Cultivating Lifelong Donors: Stewardship and the Fundraising Pyramid

This handbook helps nonprofits build long-term giving programs that span the entire supporter lifecycle, from engagement through the end of life. It highlights strategies for engaging new supporters online, investigates the characteristics of loyal donors, examines the importance of developing personal relationships with transitional giving prospects, and discusses donor cultivation

Charitable Giving Report: How Nonprofit Fundraising Performed in 2013

The Charitable Giving Report, derived from The Blackbaud Index, includes overall giving data from 4,129 nonprofit organizations representing $12.5 billion in total fundraising from 2013. The Report also includes online giving data from 3,359 nonprofits representing$1.7 billion in online fundraising from 2013. This year's report features the addition of overall charitable giving data from 985 organizations and online giving data from 778 organizations

2008 DonorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis

Over the past three years, Target Analytics, a Blackbaud company, has held a series of annual meetings with a total of twenty-four major national non-profit organizations on the subject of online fundraising. The primary purposes of this effort were to give each participating organization the information needed to benchmark their own online fundraising program performance against that of peer organizations and to provide a forum for sharing best practices about online fundraising techniques and developing a successful integrated marketing strategy.A separate goal of the project was to use the aggregated organization data to derive a set of general discoveries about internet giving in the context of an overall fundraising program. Target published a summary of initial discoveries following the meeting of the first twelve participants in 2006. This document is an update to those findings that incorporates two more years of analysis and giving data from double the number of organizations

Gilded Giving: Top-Heavy Philanthropy in an Age of Extreme Inequality

Unprecedented levels of charitable giving in recent years mask a troubling trend. This report shows that charities are increasingly relying on larger and larger donations from smaller numbers of high-income, high-wealth donors. Meanwhile, they are receiving shrinking amounts of revenue from the vast population of donors at lower and middle-income levels. This trend mirrors the increasing concentration of wealth in larger society.The report finds that this has significant implications for the practice of fundraising, the role of the independent nonprofit sector, and the health of our larger democratic civil society. The increasing power of a small number of donors also increases the potential for mission distortion.This study tracks significant changes in philanthropic giving in recent years, puts forward a number of possible implications of these changes, and offers some solutions

KID smART: Relief Effort Through the Arts

The purpose of this internship report is to analyze the nonprofit organization KID smART through the lens of my Arts Administration education and training. I will provide a breakdown of the organization’s structure and the components of my internship that occurred during KID smART’s programmatic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through my S.W.O.T. analysis, I connect KID smART’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to best practices of the Arts Administration industry. In conclusion, I offer recommendations of how KID smART can improve as it grows and continues to serve the New Orleans communit

STATISTICAL AND OPTIMAL LEARNING WITH APPLICATIONS IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Statistical learning is widely used in business analytics to discover structure or exploit patterns from historical data, and build models that capture relationships between an outcome of interest and a set of variables. Optimal learning on the other hand, solves the operational side of the problem, by iterating between decision making and data acquisition/learning. All too often the two problems go hand-in-hand, which exhibit a feedback loop between statistics and optimization. We apply this statistical/optimal learning concept on a context of fundraising marketing campaign problem arising in many non-profit organizations. Many such organizations use direct-mail marketing to cultivate one-time donors and convert them into recurring contributors. Cultivated donors generate much more revenue than new donors, but also lapse with time, making it important to steadily draw in new cultivations. The direct-mail budget is limited, but better-designed mailings can improve success rates without increasing costs. We first apply statistical learning to analyze the effectiveness of several design approaches used in practice, based on a massive dataset covering 8.6 million direct-mail communications with donors to the American Red Cross during 2009-2011. We find evidence that mailed appeals are more effective when they emphasize disaster preparedness and training efforts over post-disaster cleanup. Including small cards that affirm donors' identity as Red Cross supporters is an effective strategy, while including gift items such as address labels is not. Finally, very recent acquisitions are more likely to respond to appeals that ask them to contribute an amount similar to their most recent donation, but this approach has an adverse effect on donors with a longer history. We show via simulation that a simple design strategy based on these insights has potential to improve success rates from 5.4% to 8.1%. Given these findings, when new scenario arises, however, new data need to be acquired to update our model and decisions, which is studied under optimal learning framework. The goal becomes discovering a sequential information collection strategy that learns the best campaign design alternative as quickly as possible. Regression structure is used to learn about a set of unknown parameters, which alternates with optimization to design new data points. Such problems have been extensively studied in the ranking and selection (R&S) community, but traditional R&S procedures experience high computational costs when the decision space grows combinatorially. We present a value of information procedure for simultaneously learning unknown regression parameters and unknown sampling noise. We then develop an approximate version of the procedure, based on semi-definite programming relaxation, that retains good performance and scales better to large problems. We also prove the asymptotic consistency of the algorithm in the parametric model, a result that has not previously been available for even the known-variance case

Gilded Giving 2018: Top-Heavy Philanthropy and Its Risks to the Independent Sector

