Generational giving: How to better connect with each generation

James Goalder: Thanks everyone for joining us today. We’re going to talk about a generational giving study that Bloomerang did last year and some of the findings. We’ll look at a lot of statistics, but also hopefully give you some actionable things you can take away for how to approach the different generations in different ways, and what you can do to keep those folks engaged and continuing to work with you to further your mission.

My name is James Goalder. I am the partnerships manager at Bloomerang, and I’ve been with Bloomerang now for ten years.

Everything you see here on the slide is, of course, true. My first job was at a McDonald’s drive-through, and every time I think to myself, “Gosh, my job is stressful sometimes,” I think back to a Sunday afternoon in the McDonald’s drive-through after church let out and just laugh, because I’m not sure anything could be more stressful than that. Lots and lots of people coming through wanting their orders correct. So, fun memories there. We do have four kids, three cats, and a dog. You probably can’t see them, but I am surrounded by animals here. There’s one back there. Anyway, they’ll probably make their presence known at some point by walking over the desk or something. We’ll see.

If you have questions as we go, pop them into the questions module. There’s also the opportunity at the end to ask questions. And for those of you who maybe aren’t as comfortable asking a question in this kind of setting, I have put my email address on the very last slide, I believe. You’re welcome to contact me that way if that makes you more comfortable. Whatever works for you.

Okay, here’s the agenda for today. As I said, Bloomerang last year produced a generational giving report. We surveyed over a thousand fundraisers and asked them all kinds of questions, and then also surveyed different multigenerational donors to get a variety of perspectives and data into our system. From the results of these studies, we can talk about some current giving trends, the generational giving data, what you can do with that, and some takeaways from all of this. Like I said, there’ll be some time for questions at the end too.

So why are we so interested in this? One of the big reasons is this statistic right here. There’s a lot of money that’s going to be passed from the baby boomers to both millennials and Gen X, and probably even some Gen Zs as well, in the next thirty years. That’s a lot of money. So what we want to do is make sure we’re positioning ourselves in the right way to engage with these different generations in the best manner possible, so that we can further the relationship with them, make sure they understand the impact we’re having on their community, and hopefully get their support as we go.

Quick question, and you can drop this in the questions module. I would love to see what generation you identify with. The reason we say “identify with” is that our oldest daughter and I were talking a couple of weeks ago, and she said, “Dad, I always thought I was a millennial, but now I’ve seen some new definitions, and I think maybe I’m a Gen Z.” She was born in ‘97, and she said maybe the line is being redefined if you were born after 2000. Anyway, it’s a whole thing, so who knows? However you identify, drop it in there. I’d love to get a feel for all of that. Thank you.

Oh, that’s awesome. Got some Gen X. Love that. Good job. Gen Z is outstanding. Baby boomers. Great. That’s amazing. Thank you, everybody.

Okay, here is what we did. We at Bloomerang surveyed a thousand donors last year, and these were the cohorts of the people we surveyed. Depending on what you identify as, you’ll see yourself on this list, and you can do the math to figure out what percentage you’re part of. But this is the makeup of everyone we surveyed.

One of the other things we wanted to see was the existing giving habits these cohorts are reporting now. What size gifts? How many? What does your total giving look like? What we found was pretty interesting. As you would expect, the baby boomers and Gen X are a little further along in their careers, a little more well established. So they’re able to fill this slice over here, the red, which is $1,000-plus gifts. They’re a little more capable of that than millennials and Gen Z, although they do show up as well.

But what I thought was really interesting, if you look at these graphs and the breakdown, is the dark green: the $100 to $500 giving level. We’ve got a lot of baby boomers, Gen X, and millennials right in that slot. Fewer with Gen Z, but look at the opportunity that’s going to exist with them as they get a little older and start to get more consistent pay and careers. If you get them in the door at that $5 to $50 level, which we see is a level they’re really drawn to right now, and then nurture them and continue to engage with them, and make sure you’re informing them about all the wonderful things you’re doing, then I would say you’ll start to see that graph reconfigure and even out a little more, like what we see with millennials and Gen X.

So, tremendous opportunity there. We’re going to talk a lot more about how to engage with Gen Z, which is probably the number one question I get asked when I go on the road and present this information, or if I’m at a conference: how do we appeal to the younger voters, or, excuse me, younger donors? We’re going to talk a lot more about that as we go. But I think the takeaway from this slide is that there’s a lot of opportunity there.

We’re going to talk for a couple of minutes about the current giving trends. I want to highlight real quickly, down here in the bottom left corner, that the statistics we’re looking at here and in the next couple of slides are from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which is an arm of AFP. They aggregate a lot of donor data from several big donor database companies. Bloomerang is a part of it, Raiser’s Edge, Neon, DonorPerfect, I believe, lots of others. No one’s looking at individual donations and who gave what to which YMCA or which Boys and Girls Club. It’s an anonymous group of data that we get a chance to pore through to see things like what you see on this slide: total giving year over year, the number of new donors, recaptured donors, total amount of donations, all kinds of fun stuff. It comes out usually once a year, right around the big AFP conference. And frankly, we have nerds at Bloomerang. I’m absolutely one of them, who pore through that data and try to come up with these trends.

