Today in the fourth installment of my Fundraising Myth Busters series, we’re going to tackle the belief that you shouldn’t add your online-acquired donors into your other fundraising channels.
Hopefully you’ve already had a chance to check out first three myths in the series. If not, you can get those right here (Donor acquisition; Brand advertising & direct response fundraising; and Solicitation frequency).
Now let’s dig in…
Myth #4
Online-acquired donors are different (and they shouldn’t be included in your direct mail)
What we know
- [bctt tweet=”Online-acquired donors: Are nearly twice as valuable as offline-acquired donors”]
- They tend to skew younger and have higher household income than offline-acquired donors
- Are consistently more loyal, often having much higher 2nd gift conversion and retention rates
- Are much more likely to give across multiple channels than their offline-acquired counterparts (41% vs 10%)
- Multi-channel donors are significantly more valuable than either online or offline only donors (as much as 3-4x more valuable)
What we did to validate this myth
- An international medical relief charity analyzed cross-channel migration of their donor base to see whether online-acquired donors who were included in other solicitation channels gave more or less revenue annually.
What we learned
- We found that when online-acquired donors were solicited in additional channels and began to give via another channel (either phone or direct mail), their long-term value increased by nearly 45%
As you can see, this analysis indicates that there’s really no basis in reality for keeping online-acquired donors out of your other fundraising channels. Importantly, donors don’t consume media in silos – and that is as true for your messages as it is for their personal entertainment, etc.
