Millennial Donor Summit

As loyal Social Citizens readers know, we were all abuzz at the Case Foundation as we brought together more than 100 organizations across the country for a virtual summit on Millennial engagement, earlier this summer. Check out the exclusive behind-the-scenes video the Case Foundation interns created featuring insights from Geoff Livingston of Zoetica, Barbara Bush of Global Health Corps and Erica Williams of the Citizen Engagement Lab!

While Millennials are known for being a tech-savvy and entrepreneurial generation, they are less well known for being one of the most active generations when it comes to volunteering and donating. For many organizations that strive to reach this skilled and passionate generation, figuring out how to tap into this passion for service and philanthropy remains a mystery.

In addition to the video we wanted to share some key highlights and takeaways we heard during MDS11:

• Social Media: Non-profits should use social media to interact with Millennials—don’t just make “announcement” posts, but ask questions, respond to comments and tweets, and keep people informed about your organization’s work. It might be a “virtual” relationship, but it’s still a relationship.
• Volunteers and Donors: Advanced technology and increased internet access have empowered the Millennial generation. Satisfy their desire to be influential—give your volunteers and donors legitimate decision making power about how their time is spent and where their money is going. 
• Cross-generational Communication: It’s simple—embrace dialogue between generations! Be open to teaching and learning.
• Non-profit Leadership: The entrepreneurial spirit of the Millennial generation should be harnessed in the non-profit sector—don’t be afraid to try a new method or idea just because it isn’t a standard operating procedure.

If you attended MDS11, what did you find interesting or exciting? If you missed out and want to learn more, register for post-Summit access to the videos at www.mdsummit11.com.

Special thanks to Kate Newman and Kathryn Beard, interns at the Case Foundation, who created this video piece and blog post.

At the Case Foundation we believe strongly in taking risks, pushing the envelope and experimenting with technology in order to better understand how it can be leveraged for social good. Yesterday was an experiment in all of these things as we opened the “virtual” doors to the Millennial Donor Summit.

Conducted exclusively online, the conference set out to engage some of the most forward thinking voices in Millennial giving and engagement. We will be sharing a lot of take-aways from our event, both in terms of sharing the rich content and discussions that came out of the sessions, as well as the logistical back end work involved with conducting an online convening.

Our thanks go out to all who made the day a success -- our speakers, our participants from across the country who tuned in from coffee shops, conference rooms and hotel lobbies, and of course, to our partners at Achieve and JGA.

Here’s a quick round up of some of the stories and posts from around the web that covered the event and discussion topics. And the conversation continues on Twitter using the hashtag #MDS11.

• How To Get Fire in Your Organization’s Belly: Key Insight from the Millennial Donor Summit (Beth’s Blog)

• 7 things I learned about Millennial Engagement from Mr. Youth (Katya’s Nonprofit Marketing Blog)

• Live blogging from the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit: Exploring the Latest Millennial Research (Amy Sample Ward's Version of NPTech Blog)

• A fireside chat with Jean Case at #MDS11 (Nonprofit Nate)
• Microvolunteering: Small Jobs on Your Own Time #mds11 (Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog)

• Live blogging from the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit: The Generational Divide (Panel Discussion) (NTEN)

• Philanthropy’s Community: Observers, Fans, Evangelists & Ambassadors (Tactical Philanthropy)

• Applying Social Storytelling to Strategic Online Fundraising (Geoff Livingston)

If you missed out on the Summit, don’t worry – you can still catch all the action by registering for post-Summit access to all of the videos on www.mdsummit11.com.

Welcome to our special guest blog post series -"Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We have been exploring Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners in lead-up to today's Millennial Donor Summit.

Today, we've invited Maya Enista, Chief Executive Officer of Mobilize.org to provide her thoughts on the take on how the Millennial generation can apply their strengths towards social good.

I spend most of my day working to decode the Millennial Generation puzzle; my generation’s puzzle, and support and balance the tension (in the most positive of definitions) between our technological aptitude and relationship based existence, and how the two combine the most unique way to create unprecedented social good. I was able to sneak an advanced copy of Millennial Donors: A Study of Millennial Giving and Engagement Habits, and this important piece of research has left me perplexed about my generation, and hopeful that the current dating relationship that technological aptitude and relationship based existence have, will soon settle down, get married and stop being something noteworthy, but instead accepted as the Millennial way of life; the new toolkit of a generation who grew up expressing themselves, across multiple platforms, across boundaries of all types. I was glad to see the Millennial Donors report make that argument, explore that tension and identify areas of growth for both Millennials and the organizations and causes that serve us, and which we serve.