Someone’s asking, will the slide deck be available? Yes. You can email me and I’ll get that sent out for you. No problem there.

A couple of things to look at on this slide, because there are a few things we really want to dig into. First of all, giving is dropping. If you look at the bottom right, donations were down year over year from 2022 to 2023, then went back up in 2024, but not by a huge amount. I think the biggest reason for that is if you look right above that, where it says new donors, that explains a whole lot in my mind. If this slide carried back two or three years, if it did 2022, 2021, and 2020 as well, you would see that we’ve been dropping when it comes to new donors for a while.

That’s not a surprise. If we think back to 2020, what happened? The pandemic. We had to stop holding events, or we tried to do hybrid events for a little while, and then virtual events, and we all just kind of eventually gave up and said, “We don’t like any of this.” So it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that back in 2020 and 2021 and even into 2022, new donors were dropping, and at a fairly high level. It was double-digit percentage points at that time.

What is surprising to me is that we saw a little bit of a bounce back in 2023, but then another drop in 2024. That’s a bummer. That tells me we haven’t quite gotten back into the pre-pandemic swing of things when it comes to events, which, generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking, are a lot of organizations’ primary donor acquisition method.

What that also tells me is that we have an opportunity, genuinely. Maybe we need to tailor the way we communicate about these events to people. Maybe we need to look at who we’re inviting to these events to make sure we’re inviting the right people. As you might have guessed, we’re going to be discussing this as it pertains to those four generations in a few slides, because they have very separate, unique perspectives on events. If you’re approaching them as one-size-fits-all, you’re probably missing some opportunities. So while this slide looks really bad, I do think it shows some opportunities. We just may need to readjust the way we’re doing some things.

If you look then at the donor mix from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, you’ll see a lot of negatives. In fact, only on the right side do you see positive numbers. Under major donors and supersized donors, those numbers are going up, which is good. The bad news is everything to the left. Those are all dropping. Why is that really bad?

A lot of the stories I’ve heard in the last two years are that with all of the uncertainty in the pandemic, no one knew what was going to happen next, and lockdown was crazy. All of that craziness over the last five years or so meant that a lot of organizations went back to their major donors and said, “Hey, we don’t know what’s going on. We need your help.” The good news is the major donors stepped up. They said, “Okay, let’s do it. What do you need?” They helped get things done, keep the programs running, keep the lights on, keep the staff in place. They were fantastic. But what I’ve been hearing from a lot of organizations in the last year or so is that they’re afraid a little bit of donor fatigue is setting in for those major donors, because they have been asked so much. That makes sense. After a while, some of those donors are going to say, “Is there someone else you could possibly ask?” And the bad news is, if we look at those three buckets to the left, that pool is getting smaller.

Very few major donors start out by giving you a $5,000-plus gift. It can happen. It does happen. It just doesn’t happen very often. Most of the time, an initial gift is going to be $50, maybe a couple hundred dollars. But the major donors and supersized donors come later, after we have the chance to cultivate the relationship, get to know them, talk about their preferences, keep educating them, keep connecting with them. So if you think of these five buckets as a pipeline, it becomes pretty bad news that we’re continuing to see drops in both micro donors and small donors, and even small drops in mid-level donors. What that tells me is that we’re not fully developing the pipeline. When those major donors do get tired, we’re not going to have as many people to go to and say, “Hey, you’ve been a great mid-level donor. We really appreciate it. We love the work we’ve been able to do with you. We have this big project coming up. We’d really like your help with that. Can we maybe step that gift level up just a little bit?” Those are some of the takeaways this slide gives me.

I’m curious, and again, drop it into the questions section: how many people know what your current donor retention rate is? You don’t need to put a number. If you want to, that’s fine, but just a yes or no on whether you know your current retention number. If you don’t know, please don’t be embarrassed. When I ask this question at a conference, the number of people who have any idea what their donor retention number is is around 25 percent or so. So if you don’t know, don’t feel embarrassed. Nothing to worry about.

Here’s how you would calculate it if your donor database doesn’t figure it out for you automatically. If you’re running something like Excel, take your time, because it’s a pain in the neck. If you’re running a database, you should be able to run a report, get your total number of donors from one year, then the repeat donors from the next year, divide them manually yourself, and get your current donor retention rate. It’s more doable on a database. If you’re running Excel, I just got a little bit of a migraine thinking about how you do that.

So what are the average donor retention rates? Again, this is from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, and these numbers have stayed very consistent, with one exception that I’ll talk about in a second, over the ten years I’ve been at Bloomerang. The average donor retention rate has hovered somewhere between 40 and 45 percent, with a couple of small exceptions where maybe it jumped up to 46 percent, but usually 40 to 45. First-time donors really help explain why that is, because if we’re only retaining one out of five first-time donors, which is what we’re doing on average, that’s not a great sign.

