Research reveals information on Irish digital giving
Howard Lake | 22 October 2019 | News
A new study shows that 62% of Irish charities now accept donations on their websites.
The research was carried out by Digital Charity Lab, the official Irish partner of Global NGO Technology Report from Nonprofit Tech for Good and Funraise.org. The research highlights the data from Irish charities and is the only crowdsourced, multilingual survey and report for the NGO sector.
The top findings of the research were:
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- Irish charities have embraced email marketing, with 78% sending email communications. However, many only contact their lists infrequently
- Irish charities are using Google Ads more than their peers in the rest of Europe and North America but a significant proportion that have the Google Grant are not using it.
- Only 30% of Irish charities are using Facebook’s Fundraising tools, well below the North American figure of 45%.
- Social media is popular among Irish charities, with 96% of charities using it. However, only 48% have a social media strategy
- Types of payments used for fundraising were credit card payments (87%), direct debit (55%) and PayPal (55%). Online fundraising tools used were:
- Recurring/monthly giving (92%)
- Peer-to-Peer fundraising (48%)
- Text-to-give (44%)
- Tribute giving, such as memorials and birthdays (41%)
- Crowdfunding (18%)
- Of the 96% of charities who regularly use social media to engage supporters and donors the most popular social channels used were Facebook (93%), Twitter (88%), Instagram (48%), LinkedIn (46%), YouTube (34%) and WhatsApp (6%).
Charities in the survey considered a wide range of communication and fundraising tools to be effective in digital platforms. Rating these tools from 35% effective to 92%, top rated were case studies, social media, website, email newsletters and video.
Ireland rates slightly behind the rest of Europe and USA in use of key digital channels.
139 Irish non-profits completed the survey of which 38% were classified as charities, 25% were non-profit organization (NPO) and the balance non-governmental organizations (NGO). Ten different classifications of charitable causes were presented in the survey including health and wellness 27%, human and social services 19% and children and youth 18%.
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.