I have the privilege of serving as Chief Executive Officer of Mobilize.org, an amazing Millennial organization who aims to empower and invest in Millennials to create and implement solutions to social problems. Our work bridges the online and offline Millennial community, and challenges both to get involved in addressing the most pressing issues they face. Mobilize.org convenes Millennials to discuss the challenges and obstacles that they face, provides an opportunity for them to work collaboratively to propose solutions to those problems and then invests (financially and otherwise) in the Millennials as they work hard to implement those solutions on their campuses and in their communities. We’ve funded 31 Millennial-led solutions to date, ranging from projects focused on returning young veterans and their reintegration into their communities, to the financial literacy of first generation Millennials.

The values of this report very much resonated with me, and with the work that the amazing Mobilize.org team has been doing for the past nine years. Most importantly, authentic Millennial engagement at all levels is the secret sauce for building movements, sustaining organizations and changing policy. We’ve seen it time and time again in our country, both in terms of what happens when this generation is empowered, and what happens when this generation is ignored. Authentic Millennail engagement includes recognizing the communication tools that this generation is pioneering and appreciating our ability to balance this innovation, with our appreciation for the “old-fashioned” way of getting things done.

I once heard Sean Stannard-Stockton from Tactical Philanthropy masterfully answer a question about whether or not online engagement, particularly in the donor arena, was a passing fad. He sat back, as if this was his favorite question to answer, and said the following:

Some of you remember when the telephone came along, and everyone said – there’s no way you’re going to have time to make any phone calls in the office, you’re so busy typing letters, sealing envelopes and licking stamps. And then, you started making phone calls. Then the fax machine came along and everyone said – there’s no way you’re going to have time to send faxes when you’re in the office, you’re so busy typing letters, sealing envelopes, licking stamps and making phone calls. Then, email happened and it was viewed as a short-term nuisance. There’s no way you’re going to have time to send emails in the office, you’re so busy typing letters, sealing envelopes, licking stamps and making phone calls.

He stopped there, and without even answering the question – he had made his point, because we all know what happened to email. Online engagement is here to stay; and many institutions (non-profits, funders, academic institutions) are behind the times accepting that fact. I’m also happy to report that Millennials have NOT lost their ability engage on a peer to peer level, in fact, technology has enhanced our ability to do so. For the past two years, I’ve set up a Birthday Wish on Causes.com (October 11th, incase you’re pre-planning your donations for the end of the year). I asked my 1,110 friends to donate money to Mobilize.org in celebration of my birthday. My birthday wishes have raised over $3,000 for Mobilize.org. Why? Because I asked the people I know, some in real life and some in Facebook lore only, online, to donate to something that I cared about deeply (online and offline). They did; because I asked, and because technology made it easy for me to ask.

That’s just one example of the unique balance that my generation is navigating as we redefine community, communication and access to information. I have a lot more to learn about this Millennial Generation Puzzle, and I suspect you do too. If that’s true, make sure you join me on Wednesdya, June 22nd for the Millennial Donor Summit, sponsored by the Case Foundation. Here’s the link to register, and tell them I sent you.

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.

This week, we've invited Daniel Kaufman, Co-Founder of the One Percent Foundation as well as Co-Founder of Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits develop and implement Millennial engagement strategies, to provide his take on how to tackle engagement barriers when it comes to fundraising, engagement and advocacy.

If you are reading this, you likely fall into one of two categories: either you work at a nonprofit or you are a Millennial (I’m hoping a large percentage of you are both!). As such, I’m guessing one of the following two scenarios sounds familiar:

If you are a nonprofit: You are sitting around a conference room table trying to figure out how to make your budget for the year. You and your dedicated, underpaid coworkers are trying to figure out the quickest, most effective fundraising strategy so that your organization can focus on changing the world. Inevitably you realize that you can get the most bang for your buck by focusing on major donors and large foundations. It certainly doesn’t make sense to invest time cultivating Millennials who might write a $50 check.

If you are a Millennial: You care about giving back, but you either don’t think you can afford to make a donation, don’t know which organizations are effective, and/or you don’t think you can achieve impact with your small donation. Most importantly, organizations that you might care about aren’t asking you to engage in a meaningful way. As a result, much of your giving tends to be in response to friends asking you to sponsor them in a race or support them at a fundraiser.