I think, again, that goes back to events. What that tells me is that we’re doing a really good job of getting people excited about events, educating them about what’s going on, engaging with them at the event, getting them pumped up. They’re feeling connected. They donate, and then maybe there’s no consistent follow-through after that, because they’re not coming back to donate again. Just from my perspective, logic tells me that if I care enough about your organization to donate to you, there’s a good chance I would want to donate again. But something’s falling through the cracks there, and we’re going to talk about what that is in a couple of minutes.

The good news is, if you look at the other button on the right side of the screen, almost 70 percent once you get the second gift and they become a repeat donor. So what we want to think about is how we can move them from being a first-time donor to a second-time donor as quickly as possible. Once we do that, they’re going to come back and donate again and again, 70 percent of the time, which, as you can tell by the numbers here, is a really excellent retention rate.

Connie is asking, are these numbers US-based? I believe primarily, yes. I’m sure there are some donors from other countries that are part of this, but I would say the vast majority is probably US-based. That’s a really good question. And Darlene, no, I don’t have music in the background, I don’t think. That sounds fun, though.

Okay, so here are the average donor retention rates over the last ten years. As I said, they stay remarkably similar. A little bit of variation year over year, but overall pretty much the same. One of the questions I get asked all the time is, why are you at Bloomerang so obsessed with donor retention? This slide shows you why we’re passionate. I like passionate.

The reason is that it is so much less expensive to retain a donor than it is to acquire a donor. The number I’ve always heard is that for every one dollar you raise from an existing donor, it costs the organization about 25 cents. And for every one dollar you raise from a brand-new donor, it costs the organization about a dollar thirty. So not a positive math equation, if I’m understanding all of that properly. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acquire new donors. Absolutely, we have to go and acquire new donors. Many people do that through events. Fantastic. If that’s working for you, by all means keep that going. But once someone becomes a donor, let’s spare a little time reaching out to them and engaging with them, because they want to be connected with you. They’ve already indicated a lot of interest in what you’re doing. They want to be engaged with, so let’s give them the information they want and need.

Let’s look at some generational takeaways. Let’s get into the actual study. We looked at three basic areas. First, identifying support: how do these different generations choose the organizations they’re going to donate to? Second, communication preferences, exactly what it sounds like. Do they want to be emailed, texted? How do they want to be communicated with? And third, support preferences. We’re going to dig into these as we go.

Starting with how these folks identify nonprofits to support, it’s a really interesting question. As I was reading through the data, I started thinking back to how my spouse and I chose the nonprofits we donate to. It’s a lot of different things. Sometimes someone asked us to an event: “Hey, come to the gala with us, it’ll be a lot of fun.” We did, and we enjoyed the mission and decided, “Sure, let’s donate.” One time, I took one of our kids on a field trip to a farm and just had a fantastic time. Sonny had a great time, really enjoyed everything, and we decided, “Yeah, that was really fun. Let’s donate to him.” So there are lots of different ways, and you can probably think through your own experiences as well.

Here are the results of the survey. On the far left side, the largest response, far and away, it’s not even close, is my network. I think that encompasses a lot of different things. It could be that someone in my network invited me to that event, or someone in my network asked me to chaperone the field trip I was just talking about. That should cue us into the idea that people talking with their friends, their neighbors, their coworkers, their families, are really important when it comes to how we find someplace new to donate.

But if you keep going along the bottom, you’ll see a lot of other interesting things as well. The one thing that really jumped out at me, in the middle to the right just a little bit, is Instagram. As I said before, one of the main things people ask me at conferences is how do we engage better? How do we get more younger donors? We want younger people to be more involved. How do we do that? Well, are you on Instagram? Because if you’re not, that’s where Gen Z is. If you’re on Instagram and you use it occasionally, maybe see if you can step it up a little bit and put out some more posts, because those Gen Z folks really like that as a medium to learn about your organization.

You’ll see that Facebook is still really popular with Gen X, which is great considering their capacity. So definitely keep putting those Facebook posts out there. That works really well. Google search, sure. And no surprise with news and radio. With the fractured media landscape these days, that one’s very hit or miss. If you’re looking for millennials and Gen Z, I would probably double my efforts on Instagram and not focus as much on news and radio. Do that a little bit. If you get the opportunity to be on a radio show or do advertising, sure. But take a look at Instagram, especially if you’re interested in Gen Z. That number really jumped out at me, and every time I look at this slide, it continues to.

We also asked, do you conduct research on a nonprofit before donating? As you can see here, the answer overwhelmingly is yes, across the board. So we asked, what information do you want to see before you make a decision? Almost everybody said, “We want to check out the website.”

A couple of years ago, I donated $25 to about seven hundred organizations across the United States. I went state by state and looked at everything: Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, all kinds of stuff. What was really interesting to me was the vast spectrum of websites I visited. I wasn’t able to donate on all seven hundred. Some of them didn’t have a donate-now button or anything like that, which is a problem in and of itself. But what really stuck out to me was that some of the websites really did look like they were made in the MySpace era, and others looked like they could be a company website today, and then there was everything in between. This slide should hammer home the fact that investing in your website is a good idea. A lot of these donors are relying on your website to get what they need. If it’s not easy to navigate, if it’s not easy to find their way around and get that information, they may not end up donating with you.

