Most fundraisers have seen year-over-year loss of revenue in the past 2-3 years since a surge of giving in 2020 and 2021.
It may feel like a debacle.
But is it?
A study by TrueSense Marketing on giving data for food banks gives us some insights into giving during and since Covid: IS Covid in the Rear-View?
The data is from food banks, but it’s similar to what most fundraising sectors have experienced.
This chart shows the donor numbers by life cycle from 2019 to 2023:
(“New” means those who gave for the first time that year; “2nd Year” are those who first gave in the previous year and again in the current year; “Recaptured” are formerly lapsed donor who gave in the current year; “Multi-Year” are donors who have given in 3+ consecutive years. This view of donors is important, because the expected behavior of these donor groups is very different, and it helps us see what’s really going on.)
What this graph shows is that in 2020, donors poured gifts on food banks: motivated by the extraordinary need of the pandemic, they increased by 290%.
We then see that surge of new donors work its way through the life cycles: They are 2nd Year in 2021 and Multi-Year in 2022 and beyond. So those categories are bigger than before the pandemic.
But they keep shrinking. Back toward “normal.” For food banks, 2023 looks a bit like 2019 — but bigger. While they lost a lot of those Covid donors, they also kept some, resulting in a larger class of Multi-Year donors.
I’ll guess that 2024 will also continue the downward trend toward pre-Covid numbers.
It’s likely your data looks somewhat like this.
Disaster donors are harder to keep than typical donors. Differently motivated, often younger, and less likely to stay after the disaster. This is just a fact of life. Don’t be surprised or dismayed.
But as you can see, not all the new disaster donors went away.
Your one-time-only Covid donors are now deeply lapsed. You aren’t going to recover many of them. The organizations now have a larger pool of donors to fundraise from. That’s the good news.
Next time there’s a “disaster” that drives a lot of new donors your way, have a plan to keep as many of them as possible:
- For the first year or so after that first donation, connect your fundraising to the cause they gave to. Don’t “change the subject” on them.
- Give them good reasons to become monthly donors — those who do will retain at a dramatically higher rate.
- Focus your fundraising efforts (lapsed recapture) on those who gave higher amounts.
