Millennial Donor Survey

Trying to dissect and analyze a demographic as large, transient, and hyper-connected as the 80 million voices that make up the Millennial Generation is no small feat. Even so, there’s no shortage of wild assumptions being made about Millennials and their preferences on everything from food to fashion.  Luckily nonprofits can begin to toss their assumptions aside and let Millennials do the talking.  For the third year in a row Achieve and Johnson Grossnickle and Assosciates (JGA) have come together to give Millennials an opportunity to share how they donate, volunteer, engage, and lead through the Millennial Engagement and Donor Survey, open now through the end of January. 

The Case Foundation and Social Citizens are proud to partner once again with our friends at Achieve and JGA because we know what a critical time this is for the nonprofit sector. Last year’s Millennial Donor Survey found that of the more than 3,000 people (ages 20 to 35) who responded, 93 percent gave to nonprofit organizations in 2010, with 10 percent giving $1,000 or more. So, what does this mean for nonprofits? Millennials are giving, they’re giving generously, and if organizations aren’t focused on how to most effectively engage with these new donors and volunteers – they won’t just be falling behind, they’ll have a difficult time catching up.

The information gleaned from this survey is important to all of us. If you’re a Millennial (aged 20-35, for purposes of the study) please take five minutes of your time to fill out this survey and help organizations throughout the country understand how to integrate your talent and expertise more strategically in their work.

We’ll be covering the results of the study here on Social Citizens when it’s released this summer. 

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve by having a spokesperson represent your issue.

Many nonprofit organizations have enlisted celebrities to help them not only to raise awareness about a specific issue, but also to support their organization’s fundraising efforts. I bet you can name a few without even having to think twice—there’s Marlo Thomas for St. Jude’s Children Hospital, Heidi Klum for The Heart Truth campaign, and Ryan Gosling who worked earlier this year with the ENOUGH Project.

For some, integrating a celebrity into your promotional model is par for the course—but should it be? While these A-list celebrities certainly draw attention to an issue, just how effective are they when it comes to enlisting the support of donors online?

Today, Geoff Livingston and Henry T. Dunbar of Zoetica released a white paper focusing on the effectiveness of celebrity spokespeople in social fundraisers. The report looked at the effectiveness of a number of online fundraising campaigns for nonprofits—including both those that did and did not— involve high-profile celebrities. 

They concluded that a celebrity “presence” does not always guarantee that a fundraising initiative will be successful. Rather, bringing on board lesser known celebrities and “weblebrities” can often times be more effective in connecting with donors. The key differences for the more successful, but less well known celebrities included the fact that they had: a personal and relevant story related to the cause; a willingness to engage and be active with the community focused on that particular issue; and an authentic tie to the cause.

The authors also found that while integration of a celebrity spokesperson can help galvanize a community around an issue, getting a star’s fans and followers to commit to a particular call-to-action—such as donating—is not always a guarantee.

“Nonprofits have turned to their celebrity partners with fans and followers in the millions to raise money. The numbers can be astounding, both positively and negatively. Save the Children just ran a celebrity campaign on social media with the likes of Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber that raised $100,000 in the first day. However, deeper analysis showed the fundraiser achieved $0.0001 per celebrity follower.”

In addition, the 2011 Millennial Donor survey (conducted by Achieve and Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates) found that for Millennials specifically, 85% responded that they are “motivated to give by a compelling mission or cause, and 56% by a personal connection or trust in the leadership of the organization.” Not surprisingly when compared to the findings from this white paper, “only 2% of Millennials were motivated to give by celebrity endorsements.”

Katya Andresen, Chief Strategy Officer of Network for Good offered Livingston and Dunbar three factors to consider when assessing whether or not a celebrity presence could help promote social fundraising efforts:

• Does the spokesperson have a personal story related to the issue?
• Does the spokesperson have a tight knit community that interacts with them?
• Can the spokesperson be considered an authentic messenger who can deliver issue related messages?

Similarly, the white paper offers suggestions for what a nonprofit manager should consider before integrating a celebrity component into their social fundraising campaign.

• Does the celebrity have a personal connections and authentic passion for the cause?
• Does the celebrity spokesperson demonstrate a willingness to ask their personal friends to become involved, and not just their public?
• Welcome the non-traditional celebrity and consider those who are avid users of social media or who have large/strong social networks

Livingston and Dunbar’s ultimate conclusion is that “the best results do not come from the most well-known celebrities and bloggers, but the most engaged ones.” Taking a page from more traditional fundraising techniques that focus on the creation of relationships, the authors conclude that in order for socially driven fundraising efforts be successful, they too must focus on the building of relationships.

Whether or not you get Lady Gaga to do a public service announcement or Justin Beiber to make an appearance at your next fundraiser—real success for any organization’s fundraising and mobilization efforts will come from connections with the creation and cultivation of relationships.

What techniques for online and socially driven fundraising have you used or seen? Have you ever engaged a celebrity spokesperson to help your nonprofit? If so, what lessons learned can you share?

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.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a nonprofit, a hot new restaurant or a wannabe fashion trend, one thing is certain – you’re spending a lot of time and energy these days figuring out how to attract and then keep Millennials coming back to your cause, your store or your brand.

When it comes to assessing Millennials' attitudes and preferences in supporting nonprofits, much can be assumed about what it is they want to know before giving, and how they want it. But thanks to Achieve and JGA, there is research that has helped shed some light on how to best engage Millennial donors, and you might be surprised to learn how they want to be reached.

Last year, the Millennial Donor Survey found that donors not only wanted to give financially, but they wanted to affect change and create direction – they wanted access to the board’s leadership and real opportunities to get involved. Perhaps we assume that since Millennials are doing everything else online, they must be giving there as well – but last year’s survey found that 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), but only 8% are highly likely to respond to an e-mail request.

This year Achieve and JGA are at it again. They have launched a new survey for Millennials to understand their donor preferences and to hear more about why donors decide not to support a cause, perceptions on gifting trends such as text campaigns, and views on young professional groups. The results of this study will be released in April 2011 and will help guide nonprofits that work closely with Millennials.

The information gleaned from this survey is important to all of us. If you’re a Millennial (ages 20-35, for purposes of the study) please take 5 minutes of your time to fill out this survey and help organizations throughout the country understand how to involve Millennials more strategically to impact our communities. We’ll be covering the results of the study here on Social Citizens when it’s released in April.