Sorry, Ashley, I just saw your question. No, I don’t think we asked about YouTube or TikTok. That’s a good point. We might end up doing that next time. TikTok, especially, is an interesting one, so that’s a good call-out.

If you look at this slide again, a lot of donors key in on your social media. They will visit your Facebook page, your Instagram, we talked about that. Probably go see TikTok and all of that, especially Gen Z. That social media presence is becoming more and more critical. Third-party sites are going to be something like GuideStar or ProPublica. Yeah, that happens. They’re probably looking for transparency. That makes sense. Asking family and friends is there a little bit, and then the annual report, to a certain extent. I’ve seen a shift in annual reports over the last couple of years, which I really like: less focus on numbers and more focus on impact. That impact focus seems to be resonating with people. I think you’ll start to see those numbers climb a little bit.

So what factors influence a donation? This was one of the other questions we asked. Affinity for the organization makes sense. Do they care about what you’re doing, your mission? But I thought it was fascinating, the second group here: learning how the donation is used. The more information you can put on your online donation form that says, “If you donate $25, this feeds a family of four for ten weeks,” or I’m sure that’s not right, but whatever that number is, “If you donate $100, then we can spay and neuter three cats,” that helps. People look at that and go, “Oh, okay, that’s a concrete outcome that’s going to happen because I donated.” That’s information they like. You can also talk on your online donation page about other things they may not be thinking of that they could help with. Are there in-kind gift opportunities, that sort of thing? Lots of good possibilities there.

Look at the impact stories here. Survey after survey after survey says that donors want to know their donations are making an impact. They want to know what that impact is. Please, please, please be careful thinking through privacy concerns. Make people anonymous. Do what you have to do for your service recipients. There are lots of things to think through there, but donors want those impact stories. I think that dovetails really nicely with the one right there to the left, learning about how the donation is used.

A little bit of interest when an urgent need is communicated, and then family or friends also donated. I think we’ll continue to see that bar graph on the right come up with the continued focus on peer to peer fundraising. I think that’s going to be a really key metric moving forward, but it’s still kind of getting started right now.

Okay, let’s move along and talk about communication preferences. Quick poll. Again, drop it in the questions. What’s your most successful communication channel with donors? What we hear most often is that people still resonate with email. Social media, of course, is incredibly helpful. We’re starting to see more and more people say that texting is something they’re having some success with. Thank you, everyone, for dropping those in there. Email, email, email. I love that. Facebook, print and email, email. Very good. Lots of good stuff here. Yep, personal texting, not mass texting. Sure, it’s a great call-out. A lot of different options there. That’s outstanding. Thank you, everybody.

So here were the results of the survey. Look at that. Email. It’s right there, number one, and frankly, it’s not all that close. Social media is creeping up, and it probably will continue to creep up, but people do still like getting emails. I think the content is important. We don’t want to just ask them for an appeal in every email all the time and have a little blurb about programs and then an appeal and then a blurb about upcoming events and then an appeal and so on. I think we need to be a little more measured with that, but people do still respond well to email. Social media, still really important. Direct mail, absolutely still part of things. That’s outstanding as well. Connie, yep, we did ask about direct mail. And text messages. Look at that, they’re showing up as well.

Then we do have the grumpy people on the right who say, “Don’t talk to me. Just leave me alone.” All jokes aside, we do need to honor that. Make sure that in your database, or somehow, you’re recording do not solicit, do not communicate, because it’s important to be respectful of that. But I think the big takeaway is this. I get people asking me all the time, “Should we still email?” It seems like everyone’s getting a lot of emails these days. This tells you that, yeah, it’s still worth the investment. It’s a good way to get a lot of information out the door quickly to a large group of people.

And Steven, thank you for mentioning that you’ve had a lot of success with personalized phone calls. That is amazing. Personalized phone calls are the best. I know it’s a huge time commitment. I get it. If you want to pull your board in, if you want to get your other staff members involved, awesome. Do what you can with that, but they do pay dividends. I love to hear that. That’s outstanding.

Looking at email list subscription information here, as you can see, more than 50 percent of all four cohorts said, “Yeah, we subscribe to a nonprofit’s email list.” The numbers really bear this out. At some point, it may flip in the future. Email may not be the right channel. But for right now, it’s still worth investing the time.

In these emails we’re sending out, what kind of information do people want to read about? That’s the important question. As I was mentioning a second ago, what they don’t want is a lot of fundraising asks. You can see that on the right side there; it barely shows up on the graph. People don’t want to be inundated with fundraising asks. We’re absolutely going to put them in those emails. I would never tell you otherwise. But if most of the email is dedicated to asks, we probably need to look at the rest of this slide and figure out how we can weave in more program updates, maybe some new initiatives. If we have an upcoming event, let’s drop a mention of that in there. Love the client stories. You can see that resonates particularly well with both baby boomers and Gen Xers, so that’s always good to remember. Again, as I mentioned a couple of slides ago, please, please, please carefully think through privacy concerns and make people anonymous. Do what you need to do, but those impact stories about people who have been served, and the difference it makes to them, will be really impactful and beneficial.

