Fundraising research summary for April 2015
Howard Lake | 10 April 2015 | News
The volume of academic and commercial research that can benefit fundraisers continues to grow. Here is our first attempt to create a monthly summary of those that we have come across.
1. Optimum length of email campaigns
A blog post from email marketing platform ConstantContact reports on How Long Should Your Email Be? New Data for Nonprofit Associations, Membership Organizations, and Religious Organizations?
“Nonprofit associations saw the highest click-through rates for emails with 25 lines of text. These click-through rates decreased gradually for emails that exceed 30 lines of text”.
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2. The dilemma of using pictures of bearded men to support homeless fundraising appeals
Should fundraisers use stereotypical images that perform well in terms of generating income to support fundraising appeals? For example, bearded men convey homelessness to donors well and generate donations, but they’re not representative of the majority of homeless people.
Drawing What Homelessness Looks Like: Using Creative Visual Methods as a Tool of Critical Pedagogy by Jon Dean at Sheffield Hallam University was published in Sociological Research Online.
It derives from earlier research by Dr Beth Breeze and J Dean – Pictures of Me: user views on their representation in homelessness fundraising appeals published in the International Journal of Non-profit and Voluntary Sector Marketing.
Jeff Brooks comments:
“If you’re a fundraiser, your job is to raise funds. It’s not to change the way people think… Effective fundraisers meet donors where they are. Not where they want them to be”.
3. Workers’ support for employers’ favoured social and charitable causes
Are workers motivated by the greater good? According to research by Mirco Tonin of the University of Southampton and IZA (Germany), “employees show more commitment to an employer that promotes the greater good, and they work harder too”.
Workers care about employers’ social causes, but “there is evidence for the public sector that paying people more or underlining the career opportunities (as opposed to the social aspects) associated with public sector jobs is instrumental in attracting a more productive workforce, without having a negative impact on intrinsic motivation”.
4. Male donors respond better to fundraising appeals about poverty that focus on their self-interest
According to the US authors of What drives the gender gap in charitable giving? Lower empathy leads men to give less to poverty relief, “we found that men reported less willingness to give money or volunteer time to a poverty relief organisation, gaps that were mediated by men’s lower reported feelings of empathy toward others”.
However, they managed to re-align this gender gap when they tested “framing poverty as an issue that negatively affects all Americans”, suggesting that “while men were generally less motivated by empathy, they responded to a framing that recast charitable giving as consistent with their self-interest”.
Similar reframing of the message on women however had the opposite effect, resulting in discouraging them from giving.
5. Ask Less, Make More. Turning the “ask more, make more” adage on its head.
DonorVoice argue that “ask more, make more” clearly doesn’t work, as fundraisers are doing exactly that but total charitable income is not increasing. Looking at average revenue and net income from appeals, “Both go down, a lot, as we increase the number of appeals”.
“The reality is you can ask less, make same for some donors and spend less and net more for many other donors on the file”. If you respond to donors’ stated preferences and intent (about e.g. number of communications and asks received) then, DonorVoice argues, you can move from “ask more, make the same” to “ask more, make more”.
You can view the full whitepaper here:
Meanwhile, other research
There are a few other research papers or resources that might prove useful to fundraisers.
1. What is a Twitter favourite and how significant are they?
Not everyone understands favouriting posts in Twitter, and those that do use the facility in a surprising variety of ways, according to More than Liking and Bookmarking? Towards Understanding Twitter Favouriting Behaviour.
2. What should European universities teach about philanthropy?
You can listen to a webinar from the European Foundation Centre focusing on the future of teaching philanthropy in European universities. It si a conversation between Michiel de Wilde, Director of the Centre for Strategic Philanthropy (ECSP) at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and Charles Keidan, a Philanthropy Practice Research Fellow at City University London.
[youtube height=”450″ width=”800″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK4LLbJn-O4[/youtube]
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.