Catching Up: Internet Fundraising From the 1980s to the 2020s
Editor's Note: This is the first blog in a weekly series authored by Gary B. Grant, a seasoned fundraiser with several decades of experience leading the fundraising efforts for various major nonprofit organizations, and co-author (with Gary M. Grobman) of Fundraising Online: Using the Internet to Raise Serious Money for Your Nonprofit Organization. It is a new feature of The Online Nonprofit Information Center (TONIC), sponsored by David V. and Sonya Williams of Cutler Bay, FL. TONIC includes the full text of six nonprofit management books, including Fundraising Online. The TONIC homepage may be accessed at: http://socialworker.com/nonprofit/tonic
by Gary B. Grant
You might think that, with 35 years in development, I’m a fundraising dinosaur, but I have worked hard to evolve and adapt to the changing times and the changing technology. I grew up in development in the late 1980s before the internet had its great influence on the profession. With this perspective, I see some long-term arcs that I look forward to sharing and to engaging others in thinking about.
I began in development as an undergraduate student calling alumni of my college for annual gifts. Using the phone was, at the time, a bold new trend. Prior to that, it was a simpler world. Soliciting gifts involved sending mail (letters and sometimes more expensive glossy pieces) or getting together either in person one-on-one for larger asks or in groups for fundraising events.
That was basically it.
Call centers were just beginning, and universities that had initially used alumni and student volunteers quickly transitioned to hired students that could call every night and become well trained in phone solicitation. I was in the second generation of such callers. It was exciting because it worked so well. In those days, people actually stopped what they were doing (even their meals and their movies) to answer the phone, and although some might have felt a little put off, the vast majority I talked with loved the contact with a friendly student. The only challenge, really, was catching them at home.
Then the internet boomed.
The internet brought email, websites, and things that stuck—like text messaging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—and things that didn’t as much, like chat boards, and listservs. Each new communication vehicle boggled development staff trying to figure out where to invest their time and money.
But two things focused us.
First, as email became universal, this curtailed some of the expensive mailings in favor of free email. Very quickly, the physical mailbox stuffed with solicitations eased a bit. Or at least the amount of communications dramatically increased without having to grow the direct mail budgets.
Second, the emergence of websites gave every organization the ability to allow visitors anywhere in the world to learn about them and ultimately to give online by credit card. Yes, we still wrote checks before then.
This state of confusion and uncertainty in fundraising was a big part of what Gary Grobman and I hoped to explore when White Hat Communications published our book, The Nonprofit Internet Handbook, in 1998, and the Wilder Foundation published Fundraising on the Internet the following year using material from our first book together. With regard to fundraising, we wanted to understand the changes and transitions certain to come and to comfort the field with our sense that the basic ideas of fundraising were not imploding.
In 2006, fundraising became the focus of a full book on which we continued our collaboration, Fundraising Online: Using the Internet to Raise Serious Money for Your Nonprofit Organization. This drew on my career going from university student caller to full time development professional, adding a law degree, and experiencing the full range of development functions, from annual fund to grant writing, to board development, and major gifts. I’d worked for a university for 16 years and for a voluntary health association for several years after that. I’d also moved into leadership roles, managing teams of gift officers, in some cases, spread across the country. For this reason, I was also interested in the technology for managing remote teams.
An essential theme that emerged in that book was the idea of not focusing so much on the vehicle or medium for communication, but rather on how the tools might be useful in relationship building in new ways. Could our donor ties be made broader, deeper, and more personalized? Websites and email were not magical and would not just by their nature help us to raise more. They were just cheaper forms of communication. But they were cheap in two directions. Could we engage our donors and be more responsive to their questions, needs, and wants?
This all sets the stage for thinking about the future. Over the past two decades, things do seem to have fallen into some patterns. The internet doesn’t seem to be reinventing fundraising every few years. Websites look incredibly similar from organization to organization. Every nonprofit has an email communications plan or at least a practice of blasting out their solicitations on a particular schedule to deliver asks or communicate their events or special days of giving. We have a general sense of how effective each mode is and the returns on investment to expect.
We tweak our results from online giving but do not anticipate paradigm shifts. No one, for example, is really imagining that Tik Tok or Clubhouse (I’ll explain both in later blog posts) can generate major new fundraising streams. We don’t seem to get jumpy about the next trend and worry that we are missing the boat.
What do you think? In the next blog, I’ll share some thoughts I have on how we might continue to innovate fundraising using the latest technologies. But what big picture trends do you see?
Gary Grant has a BA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Illinois Tech's Chicago-Kent College of Law. He currently serves as Senior VP for Development for Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). Founded at the dawn of the Space Race in 1958, Florida Tech is the only independent, technological university in the Southeast. In this role, he oversees all fundraising and leadership engagement for the University. Gary has authored several books on the use of the internet in nonprofits and fundraising.