Now, support preferences. This was the next area we looked at in the survey. If we look at how people like to donate, this was eye-opening, but not super surprising, I guess I would say. I want to focus for just a second on the red bars. That’s your digital wallet: Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Venmo, something like that. Take a look at Gen Z down there. Gen Z is saying to everybody, “That’s how we want to donate.” If you have an online donation form and you’re only accepting credit cards, you’re probably missing out on some Gen Z potential donors.

To illustrate this, I’m going to tell a quick story where I potentially embarrass our second daughter. Faith called me one day. She had been volunteering with an organization off campus, and she said, “Dad, I really like this group, and I’d like to donate to them. But I’m on their website right now, and I see the little button down at the bottom that says Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. I don’t have a Visa card. I don’t have a credit card. I only have a debit card, so I can’t use this.” I said, “No, no, honey, you’re fine. Debit card, plug right in. As long as the Visa logo is on it, and I know that it is, you’re in good shape. Go ahead and plug the debit card in there, you’ll be fine.” We kind of laugh about that, that she didn’t understand how debit cards work. But she knew that this is my job. This is what I do. So I could go to an online donation form, give her some feedback, and walk her through the process. If I hadn’t been her dad, if it was someone else, she probably would have just moved on and not made that donation.

I know my sweet Faith wasn’t donating $5,000-plus or anything like that. It was probably $25 or $50. But you know what? That’s an opportunity to connect with someone, as we looked at earlier in the presentation, to potentially keep engaging with them, keep them in the pipeline, all of the good things that happen with that. So as much as you can, when you’re thinking about what you want to make accessible on your online donation form, I would strongly recommend that you take a look at Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, anything like that, because that’s going to really resonate and probably allow your Gen Z folks to donate more than they are now.

I see someone asking about DAFs. Yes, those are definitely rising. The amount of money in DAFs, donor-advised funds, keeps going up every year, up and up and up. So that’s definitely going to become more and more a part of this as well. That’s a really good point. Right now, we didn’t break that out into its own category, and maybe next time we will.

A couple of other things to highlight on here. One that surprised me every time I look at the slide, and I kind of laugh to myself a little bit, honestly: there are apparently a lot of people who like giving in cash. So cool. Just make sure that’s an option, that you have the ability to do that. And, probably more importantly, that you have processes in place to track it and enter it into your database, because you want to make sure you have a record of that moving forward.

The other thing I’ll point out is that checks are still, as you would imagine, widely used by baby boomers. Checks are second only to credit cards for them. So, again, just make sure that’s still an option, that they can mail in a check, or do ACH on your website or something like that, if that’s a possibility.

So, Hailey, cash at an event, that makes sense. Just make sure you’re able to track that, because those events can be really fast-moving. Make sure you have processes in place. And yeah, Ricky, I think “cash” isn’t literally cash. I think that’s right.

Okay. Curious, and this slide is worded a little bit wonky. I apologize for that. I keep meaning to change it, and I keep forgetting. How actively do you recruit monthly givers? Maybe a better way to think about it is, how often do you mention it to your existing donor base? Are you bringing it up? Is it in your newsletter? Is it at your event? Or is it just kind of stuck away on your online donation form on your website, and people have to wander across it to find it? That’s what we’re getting at with this question. Sorry, it was worded a little weirdly.

I love to see that, Connie, that you’re developing programs specifically for monthly giving. That’s awesome. The more you can put that out there, the better off you’ll be. I think that’s great, especially given this slide. Again, more than 50 percent are donating monthly, or multiple times throughout the year, which generally is monthly, though sometimes it’s quarterly or whatever the schedule is that they want.

This is picking up a lot of steam. When we think about Netflix and Hulu, we pay them monthly, and we don’t think about it. It’s set it and forget it. The same really is true with a lot of folks and their donations to nonprofits. I know my wife and I have a couple. I don’t actually know that I could tell you what the amount is every month, but I know who we give to every month. So if you’re not mentioning that, giving that as an option, talking about “here’s what $50 a month will accomplish by the end of the year,” you probably ought to think about that a little bit, because this is really picking up speed and becoming more and more popular, which is great. It’s a really nice way to stabilize some of the ups and downs when it comes to revenue.

I will also add, and Bloomerang is not the only one that does this, that Bloomerang does have, on the online donation forms, the ability to do the following. If I say, “Okay, I’m going to give this organization $100,” and I start putting my details in, the system will say, “Hey, this is awesome. Thank you so much. $100 is amazing. Would you think about maybe $25 a month?” It does a suggested amount for a monthly gift based on whatever the original gift amount is, and that can be incredibly helpful to get a monthly giving program up and running. It’s not just Bloomerang that does that. There are other organizations that do that too, so that might be something to look into.

