Charities look for ways to raise smaller sums from more donors
Even with the dismal economy, charities continue to see steady increases in online donations, but the rate of growth is slowing as the recession takes its toll, according to The Chronicle's annual survey of online fund raising.
Online gifts to 203 nonprofit organizations that provided data for 2007 and 2008 grew by a median of 28 percent last year, meaning that half of the organizations saw giving grow by more than that amount and half did less well. The increase is far smaller than the 42-percent median growth rate in 2007, or the 45-percent median growth in 2006.
Still, 10 groups in the survey raised $25-million or more online in 2008. And three raised more than $100-million: Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund ($409-million), in Boston; United Way of America ($245-million), in Alexandria, Va.; and American Cancer Society ($101-million), in Atlanta.
"We're not seeing the frightening declines other fund-raising channels might be seeing," says Sarah DiJulio, executive vice president of M+R Strategic Services, a Washington consulting company that specializes in online fund raising and advocacy. Among her clients, she estimates, the size of the average online gift has dropped by about 20 percent. But the number of donations has grown by 26 percent, she says, so most nonprofit groups are doing about the same or a bit better in the total amount raised online. "The good news is we're not seeing a decline," she says. "The bad news is the pace of growth has slowed dramatically."
Mini Gifts
Despite the growth in online fund raising, the Internet still provides only a sliver of overall revenue for most charities. For 101 groups in the survey, online giving accounted for less than 1 percent of donations. But 10 groups now receive more than 10 percent of their contributions online. The two that get the most are the College Success Foundation, which attracts 37 percent of its donations online, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, which receives 29 percent of donations online.
While a handful of charities have raised multimillion-dollar gifts through their online pitches, the bad economy has prompted many charities to focus their online solicitations on much smaller gifts.
Mercy Corps, in Portland, Ore., created what Jacob Colie, its director of Internet marketing, calls "value giving" e-mail messages, which encourage people who have never previously given to make a donation of just $5. The charity's e-mail solicitations, which are sent to people who have signed online petitions for the charity or registered to get its e-mail updates, demonstrate what the charity can do with that sum, such as buy seeds to plant an acre of rice in Myanmar.
One such appeal, sent in early December to about 145,000 people, raised a total of $14,150.
Once supporters make their first small gift, says Mr. Colie, Mercy Corps seeks to persuade them to give $5 a month, by emphasizing the difference that continued support makes. A follow-up pitch sent in February produced 81 new monthly donors who contribute about $1,445 a month.
Dollars for Trees
Raising small sums was also the concept behind the Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion campaign, which seeks gifts of $1, each dollar covering the cost of planting a single tree in Brazil's endangered rainforest.
The goal of the campaign, started a year ago, was to raise $1 apiece from supporters to help the Nature Conservancy plant a billion native trees in Brazil. "We thought the price point would help us on social networks, that we could ask people through Facebook or MySpace to donate a dollar and plant one tree," says Sue M. Citro, the Arlington, Va., organization's digital membership director.
The charity also created a special Web site, plantabillion.org, that offers interactive features such as a fund-raising tool that people can add to their personal blog or Facebook profile and an electronic greeting card that people can use to notify friends that, instead of sending them a paper card, they have planted a tree in their honor.
The campaign raised more than $830,000 — enough to plant 1.5 million trees — in the past year. But the biggest surprise was the size of the average gift made. Of the $448,000 in donations raised through the campaign's Web site, the average donor contributed $49.
"Our hypothesis was the opposite of what happened," says Ms. Citro. "Instead of tons of little gifts, we had fewer gifts, but they have all been bigger."
Emory University, in Atlanta, has also been seeking small sums, primarily from its young alumni. It recently began an e-mail campaign asking recent graduates to join Emory's "834 Club" by pledging to give $8.34 a month. The pledge — which amounts to $100 a year — is less daunting to recent graduates than a lump-sum gift and makes them more likely to continue to give, says Francine Cronin, senior associate vice president for annual giving.
A Campaign Mascot
The university, which raised about $704,000 online in 2008, is also using the Internet to teach undergraduates about the importance of giving. Last fall, for the second year in a row, the annual-giving office distributed blue piggy banks to freshmen dorm residents with a notecard about the importance of saving — and distributing the savings to help others.
Emory created a Facebook page for a blue pig and started sending e-mail messages to undergraduates, asking them to add the pig as a Facebook friend. A few months later, fund raisers staged a "kidnapping" of the pig, and published a full-page ransom note in the student newspaper and on Facebook, threatening to keep him off Facebook until the hostage-takers received $3,500 by the end of the semester. The money, it promised, would be used to provide textbook stipends to students.
