Do people give because you won at pingpong?

Dear {{first_name|Friend}}

Way back in 2007, I directed a face-to-face, door-to-door fundraising canvass in Maine. My assistant director, Jordan, told me an amazing story one night. He knocked on someone’s door, and they challenged him to a game of pingpong. If Jordan won, the homeowner would donate $120 to the environmental organization we represented. 

Jordan prevailed in a hard-fought match and got his $120, plus a random assortment of items from this person’s fridge (including a summer sausage, a detail that has stuck with me for 19 years). 

But this story represents something else for me. It raises a provocative question that every fundraiser I know has been haunted by: are people giving because they care about what we’re doing, or just because I happened to be on their doorstep or in their inbox at the right time, and I am the lucky random cause they donated to.

Chorus doesn’t have a definitive answer to this question, but we have some data from a recent study that points to one. 

We conducted a comprehensive audience intelligence study for a large Nonprofit in the United States that works in human services. We found something interesting from analyzing millions of email sends: the 30 days after a gift are the single riskiest stretch for keeping a donor subscribed, with about 1 in 20 donors unsubscribing. The variable that mattered most to the unsubscribe rate in this period was the type of content the donor received. 

It was surprising to me that the post-gift month was such a risky stretch of time. My prior was that a gift signals high-affinity and deep connection to the organization, so the period afterwards should have been quite safe. I would have thought the end of year period would be riskier, because of the volume of email being sent. Or maybe a period of time without much in the way of interesting new topics to share. 

But that leads me back to my original observation. The variable that drove the unsubscribe rate in this highly risky stretch is what types of email the donor received, starting with whether they received any email at all. The instinct here is one I've had myself: someone just gave, so don’t inundate them with more stuff. But donors who got no email in the first week after their gift went on to unsubscribe at about 5% over the following three weeks, double the unsubscribe rate over donors who did receive email.

The content itself mattered, too. If they got a lot of thank yous and gratitude-heavy emails – more likely to unsubscribe. If they got an email about a matching gift opportunity – more likely to unsubscribe.

So, what helped? Sending them email about programs: the work the organization is doing and the impact it’s having. 

I know I’m connecting dots that don’t have all the evidence behind them yet, but here is my conclusion. People donate not because we happened to be in front of them when they would have donated to anyone. No, they donate because they know what we’re doing and they care deeply about it. After they donate, they want to hear about what we’re accomplishing in part due to their generosity. 

This conclusion lifts me up. Sometimes it’s easy to feel a bit jaded about fundraising for our causes. I have always wanted to believe that folks donate from a place of intent, and this study suggests that is true. 

That’s great news for all of the committed, talented fundraisers out there. We can get back to writing and organizing instead of working on our serves and backhands.