Charities – Missing a Major Online Marketing Opportunity?
By Anna Johnson on March 21st, 2009An article in The New York Times indicates that online marketing doesn’t really work when it comes to persuading people to make repeat donations to charities. Direct mail and other modes of fund-raising, it seems, work much better to prompt people to make repeat donations.
But is online marketing ineffective… or have charities been ineffective in harnessing online marketing?
While people tend to make bigger donations online, a January study conducted by Target Analytics shows that people tend not to make further donations via the Internet.
The study of 24 non-profit organizations, collectively having 9.5 million donors and total revenues of $747 million, found that few online donors used the Internet to make further donations.
Twelve of those organizations offered data about those who did make additional donations after an initial online donation in 2006. Of those who made additional donations, 37 percent never gave another gift online, while 18 percent gave electronically in one year and through other channels in another.
Charities, it seems, have not worked out how to get people to make regular donations online.
While The New York Times article raises suggestions about why direct mail and other modes may be more effective than online marketing, it occurs to me that such charities may just not have worked out how to optimally use the Internet yet.
Perhaps at least part of the answer lies in how others HAVE managed to get what are close to charitable donations on a regular basis.
I’m thinking, here, of Kiva.org, which facilitates micro-lending rather than charitable donations, but is certainly charitable in its outlook.
One thing Kiva seems to do quite well is connect micro-lenders with particular borrowers and their plights, and then enable the lenders to follow the story of their borrowers and, effectively, see how their loans are put to use.
What many charities seem to do, on the other hand, is raise funds from donors without necessarily enabling the donors to see how their money is used.
There are very good reasons for this, of course, but one of the disadvantages is that it detracts from the kind of donor involvement that is likely to spur donors to donate more money.
For example, we recently donated money to the Victorian Bush Fire Appeal run by the Australian Red Cross. Our money was pooled with all the other donors’ money and will be used to help the victims of the devastating fires rebuild their homes (and lives).
I certainly have no regrets about our donation, and I don’t propose that, as donors, we should have had the ability to personally decide who got our donation. That would create mammoth problems and largely undermines the point of having organized charities.
But do you think the Australian Red Cross has updated me on how my donation is being used? Will they do this? Will they send me regular emails about how the victims are using our (albeit pooled) donation?
Probably not, based on my experience donating to innumerable charitable donations over the years – from donations to victims of Hurricane Katrina, to victims of the Asian tsunami, to donations for cancer research.
This, I believe, is not only a shame, but, when it comes to the Internet, a huge opportunity missed.
Not because donors should have some kind of right to see how their donation is being used… but because keeping donors involved and interested is likely to get them donating again… which benefits the charities!
A website is the ideal vehicle for giving donors, not just generic news about what the charity is doing, but access to at least some information about how THEIR donation is helping people or specific research efforts. Think multi-media – audios, videos, images, etc.
Not necessarily a small task, but the upshot could well be a pool of donors who feel much more involved in their donation, and therefore more inclined to donate again and again.
