Here’s to 2024! A new year always brings a sense of new opportunities. In fundraising, we can use this time to evaluate our current fundraising processes, implement new and timely practices, and create actionable plans for a more prosperous future with our donors. JGA anticipates the following five donor trends and offers practical solutions for nonprofits in every sector as we move forward into the new year.
Five Trends in Generosity
1. Personal relationships are more important than ever. Individual donors continue to drive philanthropic giving, and foundation giving continues its upward trend.
- Engage your donors. Giving USA 2023: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for 2022revealed that individuals remain the largest group of donors. Understanding donors and building trust is the best way to align your organization with individuals and their philanthropic interests. The first step to creating change at your organization through giving is by prioritizing efforts to re-engage lapsed donors through intentional cultivation and solicitation.
- Reframe philanthropy. We see more institutions redefining philanthropy as generosity. Your organization may find that generosity is a more inclusive mindset that helps you see and engage donors who believe in your mission and give their time and energy as well as dollars. It allows us to think more expansively about giving.
- Actively engage foundations. Prioritize stewardship with your foundation funders by creating strategies to provide updates, thankful acknowledgments, and communications detailing the impact of their support.
2. Nonprofits need to shift to address the growing giving crisis.
- Our traditional donor pyramid of 80% of campaign funds raised by 20% of donors has evolved to as much as 90–94% of funds raised from roughly 10% of donors in a typical campaign today. As the number of donors participating is decreasing, it is more important than ever to cultivate prospects of various levels to build a pipeline for the future.
- Embrace data and other emerging tools for nonprofits, fundraisers, and donors. Utilize technology to enhance donor interaction and broaden donor outreach with new personalized approaches, including customizing how you engage individuals with psychometric and wealth screening data. Rethink the metrics you use for fundraisers to focus on the importance of building relationships with donors at all levels and rewarding stewardship efforts to help build and grow generosity for the future.
3. A great wealth transfer is coming up in America.
- Data projections forecast that Generation X and Millennials will inherit approximately $16 trillion in the next decade from older Americans. We suggest planning now for this wealth transfer, which will help your organization and donors to prepare for the future.
- Integrate planned giving throughout your advancement program. Planned gifts are flexible and comprehensive generosity options for donors with an affinity for your organization. Consider how planned giving initiatives can enhance your major and annual giving programs.
- Reimagine “major gift” and typical donor profiles at your institution. Broaden your outreach to include donors who have donated significant dollar amounts and donors who give annually. Data can be a useful tool to help you identify and connect with and engage donors in the middle of your gift pyramid.
4. Different generations respond to different engagement practices.
- Track important data points and employ the data to help customize your outreach. We have already seen significant changes in philanthropic giving among generations; Millennials now give more dollars than Gen X, according to Giving USA: Giving by Generation 2023. Also, younger generations want and value direct and personalized engagement. Customize and clarify your messaging to reach them in ways that resonate.
- As you engage donors this year, consider:
- What data do you track now, beyond the graduating class or alumni group?
- What are the top two to three affinity groups at your institution that you could engage?
- How do you engage your faculty/staff in generosity and advancement efforts?
5. Data and innovation drive decision-making and investments.
- Consumers are becoming more familiar with and open to AI features and the value of data. And there is so much data out there! As fundraisers, how do we take the data, see the implications and trends, and translate it into strategy?
- Use new technologies to customize your communication and giving appeals. Donors expect personalized messaging with clearly stated impacts and an explanation of the return on investment.
Learn Who to Engage and How to Engage with Acuity® Darts
As your organization ramps up for 2024, paying attention to changing trends will be important. To initiate an actionable plan with clear intelligence on who to engage and how to do so, JGA suggests integrating an innovative data solution like Acuity Darts into your donor engagement plan.
Watch the 30-minute case demo and case study to see how Acuity Darts tells you which donor conversations to prioritize and what to say.
Acuity Darts combines JGA’s proprietary donor identification and prioritization tool, Acuity, with Carnegie’s psychographic and segmentation system, Darts. This system provides a deeper understanding of your donors through wealth screening, engagement analysis, custom demographics, and psychographic identification. With this advanced technology, your organization will learn which donors or engagers are most promising for direct development efforts as well as the psychological factors like personality, motivation, and desires that allow for dynamic communication.
Acuity shows you WHO to engage.
As annual data trends reveal, individual donors remain the largest group of donors for most nonprofits. Acuity Darts includes an Acuity analysis, which takes donor screening a step further; it identifies your organization’s top individual donors based on their capacity to give and their level of engagement. As a result, you’ll know exactly which prospects to solicit, and your team and gift officers will have an actionable and strategic prospect management plan to follow.
Darts tells you HOW to engage them.
Once you know your best prospects, Acuity Darts utilizes a personality-based methodology to identify the most effective ways to engage those individuals. Prospects are categorized into one of nine positive archetypes, or Darts, based on qualitative and quantitative data. These archetypes reveal charitable contribution factors, or the motivations, behind each donor’s giving patterns. In addition to knowing their personality type, Darts analyzes donors to understand their contact preferences so you can tailor communication options and frequency.
As donors become savvier, a personalized approach becomes more and more important. Acuity Darts is a powerful tool to individualize how you engage your donors with segmented, actionable data, positioning you for successful fundraising in 2024 and for the future. Watch this 30-minute demo to learn more.