New nonprofit study by GiveCentral reveals valuable information about technology and donation processing

Welcome back to the blog and today I’ll take a look at our first nonprofit fundraising study of 2015. Today’s report is the ‘Give Central Survey Report | 2015 Predictions for Nonprofit Giving’ and is compiled by GiveCentral.org out of Chicago, Illinois. It’s a very interesting report as it focuses on feedback from senior leaders and executives within the sector and examines how the changing environment for giving is creating challenges for some, not least due to technology.

As mentioned the surveyed audience is dominated by nonprofit senior industry leaders with vast experience and they collectively represent 80 different organizations. Twenty four percent of respondents hold a Religious Leadership role, while thirty six percent are either the Chief Executive or Chief Financial Officer within their particular organization.

The report takes a very different look at many of the topics that technology, preferences and traditions bring to the table for established fundraisers and also offers insight on donation processing – both exploring historic tendencies and the changes and challenges that 2015 will bring.

Sometimes overlooked from our technology heavy vantage point is the large role that payment by check still represents, especially for religious organizations as shown by the report. With church collections being the typical method of donation these organizations see donations dominated by check payment (58%) followed by online donations (48%) with just a very small slice (6%) via mobile donations which contrasts greatly with the sector overall. The point in fact is that these leaders report that their donor audience are greatly in favour of payment via check for a variety of reasons covered within the study and in part below.

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Perhaps most interesting in technology terms were the list of benefits for electronic giving (image above) and the primary causes for the adoption rate of technology being lower than is perhaps ideal. Those reasons are outlined in the image below but the top three concerns according to nonprofit executives were ‘donors don’t understand online giving’ (49%) ‘donors not wanting to give online’ (46%) and ‘technology too complex for our donors (35%). All very useful data that presents a series of opportunities for nonprofits to explore with donors in terms of improving technology adoption rates in the future.

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I’d be fascinated to see this study replicated at a far broader level taking in the opinions of hundeds of nonprofit leaders from all charity types to determine how uniform these results would be with a larger sample size. In the meantime please use this link to download the entire report via .pdf file and our sincere thanks to GiveCentral for an excellent study.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions  and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.