What are the risks to the autonomy of the independent nonprofit sector—not to mention our democracy—when a growing amount of philanthropic power is held in fewer hands?This report takes a close look at the impact of increasing economic inequality on the philanthropic sector. It finds that our charitable sector is currently experiencing a transition from broad-based support across a wide range of donors to top-heavy philanthropy increasingly dominated by a small number of very wealthy individuals and foundations.As we reported in 2016, growing inequity in charitable giving continues to hold risks not only for nonprofits themselves, but also for the nation. This is truer now than ever, as ever-greater proportions of charitable dollars technically qualifying as tax-deductible donations are diverted into wealth-warehousing vehicles such as private foundations and donor-advised funds, and away from direct nonprofits serving immediate needs.This updated edition of Gilded Giving focuses on the impact of increasing financial inequality on the philanthropic sector, highlights trends that have either arisen or increased in intensity since the initial publication of our report, puts forward several possible implications of these changes, and suggests some solutions

Gilded Giving 2020: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy

Ten years ago, in August 2010, several dozen U.S. billionaires led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett pledged to give away at least half of their wealth before their death. Many have donated considerable sums to charities and foundations since then. But as a group, these billionaires have seen their fortunes skyrocket in the decade since the so-called Giving Pledge was launched.The wealth of the billionaire class is growing so fast, it's simply outstripped their capacity to give it away. But in a time of acute charitable need, there's another growing concern in the broader charitable sector: Most of these funds may end up in family foundations and donor-advised funds that could legally exist in perpetuity — without ever supporting real, on-the-ground charitable work.Over the last two decades, charitable giving has been on a steady upward trajectory. But this growth has masked a troubling trend: Charity is becoming increasingly undemocratic, with organizations relying more on larger donations from a smaller number of wealthy donors, while receiving shrinking amounts of revenue from donors at lower-and middle-income levels.What's more, a growing share of these high-end donations go not to the organizations that actually perform charitable work, but to tax-privileged private foundations and donor-advised funds that pay only a small percentage of their assets to support working charities. These vehicles offer substantial tax benefits to donors, but may then hoard most or all of these donations in their endowments, drastically limiting what's available to on-the-ground nonprofits.This poses a growing risk to the independence of the nonprofit sector, the integrity of the tax system, and the health of our democracy — and that was before two new existential threats to the nonprofit sector: the GOP tax cut package that passed in 2017, and the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, both of which are likely to concentrate more wealth at the top while hurting the ability of people of ordinary means to give.Diminished giving threatens to exacerbate philanthropic inequity even further at a time when the demand on charities is increasing. This is not the time to discourage broad philanthropic participation, or to hoard charitable revenue in wealth-preservation vehicles. Gilded Giving 2020 examines several possible implications of these conditions and suggests some solutions

Nonprofit Narratives: Faith-Based Organizations, the Gospel Mission, and You

This study involved an in-depth investigation into how overtly Christian 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations incorporate the use of storytelling into their external communications through the lens of Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm theory. Key theoretical streams examined as a part of the literature review include organizational mission communication with an emphasis in faith-based nonprofits, as well as organizational storytelling. This research study explored the following questions: “How do faith-based nonprofit organizations use narrative storytelling via social media to communicate their organizational missions within their circle of influence?” and “How do faith-based nonprofit organizations use narrative storytelling via social media to invite their audiences to join in taking action to fulfill their organizational missions?” Data gathering occurred through content analysis of organizational communications from five nonprofit organizations’ social media channels. All of the organizations advocate for different causes and complete different work, but remain united in the foundation of Christian faith. This textual analysis adds to the body of public relations knowledge regarding organizational mission storytelling as well as audience support motivation. In particular, using Fisher’s principles of narrative provides a unique perspective on public relations efforts of faith-based organizations and the role that storytelling plays in the effectiveness of these efforts. Applying and building on Fisher’s narrative paradigm, this content analysis explores these issues in the distinct organizational context of overtly Christian nonprofits -- a complex setting that has not yet been studied in all its facets. This study has notable applications for faith-based nonprofit organizations to find ways to further execute their organizational mission through harnessing the power of storytelling. There are also relevant implications for constituents as they consume such stories and choose nonprofits and missions to support

Adoption of disaster risk reduction strategy in agriculture sector at Southkhali Union of Sharankhola Upazila, Bangladesh

Climate change is contemporary global threat especially for coastal area of Bangladesh which drastically affects in agricultural sector. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent of adopting disaster risk reduction strategies by farmer towards agriculture sector in Southkhali union of Sharankhola upazila. Data were collected following a structured pretested interview schedule, FGD and KII and then verified with secondary sources of information. Coefficients of Correlation and regression analysis were used to find out the contribution of factors to the variation of adopting disaster risk reduction strategy by farmers in agriculture sector. The study found that the salinity was the major climate change effect in agriculture sector of this area that resulted soil salinity in agriculture and the most common adopted strategies are rain water harvesting (90%), tree plantation (89.16%) and homestead gardening (80.83%) in agriculture. Correlation analysis indicated that age (0.383**), farming experience (0.441**), communication exposure (0.271*) and organizational support (0.226*) had positive significant relationship and climate change effect (-0.266**) had negative significant relationship with adoption of disaster risk reduction strategy of farmers in agriculture. Regression analysis revealed that farming experience (β=0.546) has the strongest contribution and  climate change effect (β=-0.139) had negative contribution to the adoption of disaster risk reduction strategies in agriculture. Based on this observation it can be concluded that the awareness and skill of farmer should be more developed through arranging different training program and providing necessary support to promote environmentally safe cultivation and to enhance climate change adaptation in agriculture sector