Sound the Alarm?

As it does every year, the Giving USA Foundation released its annual study of giving in the USA, and it reported charitable giving dropped 2% from 2007 to 2008. Here's a Washington Post article, along with the actual press release. Though a drop of 2% sounds reasonable considering our country's current economic turmoil, the drop could actually become much worse in 2009- read on if you dare!

Back in December of 2008, I blogged about our analysis that showed DonorPerfect clients donations were actually up 4% in the preceding 12 months (October 2007-October 2008). Using the same data analysis technique and aggregating our clients' results, we now show that overall giving for DonorPerfect clients for the entire calendar year of 2008 vs. 2007 remained relatively flat, increasing .5% (the mean result was -.8%). Note that this is higher than the Giving USA data, and it’s consistent with our multi-year analysis that shows DonorPerfect fundraising software clients improve their fundraising results by 1% to 2% above the national average of all non-profits.

Given that our clients were up 4% in the first 10 months of 2008, the flat results for the year mean that fundraising was down significantly in November and December. Our analysis shows a drop of nearly 18% in that two month period, an unprecedented decline.

What's does that mean for 2009? Well, our analysis for the 1st quarter shows an 8.4% decline vs the prior year. This shows improvement from the huge drop at the end of last year, but unless this improving trend continues, there is a good chance that overall giving in the USA in 2009 may be down more than 2008’s -2%, perhaps even as low as -10%!

The obvious fear is that cash-strapped nonprofits will need to reduce services at the very time when they will be needed most.

The good news is that this does not have to be a foregone conclusion. After all, Americans are still some of the most generous people in the world. Our data shows that there are still many nonprofits that are maintaining – even growing their donation levels using DonorPerfect. Yes, it may be harder to reach your goals in 2009, but there are still many opportunities to reach out to supporters with a compelling message and achieve success.

Burning Money...

Just tonight I came across this. It's certainly funny, and probably will work for them. (Heck, even this blog post will likely increase their traffic).

However, shouldn't this large company start reducing their inflated prices instead of spending their money on this????

http://www.nonprofitnetworknews.com/index.php?o=DonorPerfect&n=Jon

There comes a time when enough is enough. Marketing is one thing, frivalous spending, at the detriment of your NON-PROFIT clients, is another.