As you should well be aware by now, I really do care about the non-profit industry. That’s why when I saw the below string of ask amounts on an online donation form, I got really bothered.
I’ve looked at countless gift files, and I can tell you without the shadow of a doubt that in no case ever was there a charity for whom most people donated $100. It just doesn’t happen! Charitable giving is always skewed – the vast majority of people give a small amount, and a handful of people are super generous. That’s why I was instantly skeptical of this statistic.
To help you to understand just how skewed charitable giving can be, I decided to get some simple giving stats from my cloud server’s database that I use for some dashboards that I provide. Below is a table of such stats for the 11 clients whose data is served by the dashboard (client names are anonymized, of course!)
As you can see, these charities take a variety of sizes, but in all but one case you can see that gifts of $100+ form a minority of records. In other words, giving at the $100 level is way more an exception than any kind of a rule. In the case of client 5 gifts of $100+ actually constituted just over half of all gifts, so that was truly an exceptional organization! Now in the rightmost column you can see I’ve included mean/average gift. I’ve done so because I suspect that the charity that inspired this blog post is using average gift to inform their ask string on the online form. Here you can see that the majority of clients represented in my table had a mean gift of at least $100. That said, it certainly doesn’t mean that most people are donating $100. It is just the result of a mathematical equation, more than a reflection of reality!
What is the charity doing in the minds of their donors by making it seem like most people are giving such a high amount? Are they breeding complacency, and thus influencing people to stop giving? Or are they actually stimulating higher donation amounts?
It hurts because this is such an important cause, and I do want to know if their fundraising is doing okay (I donated $15 today).