Causes.com

Welcome to our special guest blog post series - "Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We hope you will join us each week until the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22, 2011, as we explore Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners.

To launch the series, we've invited Susan Gordon, Director of Nonprofit Services for Causes.com to share her reflections on the Millennial Donor Survey report released earlier this spring. As a leader in the online fundraising and engagement arena, Susan shares with us her insights on trends related to Millennial donors.

As a Millennial and a professional focused on online fundraising for nonprofits, I couldn’t help myself from nodding my head vigorously throughout most of the Millennial Donor Survey. Congratulations to the writers for a job well done. Here at Causes, we’ve done a lot of donor surveys, focus groups, and data collection that has provided many of the same findings. We also started building tools to help your nonprofit capitalize on these trends so I’d like to share some of those tools and how they can help your nonprofit put this survey into practice. 

If you work for a nonprofit, read the survey and are now thinking, “I understand what Millennials are looking for, but how can I do it?” you’re in luck. The survey pointed out two notable statistics:

• 82% of Millennials said they would be very or somewhat likely to donate to organizations that describe the specific purpose for which the money will be used
• 32% were very likely and 45% were somewhat likely to stop donating if they “didn’t know how the donation was making an impact”

These numbers are staggering in a world of general fundraising drives. Causes has built a Fundraising Projects tool that will help you give Millennial donors a picture of how their money makes an impact. If you go to www.causes.com/donate, you’ll find the Causes Fundraising Project directory. Since late 2010, over $3 million has been donated to Causes Fundraising Projects. Nonprofits of all sizes and budgets are taking advantage of this tool, from Homeward Trails Animal Rescue to the Humane Society of the United States, and succeeding at funding their projects through social media.

The other statistic that struck me was that “59% of Millennials gave in response to a personal ask.” Peer-to-peer fundraising, especially through social media, is a hot topic right now (just look at mycharitywater.org) but many nonprofits don’t have custom tools to take advantage of this trend. This is why Causes built out our Wishes feature. Birthday Wishes help Millennials fundraise from their friends and family by asking them to donate to a nonprofit as a birthday present. Birthday Wishes solicited by Causes (we ask everyone to start one when their birthday is approaching) raise an average of $100/wish, but when a nonprofit asks their supporters to set one up from their website with a Causes Birthday Wish widget, Wishes raise an average of $150/wish. This statistic reinforces the study’s findings that Millennials want a relationship with the nonprofits they are supporting.

Something I’d like to see from this study in the future is a more precise definition of “donating on Facebook.” That term can refer to everything from clicking from a Facebook Page to a nonprofit’s website, to donating through a custom tab on a Page, to donating on the Causes application. This distinction may not be as important for this survey, but for the benefit of nonprofits trying to make decisions about these very different methods, I think it’s important to clarify this term in future studies.

This distinction would also help in analyzing the finding that only 4% of Millennials have donated on Facebook. For now, I see this number as a sign of potential and disagree with the conclusion that “while social media and text remains a favorite of Millennials for communicating, they do not seem ready to jump into donating via those methods.” I believe that Millennials are ready to donate through social media but they are not solicited in the right way, or at all, through Facebook. How many of the respondents received a fundraising ask from a nonprofit through Facebook? I know I’m biased but as Facebook blows past the 500 million user mark and the average person spends over 55 minutes a day on the site, I see it as a huge opportunity for nonprofits. As with any new technology, figuring out fundraising through Facebook will take time and experimentation but the potential of this growing community is worth the growing pains.

If your nonprofit is interested in using Causes as a tool to do that, email our Nonprofit Services team at and we can help you get started.