Wednesday, March 9, 2011

A look at trends of charitable giving

Today we have a guest blogger from our Research department to tell us about trends in giving! Take it away!

In late 2009 and again in late 2010, DMI commissioned five poll questions to be conducted by the Survey Policy Research Institute at San Jose State University.  The questions were asked of respondents in the Silicon Valley area of California.

The results for the 2009 Survey can be found here, and the results of the 2010 Survey can be found here.

So what did we learn from the surveys?  We inferred that the likelihood of a significant donation decreased between the end of 2009 and 2010, mostly for church based organizations, and that the public perception of the importance of Food Banks decreased more than any other type of organization listed, while the public perception of organizations promoting environmental issues increased slightly.

More people in 2010 say that they are donating to national organizations, perhaps driven by political considerations, or even specific issues like the BP oil disaster.  There also appears to have been a shift in preference to Email solicitations at the expense of Postal mail, but Postal mail is still the most popular form of solicitation; there has been an increase in the None of the above option, indicating the emergence of a new solicitation method, perhaps social media driven.  We can also see that more donors say they are restricting their giving to known organizations, indicating perhaps the increasing importance of loyalty. 

In all, people still open their mail, and still want to be mailed, but appear wary of giving to new organizations, or to donating in general.

If you want more information about these surveys and our results, contact us!

--B

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