The blue pig also appears regularly in e-mail messages about class giving, has his own Twitter feed inviting students to bring their piggy banks to events, and starred in an online contest in which students posted photos of the pig in settings around campus to his Facebook page.
"It's really taken off. The students love him," says Ms. Cronin.
Since adopting the pig as the class campaign mascot, the annual fund has attracted a 157-percent increase in the number of gifts from undergraduates. And the total amount from undergraduates collected for first seven months of this fiscal year has reached $12,915, compared with $682 raised during the same period last year.
Because the recession has forced charities to pay increased attention to costs, many charities are trying to use e-mail appeals to replace direct mail, which has become increasingly expensive to produce and send.
But as charities send more and more e-mail messages, they find that some of the appeals are not working very well, says Ms. DiJulio, the fund-raising consultant. In particular, she says, stand-alone e-mail appeals are not raising significant sums unless they contain an urgent deadline for giving.
'E-mail Chaperones'
The signs of donor fatigue in response to e-mail appeals persuaded Campus Crusade for Christ to stop sending so many e-mail messages to people whose names it obtained by renting contact information from e-mail list brokers. Instead, it is now working to persuade a larger share of the 560,000 people who give through direct mail and other traditional appeals to agree to let the charity send them information by e-mail, says Elvin L. Ridder, the Orlando, Fla., group's U.S. development coordinator.
The group, which raised $43-million online last year, was also able to recruit 11,000 new online donors through "e-mail chaperoning" agreements with groups such as the American Family Association and Focus on the Family, which sent e-mail appeals on behalf of Campus Crusade to their own lists of online supporters.
Through those arrangements, Campus Crusade reached four million people to seek money to send Bibles and devotional materials to members of the military; since June, those appeals have brought in more than $100,000 for the organization.
Some charities expanded their e-mail reach last year by persuading companies to sponsor Internet fund-raising campaigns on their behalf.
For example, the American Cancer Society, which in 2008 broke the $100-million mark in online contributions, joined with United Airlines for a year-end, Internet-only campaign to raise money for cancer research.
The airline sent e-mail messages to customers directing them to a Web site that promised to send a teddy bear to a child with cancer for every $50 or 7,500 frequent flyer miles donated through the site. Donors gave a total of $110,000 and 52 million miles to the campaign.
Among the charities that achieved the best results in their online fund raising last year were those that used multiple approaches to make their pitches, including e-mail, direct mail, social-networking sites such as Facebook, online video, and text messages.
Online gifts to Direct Relief International rose by 150 percent last year, to $1.6-million, a result that officials attribute to concerted efforts to use direct mail, e-mail, social-networking, and online video communications to drive people to a Web page that prominently features several giving options.
One of the relief group's most successful ventures has been a public-service announcement that runs on the online television-streaming site, Hulu. The 30-second spot appears before a person can watch downloaded television shows. Since January, 30 percent of the charity's online visitors to its home page have come through Hulu.
Direct Relief International is also a beneficiary of a social-networking site called Social Vibe.
When people join the social network, they can choose from a handful of corporate sponsors — such as Sprint or Colgate — to appear on their profile pages, and pick a charity that will benefit from a percentage of the advertising revenue received from corporate sponsors.
Since joining Social Vibe in September, Direct Relief International has recruited 7,478 new supporters and raised $14,832 toward a $30,000 goal to provide HIV/AIDS treatment to patients in Kenya.
The appeal of such personal ways to promote a connection to a charitable cause is helping many charities expand their online fund raising.
Easter Seals recently let its chapters give supporters the ability to create personal fund-raising Web pages where they can post stories and photographs about their connection to the charity, set their own fund-raising goals, and invite others to give by sending appeals to friends and associates.
The advantage of the personal pages, says Eve Smith, Easter Seals' director of interactive marketing, is the flexibility they give people to raise money to promote a cause or event that is meaningful to them.
For Amy Liss, an employee at an Easter Seals chapter, in Villa Park, Ill., that means sharing the story of how Easter Seals has helped her receive weekly therapy for cerebral and spastic quadriplegia since she was an infant.
Ms. Liss created a Web page a little more than a year ago that so far has raised more than $9,000 for Easter Seals. "I'm just glad to be able to share my story whenever I can," says Ms. Liss. "Someone might look at the page and we might get a donation from a perfect stranger, or they might better understand Easter Seals through my page."
Altogether, Easter Seals raised $175,000 through personal Web pages since March 2008. And in many cases, says Ms. Smith, the new function has tapped into pockets of dedicated supporters that local affiliates didn't know existed. "It has brought people out of the sidelines who have been really passionate about Easter Seals,"
Candie Jones contributed to this article.