If we were on Craigslist, both sides would be posting under the category of Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connections. Most nonprofits need operating funds now and can’t justify investing in Millennial donor cultivation that pays off over the long-term. Most Millennials take this lack of communication as meaning that nonprofits don’t value their engagement. The two parties seek each other but don’t actually talk to one another.

The findings in the Millennial Donors Report underscore the opportunity if we can change this reality. Millennials are eager to engage, so long as they have a trustworthy partner—whether that trust comes from the endorsement of their social networks, organizational transparency, or access to organizational leadership. This begs the question: How do Millennials and nonprofits work together to build and leverage trust?

Enter the One Percent Foundation (OPF), a Millennial-driven solution to the Missed Connection problem, one that seeks to empower Millennials to give in a sustained, generous, and strategic manner. OPF runs a network of online giving circles that engage Millennials earning an income for the first time. We seek to train, educate and engage our participants to use their limited resources to fund the ideas, organizations, and innovation that they are passionate about. Ultimately, OPF is building a broad-based movement of Millennial philanthropists that challenges the status quo by democratizing giving.

OPF’s giving circle model is relatively straightforward. Participants register online, commit to give at least one percent of their annual income to philanthropic causes, and establish monthly recurring donations through our website. We aggregate participants’ giving and facilitate a crowd-sourced, participatory grantmaking program whereby participants identify, assess, and ultimately select grant recipients. The One Percent Foundation program tackles the three key barriers to meaningful Millennial participation (affordability, knowledge, and impact). 

Embedded in OPF’s grantmaking process is the notion that our process breeds trust and thereby reinforces engagement. The first step of an OPF grant cycle is a nomination period whereby anyone in the OPF community (Millennials giving 1%) can recommend an organization to the circle. During the second phase, a small group of volunteers from the OPF community are trained to conduct due diligence on the nominated organizations. This “working group” speaks to staff members of the nominated nonprofits, examines theories of change, vets the organizations’ financials, and conducts independent research. OPF facilitates a conversation with the working group to narrow all of the nominees to five finalists. During the final phase, OPF educates the entire community about the finalists and asks them to vote online. The two organizations that receive the most votes receive a grant from OPF.

OPF’s grantmaking process tackles the three fundamental trust concerns of Millennials: organizations are only considered after they are endorsed by someone in the social network, nominees are vetted by the community, and participants get access to organizational leaders.

Ultimately, OPF is nothing more than a design solution to the Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connection problem. We have created the conditions for Millennials to be able to easily access information and interact with nonprofits so they feel comfortable giving proactively.

I invite you to join me for my session at the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22 to learn more about the One Percent Foundation and how OPF and other creative solutions can enable nonprofits to better engage Millennials.

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.

This week, we've invited Anne Tillema, Director of Development for Mobilize.org to address how fundraising is evolving among organizations.

As the Director of Development of Mobilize.org, a nonprofit organization that focuses on Millennials and investing in their ideas, and as someone with six years of experience in Direct Marketing (particularly Direct Mail) working with over 20 organizations, my fundraising experience expands across almost the entire spectrum of generations. Working in Direct Mail, my target audience was often 70-80 year olds, while today my fundraising focuses on Millennials and members of other generations who want to invest in them.

One thing I have learned from my experience – both in Direct Marketing and with Mobilize.org – is that you cannot make unfounded assumptions about your target audience, no matter what generation they belong to. I was glad to see that the Millennial Donor Survey is helping to shatter some of the assumptions people make about Millennials and their giving habits. Instead, this survey is helping replace these assumptions with theories based on feedback received directly from Millennials themselves – further broadening our understanding of this unique generation.

Many believe that Millennials are most interested in, and therefore most responsive to, solicitations through social media and email. Yet, according to the Millennial Donor Survey, “91% of Millennial donors are at least somewhat likely to respond to a face-to-face request for money from a nonprofit organization, with 27% highly likely to respond to such a request.” On the other hand, “only 8% are highly likely to respond to an email request.” This tells us that we need to make sure that we personally contact and connect with Millennials in our donor cultivations and requests in addition to reaching out to them online, something that many organizations are currently not doing.

At Mobilize.org, we feel it is important that we engage Millennials in discussions about issues affecting our communities and solicit their ideas for solutions, rather than making assumptions about their perspectives and missing out on their innovative suggestions. This same idea applies to Millennial Donors. We need to continue to engage Millennials in order to find out more about why they give, how they prefer to give, their preferred methods of interaction with organizations, what types of communication they prefer, how frequently the want to hear from organizations and their preferred forms of solicitation. We will not understand Millennials’ ideas unless we ask them directly.

