I hope you each had a wonderful Labor Day weekend and found some time to relax amidst the festivities. Take a deep breath — Q4 is officially here!
Reflecting on 2023 in this touchpoint a year ago, I shared a report from CNN Business stating that families were spending an additional $709 per month compared to two years prior, and CFOs were feeling more optimistic about avoiding a recession. Let that sink in for a moment ...
I also want to revisit a great piece from Sean Triner last year, highlighting effective strategies to encourage your donors to upgrade their giving:
On an interesting and somewhat humorous note, Nationwide shared their annual “most unusual pet insurance claims of the year.” The Hambone award finalists were four dogs and a parrot, with antics ranging from a dog who broke through a plate glass door alerting his family of the mail carrier’s arrival to another eating 250 jigsaw puzzle pieces.
Year end is truly right around the corner, and that’s when all the charity rating websites are most frequented by donors. If you would like to know how to maximize your Candid/GuideStar profile for the giving season, you can sign up on Candid for their upcoming free training from 2 - 2:45 p.m. ET (11 - 11:45 a.m. PT) on Wednesday, Oct. 2. I highly recommend you update your organization profile before Oct. 2, then go back and make it more robust with what you might learn at the training.
For more insights, jump over to RKD Group’s LinkedIn articles and grab Ronnie Richard's Thinkers Newsletter on LinkedIn. He shares fundraising and marketing insights inspired by his own experiences as well as blogs from our own strategists and partners. This month, he covered audience-first fundraising, some great insights from The Bridge to Integrated Marketing & Fundraising Conference, the humor of back to school, and kid’s terms that are actually code-switching.
It’s that time to grab your favorite beverage and dive in.
New research found that donors gave 57 percent larger gifts when they were asked to donate units of food for refugees compared to when they were simply asked to give cash
The results showed that asking for donations with the large unit size garnered 57 percent larger donations than asking for money — large-unit donors gave $42.35, on average, compared to cash donors, who gave $26.94. However, donations made in the small-unit size averaged $24.25, about 10 percent less than cash. So, picking the right unit size to ask for mattered.
The researchers also wondered if telling people how much their money could do in unit sizes and then asking for money, rather than units of charitable goods, would impact how much donors gave. It did—and not in a good way. Telling people they could feed a child for $1 a day or for $30 for a month and then asking for a monetary donation resulted in smaller gifts—an average of $3 less with the daily figure and $5 less with the monthly figure.
“In addition to discovering unique preferences among different generations of donors, we’ve also discovered what different generations have in common,” said Bloomerang’s nonprofit content and education specialist, Wendy Mercurio. “For example, trust and connection are crucial to all donors. For those who noted intentionally stopping their support, not feeling connected to a nonprofit and losing trust in how their donation was spent are major factors that led to a halt in donations.”
Key findings from the second edition of the 2024 Generational Giving Report include:
Three seconds. That’s the average time viewers will spend on a social media video before they decide to move on. Facebook reports that their users spend, on average, 1.7 seconds on viewing a post before scrolling to the next.
Many have pointed to social media as the cause of our shorter attention spans, although movie and television shots have also become shorter. So, which came first: our loss of focus or increasingly fast-paced media? It’s likely a combination of both. In any case, today’s audiences prefer shorter, bite-sized social media content, and Candid’s experimenting with ways to provide it.
Tips for adding social media microlearning for your nonprofit:
Despite the popularity of online marketing, direct mail offers unique advantages that make it an effective channel to help nonprofits connect with donors, raise funds and promote their causes.
We know it takes an omnichannel experience working together to increase response rates across marketing efforts.
By leveraging the unique strengths of direct mail, nonprofits can build stronger relationships with their supporters, drive action and achieve their mission.
Soaring home prices and smart investments have helped boost a generation once considered perpetually behind. Millennials are now wealthier than previous generations were at their age. They can’t believe it either.
The median household net worth of older millennials, born in the 1980s, rose to $130,000 in 2022, from $60,000 in 2019, according to inflation-adjusted data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Median wealth more than quadrupled to $41,000 for Americans born in the 1990s, which includes the generation’s youngest members, born in 1996. In the first quarter of 2024, the collective wealth of millennials and older Gen Z stood at $14.2 trillion, up from $4.5 trillion four years earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.
The turnaround has been so dramatic that millennials—mocked at times for being perpetually behind in building wealth, buying homes, getting married and having children—now find themselves ahead. In early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had, on average and adjusting for inflation, about 25% more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age, according to a St. Louis Fed analysis.
It’s unclear if millennials are better off overall, given the outsize increases in some of the most burdensome costs, such as childcare, housing, student debt and healthcare. They’re also projected to live longer than Boomers, so they’ll need to make their money last.
Overall, millennials hold about 9% of U.S. households’ wealth. That might seem small, but net worths tend to swell with age, meaning that increases work out to bigger percentage gains for younger generations that have yet to build up significant wealth.
