Saturday, April 07, 2007

Are we going to drive donors crazy online, too?

NonProfit Times recently ran an article on how non-profits deal with online small donors. A columnist donated $15 each online to 62 different groups and then kept track of how they responded. The conclusion offered as obvious -- and echoed in this leading philanthropy blog -- is that non-profits should respond to online donations just as intensively as they are now expected to respond to check-writing donors.

aarrrg...I don't think I'm the only charitable donor for whom that idea inspires clenched teeth and a desire to reach into the monitor to smack somebody upside the head.

Literally everyone I know who regularly donates to non-profits absolutely loathes the sort of fawning, repetitive cultivation contact that development pros institute. Follow-up phone calls are simply intolerable (I remain outraged that non-profits were exempted from the "Do Not Call" legislation and list); in my household we follow an ironclad rule now that any non-profit to which we have donated never again receives anything if they ever call us. Friends and family members who know that I'm a lifer in the sector are constantly asking me why making a donation has to result in so much blankety-blank mail and phone calls and invitations to the next fundraiser and so forth. The news that bulk-postage rates for non-profits are about to go up gets a big cheer from here, in the hope that it might make direct mail just a little bit less attractive.

At every place I've worked, when these concerns are voiced the staff and board members think that what annoys people is the visible costs: how many trees were consumed to print that newsletter, etc. Hence they always think that online culivation activity is all to the good in terms of donor goodwill.

That's increasingly wrong in my experience. What makes more and more charitably-minded people nuts is that non-profits spend so much time and energy pestering people who have already donated! That is the thing my friends and family members always lament to me. That is what makes them roll their eyes or swear never to "make that mistake (of donating) again!"

So when NonProfit Times columnist tut-tuts about the fact that 34 of 62 organizations responded to an online donation with nothing but simple acknowledgement of receipt, my reaction is to ask if I can have the list of 34 so I can move them to the top of my family's charitable-giving list. And I am quite certain that my reaction is far more common now than the reverse, and is growing. What people who invest in non-profits with their wallets want is for the organizations to do what they do -- not for them to behave like timeshare-condo salespeople on the excuse that it's for a good cause.

34 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is an important question you raise, Paul. The kinds of follow-up suggested by the Nonprofit Times article are quite benign and can be conducted in way that respects the privacy and tastes of the individual donor (by using opt-in, for example, instead of opt-out appeals). The article didn't address the number of contacts that followed the initial gift, but focused rather on the quality of that first interaction with the donor.

I think NPOs need to take their counsel from professional fundraisers, not from folks like me (or you) who don't appreciate nonprofit intrusions into our mailboxes and e-mailboxes. I would guess that a majority of AFP members would agree with the author of the Nonprofit Times article, but this is an empirical question we can better answer by survey.

Finally, my own experience in working with organizations like TouchDC and the Catalogue for Philanthropy is that charities tend to err on the side of doing too little rather than too much to follow up on a donor gift. Donor tastes and donor behavior will shift over time, so you're right to raise these issues.

Anonymous said...

I agree with albert's comments. The article didn't seem to lobby for inundating the donor, as much as it suggested that organization's can - and should - do a much better job THANKING supporters for their help, and then following up with relevant information that nurtures and cultivates.

Your opinions on this article come from the perspective of someone who assumes the donor doesn't care about the organization they've just donated to. Frankly, I would suspect that most people who give to a charity, also would like to hear more from that charity. There's a profound difference between someone who is a cynic (you), and a supporter (most of us).

Paul Botts said...

The post following this one is my response to these comments.

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