If you look at the breakdown of monthly donors by generation, you’ll see that everybody’s doing it. Gen Z has the smallest level. My guess, just a guess, is that we will see that number continue to climb as we make it known that a monthly gift doesn’t have to start at $50. It doesn’t even have to start at $25. If you want to do $5 a month, awesome. $10, even better. Once we let folks know those options are available, and once monthly giving becomes more ingrained in everything, I think we’ll see those numbers across the board just continue to go up.

Madeline is asking, what have we seen on the conversion rate of a one-time giver to a monthly giver? It really depends, Madeline, on how you’re engaging with that person. If you’re able to get back in front of them, remind them of the impact you’re having, and then also ask them for that monthly gift, that does fairly well. If it’s more like, “Okay, it’s been a year since your first gift. We’re now going to come back to you after not really having talked to you all year and say, ‘Hey, can you do a monthly gift this year?’” that doesn’t go as well. If you can engage with them and keep that conversation going, you’ll have a much better chance of success.

I think I mentioned this a little while ago: we’ve seen that peer-to-peer fundraising is on the rise. It has been for the last ten, fifteen years, and it’s only getting bigger and bigger. I think there was a misconception a while back that only the really big, big, big organizations would do peer-to-peer fundraising effectively, your American Heart, American Cancer, stuff like that. What we’re seeing is that small and mid-sized organizations are having amazing success with peer-to-peer fundraising. And what you see looking at this graph is that Gen X loves peer-to-peer fundraising.

If we think about the capacity of Gen X, if we think back to one of the first slides where we saw that Gen X was giving more $5,000-plus gifts than just about anybody else, then we should think about incorporating peer-to-peer into our mix, because Gen X loves peer-to-peer, apparently. That can help us get some more of them in the door, and then we can cultivate those relationships and do all the other things we’ve been talking about. The other one that jumps out to me is Gen Z at 56 percent. Again, if you’re looking to get some more younger donors in the door, peer-to-peer would seem to be a really good avenue for that. So there are a couple of interesting use cases to think through.

If we think about fundraising events, are there preferences? Of course there are. I will say that every time I look at this slide, the blue bar on the left makes me giggle a little bit. Baby boomers are saying, “Just leave me alone. I don’t want to go to events.” So when you’re setting up your event invite list, if you’re focusing on existing long-term donors who might be in that baby boomer cohort, you might be limiting yourself to people who are already saying, “That’s not really our bag. That’s not really something we want to do.” But if you look at Gen Z, only a quarter of them say, “No, we don’t want to attend.” So, again, think through how you’re segmenting your list, how you’re approaching these different groups, and how you’re trying to pull them into your ecosystem and get them engaged and involved with what you’re doing.

For the people who do like events, looking at that next bucket, in-person, they all like in-person events. Virtual events and hybrid events are about what you would expect. It’s fine, but not much of a highlight for people. People don’t really love them. People like the in-person events, which is good. So keep throwing them out there.

Providing in-kind donations, I mentioned this a little while ago. Everyone is over 50 percent here, so this is a really important opportunity to make people aware of, if you have that need. There are a lot of people who may not be able to donate as much monetarily, but maybe they can donate goods or services. Maybe they can volunteer their time. We’ll talk about volunteering in a minute. But make sure the opportunity is there and that people know about it, because as you can see from this graph, just about all the generations will take you up on it if you put it out there and they know what is available and what’s needed.

Speaking of volunteers, again, throw this in the questions: how often do you involve volunteers in your work? What I mean by that is, do you have the need for a lot of volunteers, or is it a couple of times a year you might need someone to help with an event you’re holding? Or is it a daily or weekly need? There are lots of different answers. No wrong answers. Everybody’s a little bit different. So, yeah, all the time, daily, all kinds of stuff like that. Stephanie, you’re asking about vehicle donations. That would usually be in-kind. They’ll tell you what the vehicle donation value is, and you can go from there.

Okay, we asked how many of these folks volunteer at organizations they support, and look at Gen X leading the way there. We definitely like to both volunteer and support. So think through how you’re going to get more volunteers. Those of you who answered that you need volunteers daily, all the time: it looks like Gen X is pretty fond of volunteering. That’s good to know. Maybe we can do a targeted email to Gen Xers saying, “Hey, we need some help. Here are the projects we have coming up,” and see if we can get them involved that way. If you’re able to filter your database and find people who have donated but have not volunteered, and then narrow it down to Gen Xers, you’d probably get some pretty successful results, I have to imagine, because this data is saying they like to do both of those. The more you can do that, the better.

We also asked why people volunteer. The responses are all what you would expect, and it always warms my heart. I love being in this field. Passion for the mission is the number one response, and that always makes me really happy to see. Then you see that people have personal connections as well. They like the impact of the organization. They like the people, all kinds of different stuff. I want to highlight two things over on the right side, under expand network and resume. Look at Gen Z. Gen Z is saying, “We’re just getting started in our careers. We’re just getting started down the path of having to work and figure all this stuff out, so we want to expand our network. We want things that are going to look good on our resume.”

