returns; consider the loss in value of those donors, the damage done to public confidence, and the possible loss in bequests,” Mr. Sargeant said.