So what does this mean?

We need to continue the work of the Millennial Donor Survey and reach out to the Millennials who are donors, volunteers, staff members and even board members of our nonprofits. We need to engage them so that we can learn more about the Millennials involved in our own organizations and make adjustments to our communication and donor strategy accordingly.

Each organization is different and now that we understand more about Millennials and their general giving patterns, we can drill down and learn more about the specifics as they relate to each nonprofit organization. Conduct further surveys, test messages and techniques (both online and offline), segment your fundraising efforts by generation and study giving patterns to see how Millennial donors are currently engaging with your organization and their preferences for the future. The findings can only help expand the role that this important generation, with over 80 million members, can play within our organizations.

Millennials are already an essential part of our nonprofit organizations – and their roles and importance continues to grow. Moving forward, we must involve all generations connected to our nonprofits as we decide on our strategies and plans for the future.

To learn more about Mobilize.org and our work empowering and engaging Millennials, visit www.Mobilize.org.

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.

This week, we've invited Andrew Ho, Manager of Global Philanthropy for the Council on Foundations to share his insights on how Millennial engagement is being redefined here in the US and around the world.

Philanthropy, much as with other things today, has stepped on the accelerator in terms of becoming a global phenomenon. The amount of charitable donations going overseas and to US-based international programs has doubled since 2003, according to the Foundation Center. The rise of philanthropy among the world’s wealthiest in the most recent Forbes survey of the top philanthropists now includes individuals from India (Azim Premji), Mexico (Carlos Slim), China (Li Ka-shing), Germany (Dietmar Hopp and Klaus Tschira), and Switzerland (Steven Schmidheiny). This is yet another example of the global nature of philanthropy now.

It is no coincidence that the rise of global philanthropy mirrors the growth of the millennial generation. Millennials are more connected, cognizant, and committed to tackling society’s ongoing challenges of a global scope than any generation before them. Technology and social media certainly facilitates the increase in connectedness and knowledge – and millennials have grown up in an age where the Internet has always existed. Now there are the tools to not only know what’s going on but know who else is passionate about global issues of the environment, poverty, global health, and education at a speed and on a scale that wasn’t previously achievable. The knowledge and connections spanning the globe – through study abroad trips in college, volunteering for a short-term stint in a developing country, or backpacking the world in a gap year, have led to higher levels of knowledge about the world, but more importantly a higher commitment to solve challenges in today’s world.  Philanthropy increasingly reflects this changing worldview as well, with more and more young people volunteering and making charitable donations.

Global philanthropy is no longer only writing a check or making a grant and sitting back to wait for the results–it is becoming much more involved than that.  Global philanthropy is drawing from the best of the sectors, and collaborating to find solutions.  Social stock markets, social impact bonds, and other hybrid solutions drawing from each of the three sectors demonstrate the merging, melding, and blurring of the business, government and nonprofit sectors. It isn’t so much about which sector or industry is responsible for solutions anymore, it is recognizing that any one cannot achieve success alone, and that it requires networks of committed citizens across the sectors to work together to develop solutions.  Bridging the gaps and increasing philanthropy's impact by breaking down traditional barriers of class, race, sector, and wealth are a work in progress, as are the development of new forms of philanthropy. Each country and culture affects philanthropy, and we all have much to learn from one another as we form our respective ethos of philanthropy.  

The Council on Foundations is committed to developing the next generation of philanthropic leaders and preparing them to take on positions of increasing leadership in the philanthropic sector. Whether through the Career Pathways program, the Next Generation Task Force, or through publications like Trading Power, the Council recognizes and values the development of new leadership in the philanthropic sector. Working with the Council are groups including 21/64, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, Resource Generation, and others are working together with under-40 philanthropic leaders around the world to make a difference. We are also working alongside groups in Brazil, Mexico, and China as they develop the next generation of philanthropic leaders in their respective country. Global philanthropy has tremendous potential for social change in the coming years, as philanthropy raises new leaders to increase collaboration across philanthropy, across borders, and across sectors.  

The philanthropic sector, at a young 100 years old, stands to grow tremendously in the second 100 years through new ways of communication, collaboration, and cooperation. By building trust, sharing knowledge, developing relationships, and strengthening the collective vision toward shared goals for a better society tomorrow, together this generation can extend philanthropy’s impact in pursuit of a better future, for all of us.

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.