Blueprint Fundraising

Want to show your favorite corporate partner how much you appreciate them?

Consider nominating them for an Imagine Canada Business & Community Partnership Award. The deadline is July 7. Even if you don’t win, your corporate partner will appreciate the nomination.

Good news for cultural and social service organizations in BC and the Yukon. The Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation has announced new grant guidelines, including larger grants and multi-year funding.

This is sort of old news (from a few weeks ago anyhow) but I want to make sure that readers of the fundit are on the cutting edge of philanthropy research…

An East Carolina University research team set up an experiment where people of varying degrees of attractiveness raised money in a door-to-door campaign. Their conclusion: attractive women, particularly blondes, make the best solicitors. They raised more than double the hourly amount of other solicitors.

The study also looked at race and found that a white blonde was less
successful asking for money from a cultural minority than when a
minority asked another minority for money. Physical attractiveness,
though, influenced amounts of giving despite race.

No surprise, but results were entirely driven by the response of men who answered the door — when women answered the door attractive female solicitors lost their advantage.

A few other highlights from the study:

• Blondes raised more than brunettes (even when they were both assessed as being equally “attractive” by an independent panel)
• Personality and assertiveness had less impact than beauty
• Assertive solicitors raised less than shy solicitors
• Offering to enter people in a chance to win $1,000 encouraged more giving
• Being told that others had made donations encouraged more giving

I am happy to hear that the shy people raised more than the pushy ones.

You can find the full publication here.

A new study caught my attention because I am currently working on matching gift campaigns with several clients.

What is a matching gift campaign? Basically a donor offers to match what others give. as an incentive to encourage people to donate. The match might be 1:1 ($1 for every $1 raised ), 2:1 ($2 for every $1 raised) or even more.

These campaigns are especially popular with arts organizations in British Columbia at the moment, where the BC Arts Renaissance Fund and Canadian Heritage are matching new donations to some arts endowments.

Conventional wisdom says that a higher match (i.e. 2:1) would result in more giving, right? Not so according to a Yale study. Researchers found that matching campaigns do encourage giving overall (gifts were 19% bigger and response was higher by 22%), but that degree of the match has no impact. A 2:1 and 3:1 match did not result more giving than a 1:1 match.

Based on this study, the Chronicle of Philanthropy concludes that fundraisers should not spend time trying to convince wealthy donors to match at a 2:1 or 3:1 level — just go for 1:1. This makes no sense to me! It is useful to know that the bigger matches aren’t incentives, but the final result to the nonprofit will be much greater if the lead donor will give $2 or $3 for every dollar.

An rather long and dense article summarizing the results of the study, “Does Price Matter in Charitable Giving? Evidence From a Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment,” is available as a PDF here.

The 2004 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating was released this week.

The authors say that the results can’t be compared to the 1997 and 2000 surveys because of a change in data collection techniques and questions. I guess this will make the quality of the information better, but it is really too bad that it won’t show us the trends at play in charitable giving.

I’ll share the highlights with you as I wade through the report over the next few weeks. Here’s a start:

• 85% of Canadians report having made financial donations to charities and nonprofits in 2004
• Average amount given: $400
• Average number of donations made by each person: 4.3
• Median donation amount: $120 (this means half gave less than $120 and half gave more)
• Religious charities received 45% of all donations (health and social services were next at 14% and 10% respectively)
• The top 25% of donors account for 82% of the value of all donations
• The likelihood of being a top donor increases with religious attendance, age, household income, and education
• Top three reasons for making a donation: feeling compassion towards people in need; to help a cause in which one believes; and to make a contribution to the community