US non-profits receive large gifts online
Howard Lake | 29 October 2003 | News
Do donors make large gifts online? Some US non-profits say they are receiving gifts online of $1 million or over.
Rick Christ of American consultancy NPadvisors.com shares news of some major gifts being received online by US non-profits.
Writing in his monthly e-mail newsletter, Christ reports on an e-mail appeal on behalf of a client that generated an online donation of $50,000. The appeal had asked for “a gift of $100 or even more.” “The code assigned by the web donation matched that assigned to the e-mail” says Christ, so it wasn’t a case of the donor being prompted by another perhaps paper-based appeal.
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Even this though was small compared to what some non-profits say they are receiving online. An informal online poll by online fundraising company Kintera revealed that 9% of the non-profits which responded had received an online gift of $1 million or more. Another 4% had received a donation of over $100,000, and 13% had received a gift between $10,000 to $99,999. However, the majority of non-profits were not quite so fortunate: 27% received a donation of between $100 to $999, and 31% had not received an online gift larger than $100.
Christ offers two useful tips in the light of these figures. He suggests that you “look at your automated ‘thanks for your online gift’ email and make sure it would be as welcome to a $100,000 donor as it would be to a $10 donor.” In addition he recommends ensuring that your Web site generates an automatic e-mail to you if a donation over a certain amount is made online: this will then allow you to call the donor personally to thank them and perhaps elicit more on why they gave.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.