Should smaller charities be chasing younger donors? Fi McPhee takes a minute to explain the trends for our Accelerator members.
You might not know this about Fi. She has a little post-it note on her wall to remind herself that there are wonderful human beings on the other side of all this data. You are probably a little bit close to that than Andy and Fi, but it is vital to remember they are not just numbers on your database. It’s real people that we’re trying to inspire and engage.
The Single Givers from the eleven smallest charity members (this represents around 100,000 in 2022) have an average age, 75 years. This probably not surprising to any of you. But we can see from the data, whichever way we look at it, older donors are still better.
Fi frequently presents to boards who ask their teams to go find them 25 and 30 year old donors because their donor base is very old, but she thinks that when we talk about younger donors we should be talking about people in their 40’s and 50’s, not their 20’s.
This is because we can still see that retention amongst older donors is higher regardless of the type of giving, and the value tends to be higher too.