Fundraising Lessons Learned From Haiti

Important takeaways: React quickly, respond quickly, follow up fast.

In addition to having a communication plan for supporters, donors, volunteers, staff members, we also see a growing need for nonprofits to have an established communications plan with the media and, now especially, online content sites. One of the things that we've seen happen over the past couple of major events that have taken place is how quickly the online media sites — CNN, MSNBC, even Google, Yahoo, those outlet sites — quickly publish places people can go to donate online or text to give online. Again, that's something organizations can have prepared in advance. They can establish those relationships in advance so that when this stuff happens, they're prepared. That should be part of any good plan as well.

And then I think the last point on the technology side is asking yourself and asking your vendor if you can handle the types of volume that we're now seeing. Traditionally, the last week of December of any calendar year is the largest online giving month of the entire year. And when we looked at the first three days following the Haiti earthquake and compared that to December giving, it was three to four times the size. Is that something you can handle with the technology you have in place? Do the tools allow you to take that magnitude of traffic? Over time that's only going to grow more and more and more as, unfortunately, these types of events happen.

FS: How can fundraisers keep new or first-time disaster-relief donors, who might not have donated normally, engaged?

SM: One of the things that we've looked at in the past — even prior to the Haiti earthquake — is what we term "episodic giving," where it's an emergency, a disaster and you bring in a tremendous amount of new donors because of the attention, people wanting to help out, but maybe they weren't a traditional donor to any of these organizations. What we've found with episodic donors is typically some of these organizations are able to retain them for two to three years following one of these major events, but a lot of nonprofits struggle with retaining that episodic donor long term for a variety of reasons.

One of the things we constantly stress is the importance of follow-up, especially to people who are new donors to an organization. To do that, after the Haiti earthquake some organizations have taken their traditional monthly e-newsletter, where it would have information and news about the organization, they've been leading with more, "Hey, here are things we're doing in Haiti post-earthquake," and follow-up information. Following up with those new donors and using some different communication strategies, different messages with those episodic donors as opposed to what you would send to traditional donors, is important. It kind of goes without saying that if you're sending the same message to every single donor whether they're an existing donor or new donor, that's bad; you're doing it wrong if that's your approach.

FS: What about mobile giving?

SM: There's a lot of benefits to mobile giving — probably bring in a whole lot of new donors, it's very easy to do. But there's also some potential downsides to mobile giving. The giving amounts in themselves are limited by the carriers, so you're talking about $5 and $10 donations versus in 2009 the average gift that we saw was a little over $140 — much lower giving amount. And then the other potential downside to mobile giving is unless I as a donor opt in to receive additional information, the charities never know who I am. The dollars end up being deposited back to them, but one concern we have and something that we remind nonprofits looking at mobile is how does that fit in with the other channels that you're using and does mobile giving encourage more anonymous giving? The more anonymous donors you have, where you don't really know anything about them other than the dollars transferring hands, you can't follow up with them, you don't know who they are, you can't contact them. That makes it very difficult down the road to build a relationship with them. So there are some pros and cons people need to think about. FS

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