We Really DID Get 'Young' People Donating*!

* If you consider 'young' as being over 40.

Do young people actually donate? We want them to...

Not only would it bring us fresh new supporters, and supporters with potentially longer lives to donate - but perhaps we can even make social change through them.

Until the 90s there were NO strategic volumes of people below about 60 donation to charity. Probably about 90% of donors giving repeat gifts were over 60.  This is still the case in countries that have not embraced face to face (direct dialogue).

For some countries, face to face changed the paradigm - and more recently SMS followed by phone call.  The former revolutionised fundraising in many countries, and the latter is trying.  

Here in Australia, nearly 50% of individual donations to the major charities comes from face to face acquisition of regular/monthly/sustainer donors.

And the average age of these new donors is really young - actually around 43.

GiftClassification	Channel	Income	Donors (age known)	Age at recruitment
Regular Gift	Street/Mall Face to Face	$165,216,714	620,857	43
Cash	Direct Mail	$78,436,142	612,500	70
Regular Gift	Phone	$24,150,667	100,655	54
Regular Gift	Other	$25,153,095	72,101	54
Child Sponsorship	Street/Mall Face to Face	$36,042,920	68,052	44
Regular Gift	Direct Mail	$21,022,016	64,000	61
Child Sponsorship	TV	$26,524,368	42,876	47
Child Sponsorship	Other	$27,903,102	43,071	47
Gift To Child	Direct Mail	$7,091,384	82,601	52
Regular Gift	Online	$11,190,781	30,828	44
Regular Gift	Door to Door Face to Face	$4,931,672	19,558	44
Child Sponsorship	Online	$8,977,320	15,126	41
Child Sponsorship	Phone	$7,064,422	12,601	48
Child Sponsorship	Direct Mail	$7,722,054	11,543	54
Child Sponsorship	Door to Door Face to Face	$5,488,382	8,830	45

But even in this 'young people' fundraising mechanism, we see those below 45 have a much, much lower life time value than their older counterparts.

You can see this in the chart below looking at attrition by age (higher attrition = more people stopping giving).

Face to face is still by far and away the largest volume method to get 'younger' people on board.  But note from the chart the huge attrition rates of those under 35.  It is hard to imagine how a charity could recover its costs of acquisition of under 35s in face to face.

Really, the big bucks kick in after 40.

But should we look at even younger donors? There are so many articles about fundraising from millennials, Gen Y and even Gen X.  But should we bother?

I am scouring the data to find out the answer to that question for you - a blog will be up about it soon.

Sean