NTEN partnered with Charity Dynamics to conduct the 2012 Nonrprofit Donor Engagement Study.

This donor-focused study gathered feedback from consumers spanning a wide range of giving levels ($25 – $5,000+) who donated to a nonprofit in the past 12 months. Survey questions sought to understand understand individuals’ preferences regarding traditional and digital media for donating, volunteering, and engaging with nonprofits.

> Download the study online here.

Throughout the day, I'll be living blogging sessions from MCON12, a virtual conference to help leaders engage the Millennial generation. For my next session, I'm covering "Findings from the 2012 Millennial Impact Report", with Derrick Feldmann from Achieve and Angela White from JGA.

This year's report focuses on communicating with Millennials, how and where they're communicating. The survey had 6,522 Millennials complete the survey from January 1 - January 31, 2012. The 2012 report also added three focus groups: one in Indianapolis, one in Seattle, and one in Washington, D.C. The other new method used this year included an online survey of nonprofit professionals who work with Millennials; 89 of these surveys were completed.

The research was focused on three core categories: how Millennials connect, how they involve, and how they give. Here are key findings from each of those categories:

Throughout the day, I'll be living blogging sessions from MCON12, a virtual conference to help leaders engage the Millennial generation. For my first session, I attended "Building & Sustaining Relationships with the Next Generation" with Holly Ross of NTEN.

When it comes to donations, we're currently thinking about a few generations . These include Matures, (born in 1945 or earlier); Boomers (born in 1946-1964); GenX (born 1965-1980), and finally Millennials (born after 1980). Each generation has unique traits we need to think about when trying to build relationships and deepen our engagement. Matures and Boomers, for example, are more likely to make a long-term commitment when it comes to giving; they are the generations we're really comfortable with. We're already framing our issues in ways that appeal to them, and have the systems to support that.

When all of our supporter data was on 3x5 cards or in a couple of spreadsheets, a lot of the fundraising work we did involved educated guesswork, by necessity.

With the data available to us now, we can segment, slice, dice, even predict future donor behavior, all without a statistics degree.

Join Josh Birkholz, author of the top-selling nonprofit book, Fundraising Analytics: Using Data to Guide Strategy at our upcoming webinar, "Fundraising Analytics for Campaign Planning", for a look at what's possible.

Learn more and register today >>