So let’s make sure we give them those opportunities. If they’re coming in to volunteer and we’re telling them they need to sit in a corner and stuff envelopes, well, you can put that on your resume, sure. You’re probably not going to go into a ton of detail about it, and it’s okay to ask them to do that. But then maybe the next time, we can give them an organizational function that would help and look a little better on their resume. Maybe that involves a conversation with them about what their career field looks like. We can do all of that. Just engage with them, find out what would be most helpful, and then think through what volunteer options we might be able to fit them into, when possible. That’ll keep them coming back to volunteer, and it’ll probably lead to some smaller donations at first. But if we can continue that relationship and keep engaging with them, those donations will probably grow as we go, which is great.

Speaking of volunteers, how about being on the board? You can see here that Gen X says, “Yes, please,” and no one else is anywhere near as close. I apologize, the baby boomer gray bar number is wrong there. That got shifted by accident. Sorry about that. That should be a different number. But the fact of the matter is, if you’re needing to recruit some new board members, take a look at your Gen X folks, because they are much more likely than anyone else put together to jump up and say, “Yeah, okay, we can help out with that.”

We’ve been talking a lot about how we get these folks to donate, what kind of research they’re going to do, what methods of payment they’re looking at. All of this does come back to what we were talking about at the beginning, donor retention. This survey, why donors stop giving, has been done more times than I can count, and the results are always really similar to what you see here. We broke it down by generation, and you’ll see some fairly consistent findings. A lot of the items on the left, “I no longer felt connected to the nonprofit,” “I could no longer afford to donate,” “I had a negative experience with the nonprofit,” can be boiled down to poor service or communication. In other words, I donated and then not much happened. I didn’t get the information I needed to keep that good feeling about the work you’re doing going, so I decided not to donate again.

We want to make sure again that we give every opportunity for these folks to feel connected to the work we’re doing, so they can look at those impact stories, look at the good stuff we’re doing, all the amazing programs we’re trying to expand into, because that’s the information they want that will allow them to continue to donate. If they don’t get that information, they’re probably not going to continue. They’ll probably just be one and done, or whatever that number looks like. So the more info we can give them, the better, which leads to how we engage with these people.

We’ve looked at a couple of different areas. We saw that Gen Z, for instance, really likes peer-to-peer. They liked volunteering almost as much as Gen X. They do like events. They were very happy to go to in-person events specifically, and they also were into the email newsletters. So for those of you looking to hit up some new Gen Z donors, here are a couple of strategies you can look at. The other one that’s not on here, that I’ll throw back out again, is Instagram, because those folks really, really dig Instagram. Insta. My kids tell me to call it Insta, and I’m so not hip, and I never remember to do that. Anyway, throw Instagram into this mix as well, because it’s really impactful.

If we look at millennials, they’re very much into recurring giving. They really want to know what that impact is, and they’re into not only Instagram but also Facebook and social media in general. Hopefully you’re seeing a through line here. Highlighting the impact is something most generations are going to want you to do. So, again, think through the privacy concerns. I’m going to stop saying it, but think through them. Be purposeful. Be careful. But make sure you’re highlighting the really good work you’re doing, because no one else is going to tell people about it. They’ll hear about it maybe at an event, or in a testimonial, or maybe there’s a video. But if you’re not taking the opportunity to share those impact stories in a newsletter, you’re missing a great opportunity to connect with those donors, make sure they know the good stuff you’re doing, and keep them engaged.

Gen X really likes peer-to-peer. So if you’re thinking, “Maybe we should get involved in peer-to-peer fundraising, maybe we can give it a shot, but I don’t know if we want to go do a 5K,” there are other ways you can do peer-to-peer. Facebook fundraisers are essentially peer-to-peer fundraising. The disadvantage there is that Facebook does a really lousy job of sharing donor contact information with you, so it’s really hard to follow up with the donors and keep them engaged, because Facebook tends to hide all of that. Instead, what we recommend is to find some software you can use and then just put the link to that software on Facebook. Bloomerang has this capability, of course. There are lots of others out there as well. But it’s a really nice system, because then you’ll get email and phone number and all kinds of stuff so you can keep those conversations going with folks once they start to donate.

Also, with Gen X, think about recruiting board members from that cohort. They’re very amenable to that conversation. Please, please, please think through your digital wallet. Gen Xers, we do like paying with Venmo or Google Pay or Apple Wallet, whatever it is. So think through how to get that onto your online donation form, because we do like that. And we do respond to an urgent need. When you’re telling me that we’ve got forty-eight hours to raise enough money because there’s a match campaign going on, and this is what we’re going to be able to do with the full funding once we get it, then yeah, I’m going to pay attention to that, and if I’m able to, I’ll donate.

