The Wired Wealthy - a new landmark study about major donors and the Web
	Posted by Vinay Bhagat at Mar 24, 2008 05:29 PM CDT Categories: Fundraising , Nonprofit Trends

For years now I’ve believed that the Internet could play a much more meaningful role to support mid-level and major gift fundraising.  I’m really excited to now have some quantitative research that confirms many of my beliefs and adds some really exciting new insights.

In early 2007, Convio, SeaChange Strategies and Edge Research embarked on a research effort to study the preferences and behavior of high-value donors who had given at least $1,000 to a single charity over 18 months and who had an email address on file with one or more nonprofits. We named this constituency, the “Wired Wealthy”.  We recruited 23 organizations to participate and received responses from 3,443 high value “wired” donors to a Web survey in the fall of 2007. The respondents said that they donated on average $10,896 per year. We followed up with select donor phone interviews and separately, invited nonprofit organizations to participate in a survey of their online practices with high-value donors.

For the nonprofits who shared data with us, this segment of donors represents just 1% of their active donor file, but 32% of their annual revenue. We believed this constituency was active online and that their philanthropy could be influenced through online engagement. Our hypothesis was proven correct:

• The responding donors have been using the Internet for an average of 12 years.
• They are online an average of 18 hours a week; 80% have given online and 51% prefer online giving. 
• 66% of respondents said they visit the Web site of a cause or charity before donating for the first time; of those, 49% say they visit in nearly every instance when they are considering a donation to a new cause.
• When asked how email communications influence their giving, 42% responded that they are somewhat more likely to give;18% are a lot more likely to give again to a charity if sent email with news of recent accomplishments; 41% said that they are somewhat more likely and 33% are a lot more likely to give again if sent email about how their donation was spent.
• We believed that nonprofit organizations had not determined the best way to communicate with high value donors. Provided with a variety of potential strategies in the nonprofit survey, 35% said they have devised special e-communications for higher dollar donors only; 24% said they adapt email solicitations for higher dollar donors; 16% said they send email updates to high dollar donors, but not email solicitations; and 9% say they suppress high dollar donors from all emails.  Furthermore, only 31% of nonprofit organizations indicated that their major donor fundraisers were very involved in their Internet strategies.

We hypothesized that the “wired wealthy” had high expectations online that were not fully being met by most nonprofits. Once again, our hypothesis was proven correct:

• Only 8% of donors agreed strongly that charity Web sites are inspiring, and just 7% agree strongly that charity Web sites make them feel personally connected to their cause or mission.  
• Furthermore, only 8% of respondents agree strongly that emails from causes they support to be inspiring or report that these emails make them feel more connected to the cause. 
• In general, high-value donors want to have more control over their online experience, controlling both the type of content they receive/see and the frequency of communications.
• Our research confirmed that not all high-value donors are the same. We observed very clear segmentation between constituents who wanted a high touch relationship -– who we termed “relationship seekers” -- and those who preferred an efficient giving experience with limited communications –- who we termed “all business”.

We are going to present this research next Tuesday April 1st at the AFP International Conference and will be presenting it again at the DMAW/AFP-DC Bridge Conference in July. We will also host on an online Webinar.

Nonprofit organizations have made major strides in the last few years to integrate offline direct response fundraising with online marketing. The next untapped area of opportunity is mid-level and major gifts. I encourage you to read our full report “Wired Wealthy - Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors” online, and attend one of our presentations so that you can maximize the online opportunity with your high-value donors.

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