Millennials had an average 401(k) account balance of $59,800 in the first quarter of 2024, compared with $27,600 in 2019, according to Fidelity. Good timing helped here, too. Millennials were the first generation to have access to automatic enrollment in workplace plans during their early working years, said Matt Brancato, chief client officer in Vanguard Institutional Investor Group.
In 2006, 57% of employees aged 25 to 40 were enrolled in workplace retirement plans in which Vanguard was the record-keeper. In 2022, 83% were enrolled.
Top takeaways on using text messaging to enhance donor engagement and fundraising efforts.
The article is a deep dive into nonprofit texting programs with Harper Grubbs, vice president of digital fundraising and transformation of Feed the Children; Hannah Litman, senior digital fundraising manager at Brady United; and Aneesh Gowri, associate vice president at MissionWired.
Areas covered:
Looking Ahead: “Texting is going to continue to grow and be a pillar of our fundraising program,” Litman suggests. “Remaining agile is always how you're going to be successful and not being locked into an idea just because you thought it was right.” She emphasizes the need for ongoing testing and adaptation. “Make sure you're optimizing your donation forms for mobile devices," Grubbs adds. “We leaned probably too heavily on the cultivation side and were afraid to ask for money a little bit this past year. We’re now moving in a different direction and trying to be a bit more balanced this year.”
Upfront: This is a long read from a donor’s perspective. Robert Holley has quite an opinion, and I’ll let you schedule time in your day to go read it all. Below are excerpts from Robert in the post.
My goal is to encourage organizations to look at giving from the donor’s perspective. To this end, I’ll recount obstacles that I’ve faced in trying to make donations—including when I wish to give money to charities through my estate planning.
To be clear, the following stories really happened. And, to repeat my key point, my goal is to encourage charities to look at the process from the donor’s point of view by identifying how to create a slippery slope from the initial interest to the actual gift.
Five things that nonprofits should consider doing to facilitate donations:
A Few Additional Comments
To summarize, nonprofits should look at the giving process through the eyes of the donor. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to slide down the slippery slope from the intention to making the actual gift. Someone at your organization (on the development team, for example) should also monitor changes in tax laws and general economic conditions to aid donors if they have questions.
Our media thrives on creating buzz, so it’s no surprise there was quite a stir when the government revealed that the job market from early 2023 to early this year wasn't as strong as it initially appeared. According to the Labor Department, employers may have added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months leading up to March. However, this new report is just the beginning of an annual process where the Labor Department revises older payroll data using more comprehensive, but less timely, state unemployment-tax records. This is only a preliminary estimate, and the official numbers will be updated in February.
Then came the tense anticipation as everyone waited for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to emerge from the Jackson Hole, WY, meeting and hint at a possible interest rate cut in September. “We do not seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions,” Powell said in a speech at the central bank’s annual gathering in the Grand Teton National Park on Friday. “The time has come for policy to adjust.”
Fed policymakers typically meet for two days at a time. Here are the dates when their coming gatherings are set to conclude and market forecasts, based on the CME FedWatch tool:
Americans’ economic mood brightens—a bit. New data shows a small—but real—uptick in sentiment; it comes as mortgage rates and gas prices are down while inflation continues to cool. “Sentiment is drifting up,” said Joanne Hsu, who oversees the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index. That closely watched measure has risen 2.3% since July, the university said Friday, driven by an uptick in people’s expectations of how the economy will fare in coming months. Consumers are still much less buoyant on the economy than they were before the pandemic. But a variety of factors seems to be driving an improvement in American moods, including lower gasoline prices, a decline in mortgage rates ahead of an expected Federal Reserve interest-rate cut in September, and a buoyant stock market.
Meanwhile, Americans continue to spend. The Commerce Department on Friday reported that consumer spending rose 0.5% from June to July. That put it up 5.3% from a year earlier—or 2.7% after adjusting for inflation. The Commerce Department on Thursday revised gross domestic product growth for the second quarter higher, largely on the strength of consumer spending. Economists expect third-quarter spending will remain solid, and several revised their third-quarter GDP estimates upward on Friday.
Stanford University professor Neale Mahoney and researcher Ryan Cummings argue that inflation has a sort of half-life when it comes to sentiment readings. People focus on the level of prices they are paying now versus what they remember paying, rather than year-over-year changes. Memories of what prices were before the pandemic—the Commerce Department’s price measure is up 18.3% since December 2019—are only slowly fading.
RKD Group: Thinkers Monthly LinkedIn Update:
I hope your organization had a successful close to Q3 and is gearing up for a fantastic Q4! As we enter the largest fundraising quarter of the year, it's essential to have every channel in place to cut through the noise, stand out amidst the election buzz and stay competitive. Please let me know how we can help you.