Then lastly, we’ve got the baby boomer folks. Impact stories are showing up. They really want to know more about those. They want transparency with the financials. I’ve seen lately that at the bottom of a lot of websites there’s a little badge for GuideStar, ProPublica, that sort of thing, saying, “Hey, we’re very transparent.” There’s wording other than that that I don’t remember off the top of my head. It sounds much better than what I just said. But that is very impactful for the baby boomer folks, so think through whether that’s something you could add. And they do like regular updates, and they prefer email. So there you go. If you’re sending out an email newsletter once a quarter, is once a month doable? Maybe that could be a next project, to see if we could send something a little more often, because those baby boomers really like hearing from you in that format specifically. Just something to think through there.

If you’d like a copy of the report itself with all these statistics, it’s available at the QR code. I’ll leave that up for just a second for those of you who want to get that. And I think the next slide is my email address, as promised, because if you have questions and don’t want to ask them here but would like to chat offline, I’m more than happy to engage with you that way, whatever you’re most comfortable with. There we go. And I think we have just a couple of minutes for questions. I’m going to scroll through the questions again. I’m sure I missed some, but if anyone wants to pop something in there, I’m happy to take a look.

Madeline, you’re asking about newsletters and Gen Z engagement. I think Gen Z prefers email to hard copy. Rate of opens, I don’t know. I’ve seen so many different numbers over the years, from 20 percent to 40 percent. The number I just heard last week was something like 35 percent. It seems like those numbers bounce around a whole lot, so I’m not sure I feel comfortable saying here’s the actual rate of open. Good question, though. If we can figure out a way to get to that information, I would love to dig into that more.

How often should we post on Instagram in a week? Karen, you are asking the wrong person. I wish I had good advice. I don’t have an Instagram account. I know our folks at Bloomerang post maybe once a week or so for our corporate account, unless there’s a big event we’re actively promoting, and then it’s a bit more than that. I would tell you to run a couple of tests: try once a week, try twice a week, and see what levels of engagement you get. If you notice a drop-off when you’re posting twice a week, go back to once a week. Give it a shot and see what happens. But it’s a good question.

Hailey is asking about email preferences, long or short, visual or more text-based. You don’t want a massive block of text. Very few people are actually going to read that. If you’re able to put in pictures that communicate the need, that communicate the impact, whatever it is you’re trying to communicate, that’s always good. That’ll keep people’s attention. I can just tell you personally, I’ve gotten newsletters with enormous blocks of text, and I haven’t read them. I read a little bit and go, “I can’t right now,” and then, unfortunately, I don’t get back to it. That’s very anecdotal, of course, but I would tell you to think about shorter blocks of text with some pictures in there.

Stephanie, love QR codes, especially with direct mail. When you’re sending out a direct mail appeal, if you’re able to drop a QR code on it, like on a postcard, your Gen Z and others will pop that up, and they very well may donate that way. If you’re able to do that, I think that’s a fantastic idea.

Videos. Yep. Videos are still wonderfully impactful, Karen. You can drop them into a follow-up email that you send to people. That works really well. You can create them and put them on the landing page after a donation is made. There are a lot of different ways to incorporate videos, but if you’re able to record a couple of those, and ideally even send out personal videos, especially, you might have a cutoff, like someone has to donate above $100, I certainly understand that. But if you’re able to do personalized videos, just twenty or thirty seconds, that’s awesome. That’s really cool.

Rachel, you’re asking what type of fundraising works best, like events, appeals, calls. It depends on what the goal is. For events, most of the time, the goal is donor acquisition. We want to get people in the door who maybe haven’t heard about us, who aren’t as familiar with us. It’s going to be more of an education-based session where we’re informing them about what we’re doing. Then that gives us the opportunity, especially if they donate at the event, to follow up later and continue the conversation. So events generally are more about donor acquisition. Appeals are great for an annual campaign, an annual fund, something along those lines. And then phone calls, yes, yes, yes, yes. Take people out to lunch, take them out for coffee, anything like that once you get into the major gift and the supersized gifts. Those really should be done more one-on-one, more of a conversation than anything else. You can use emails as a tool to get those meetings, but I wouldn’t be making an ask for a $10,000 gift over email. I’d want to do that in person if I can, or with a phone call.

Almost done here. Someone asks whether other population segments can be used to gain more specific donor information. Yeah, I mean, ZIP codes, it’s tricky, because that data changes a whole lot. I do know that Bloomerang has the ability, when someone gives an online donation, to read the ZIP code of the IP address and then adjust the ask amount based on that. So I think the industry is moving in that direction. I don’t know that I’m willing to say we’re there yet, but it’s a really interesting idea, and I think we’re probably moving in that direction.

And, let’s see, do you think Gen Z likes events so much because they want to get offline and meet humans? Probably some of it. I was talking with someone the other day about the impact the pandemic had on Gen Z, how they were stuck on their screens for a full year, and that’s the world they know. As they get a little bit older and start interacting in person with people a little more, they’re slowly beginning to discover, “Oh, we kind of like this, and it works.” So I think we’ll probably find more and more of that as we go, and I think that’s a really good point.

I think we’re right at time, so that’s about it. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for your time today, and thanks for participating. I appreciate it.