Hot Takes on 2021 and Year-End
If you are anything like me, you are excited about the holidays and the prospects of what is to come in 2022. Maybe even, you are anxiously awaiting to see your year-end results. This time of year, new data sets are like an advent calendar to me, peeling open the window to see what treats can be found within.
Since Covid rocked the industry back in Q2 2020, benchmark reports have become even more exciting to me. While regularly recurring events like elections, hurricanes, war or famine impact non-profits and their sectors quite differently, Covid had a huge impact across the board. I’m always anxious to see if the new donors of 2020 are sticking around vs. acting like “disaster donors” of old. Are metrics still up … or is this the quarter in which we see performance begin to fade back towards pre-Covid metrics?
Leading up to year-end, I have scoured through some of my favorite benchmarks, intrigued with the key takeaways taken from 2020, and what the first half of 2021 had to tell us. The way I saw it:
Almost every metric for mail and online increased across the industry in 2020.
Online giving increased by 32% in 2020, with hunger and poverty sectors experiencing 173% growth.
As M+R coined it … there were competing influencers in 2020 with the pandemic, protests and presidency. Organizations dedicated to Covid causes or Covid relief saw the most online growth, up 40% as compared to 22% for non-Covid causes. However, the presidency and the protests seemed to have less of an impact on political and racial justice organizations.
One year after Covid hit, some organizations are seeing performance start to return to prior levels.
Smaller organizations are tending to better maintain the “Covid-Bump” metrics while larger organizations may be seeing more of a return to pre-Covid levels.
New donors from 2020 are retaining well and may not be “disaster donors” after all, while reacquired donors in 2020 are not retaining as well. *
* As a personal warning from me, take note of the large class of 2020 joins on your program as you report on retention in 2021. For most of us, this class of donors will bring down overall retention. So, make sure you not only report out both first-year and multiyear retention, but that you can explain the fact that even if both are up, your overall retention can still be down for the simple fact you have so many new donors bringing down the average. You may be a victim of your own success!
Looking outside our industry, I saw the Conference Board report that U.S. consumer confidence fell to a nine-month low in early November. And sadly, this was before the recent omicron variant began sweeping the nation. While the initial outbreak of Covid led to such an increase in giving, what would consumer confidence, and this surge in omicron cases, mean for year-end giving in 2021, the most critical time for almost every organization?
Keeping all this in mind, I kept tracking year-to-date 2021 performance trends for our clients, and I was intrigued with a fun pattern I was seeing. While not surprised to see increases in donors and revenue (the latter driven not only by increased donor counts but increases in average gifts and gifts per donor as well), I noticed the average gift of new donors seemed particularly high. This prompted a deeper dive, where I realized many of the clients were seeing an influx of new $1,000+ gifts. In fact, in one case while the $1,000+ gifts from new donors only represented 2% of total new gifts, they represented 31% of new revenue.
As the end of November rolled around, we all held our breath for Giving Tuesday, and when our teams came together to share the results, I was thrilled to hear that giving was up 9% across the industry. Likewise, all but two of the clients for whom we manage digital campaigns were up too (the two exceptions either had an incredible GT in 2020 or had a large successful digital campaign right before GT this year, and I am happy to report both their 2021 results did exceed those of 2019).
As good as that news was, I was really intrigued by the clients who reported significant increases in … you guessed it … $1,000+ gifts. This in turn prompted more questions.
Despite consumer confidence being down, were donors once again responding to the call? Is it possible that because GT fell on the last day of November that some of the December year-end gifts that are normally given later in the month o were simply given early? Or does the fact that an increase in $1,000 gifts to GT, coupled with an influx of $1,000 new gifts since Covid, foreshadow good news for year-end giving?
We will have the answer in a few short weeks, but I am personally feeling good about these trends, and feeling rather confident in the ever-important, and ever-generous donors as we close out 2021.
