Do you trust charitable donation appeals more through email or social media? TV or door-to-door in person?
As it turns out, your answer may depend in large part on your generation. Nonprofits need to consider which of the various giving channels they’re using to reach the different generations, based on data from the 2023 Wise Giving Alliance study from give.org.
In the study, people from five generations – matures, boomers, gen X, millennials, and gen Z – were asked a variety of questions about giving. They were asked how well they trust several different giving channels, and were told to rate them on a scale of 1-10. With 1-2 being considered ‘low trust,’ and 9-10 ‘high trust,’ some startling findings emerged between the generations.
Why Giving Channels Matter
Here’s one way to put this:
Creating a donation campaign for the Yellow Pages probably isn’t a smart use of your nonprofit’s marketing dollars. It’s outdated and hardly anyone uses it anymore. The same line of thinking applies to other giving channels.
It doesn’t make sense to create campaign appeals on a particular giving channel if no one from your audience trusts that channel.
So the question is, who are you donors? What generations do they tend to be part of?
If you’re like most nonprofits, most of your current major donors are probably from the generations the study labels as matures and boomers – people who for the most part are retired. But, your future major donors come from the other three generations, and different people are inspired by different missions.
With that in mind, let’s look at some findings from the study.
Most Trusted Channel – the Only Thing with Generational Agreement
Of all the giving channels in the study, only one saw more people claim high trust than low trust, and this was true for all five generations. That channel is?
Someone they know.
If that’s a letdown because that happens to be the hardest channel to replicate and scale, that speaks to the current state of nonprofit marketing and communications.
28% of all survey participants said they have high trust when hearing about charity solicitations from someone they know, and only 8% said they have low trust.
Here’s the data for the other channels:
What stands out immediately is that there isn’t just a gap. There’s a huge gap. Most people don’t seem to have a lot of trust in any media channels when it comes to nonprofit marketing.
But hold on before you get too discouraged. We’ll break it down by generation in a bit.
What this means for nonprofits
For this broad data, it kind of looks like bad news at first. But consider that the majority of nonprofits get most of their funding from major donors. This data thus strongly supports the strategy of using gift officers to engage with major donors.
Why? Because gift officers are real people, and they can become the ‘someone they know’ for your major donors. Someone they know is the most trusted giving channel, so if a gift officer can build and establish trust, they will have bypassed all these low trust channels for your biggest donors.
Generational Data Differences
With the one area of agreement behind us, let’s take a look at the generational differences.
You want major donors now. But you also want future major donors. No one lives forever. Your future major donors will come from gen X, millennials, and gen Z. So it’s worth considering how these people trust various giving channels compared to boomers and matures.
Two key findings:
Matures and boomers don’t trust any channels
The two older generations had lower levels of high trust for every single giving channel compared to all three of the younger generations. In the study, there was not one single exception to this, not even someone they know.
17% of matures have high trust in someone they know, and 21% of boomers do. But the younger three generations all had over 30% of people placing high trust in someone they know.
What this means for nonprofits
It’s rare for any study to have zero exceptions to its findings, so this is worth taking note. It appears that as people get older, their trust in charitable appeals – in general – seems to decline. That’s the best interpretation for why it’s lower for all giving channels for the older generations.
They just don’t trust anyone anymore. Some of this probably has to do with the proliferation of scams on older people, so we can thank criminals for making our good work harder.
But the fact is, older people who are also your most generous donors tend to trust charitable appeals through any giving channel much less than younger ones.
That means, work hard on sustaining good relationships with your older donors, because you’ll have a harder time finding new ones at those ages.
Trust in all channels increases for younger generations
Next, you can see a general increase in trust for all the giving channels as people get younger. A few examples of how many from each generation ascribed high trust to various channels:
The trend is again remarkably consistent. Gen X seems to split the difference each time, with the youngest and oldest generations pairing up with either less trust, or more.
What this means for nonprofits
This data speaks to the importance of engaging younger (working) donors and supporters now, while their levels of trust in media remain higher.
If you can forge strong and enduring relationships with younger donors, you will then be able to sustain those relationships as donors age, if the same trends continue in coming decades and their skepticism about giving channels increases with age.
This is also why it’s so important to monitor your data by breaking it down into giving levels.
Younger donors tend to give less, but their giving often increases as they get older. By tracking giving levels, especially data on donor upgrades as they increase from lower giving levels to higher ones, you’ll know that you have a steady stream of loyal donors becoming more generous over time.
The Fundraising Report Card makes it easy to track donor upgrades, as well as numerous other very valuable giving metrics.
