Is “being a Christian charity or fund” enough to attract Christian donors?
Christian charities and Christian funds often tell us that their donors want to support specifically Christian causes. But is simply “being Christian” enough to attract donors?
In partnership with Stewardship, we recently completed an assessment of the giving preferences of dual-national Christian donors in the UK. As part of our research, we asked these donors what they considered their “pain-points” in giving: i.e., what made giving harder than it needed to be?
Crucially, donors emphasized that when giving through donor advised funds (DAFs) their main “pain-points” were impact measurement (not knowing the impact of their giving), transparency (not knowing how their money would be used), and recipient clarity (not knowing to whom they should give). Donors were least likely to consider a lack of understanding or integration of their faith a pain-point.
Conversely we also asked donors what their preferences were when giving through funds. Here again there was a high level of preference for financial efficiency and transparency, whilst a relative low level of preference for the fund being faith-based.
This does not necessarily mean that donors think faith is unimportant. Christian donors may be satisfied with how their faith is already integrated into the giving process: after all, there are a wealth of Christian charities from which to choose. It is also possible that these findings are restricted to our research population: for this project, we intentionally sampled donors with both American and British citizenship. Donors who were only American or British (not to mention donors from other countries) may have answered differently.
These findings do, however, suggest that donors in our sample were much more concerned about impact than about simply giving through a Christian organisation. Other research indicates a wider interest in impact: three in five donors in the UK say they pay close or extremely close attention to how their donation will be used,¹ and impact evidence has been shown to help donors see charities as credible, increase the amount they are willing to give,² and increase donors’ satisfaction in giving.³
These trends may be especially important given the declining donor base of many Christian organisations: since younger generations tend to be more secular,⁴ Christian charities and funds find themselves competing for fewer donors. In this context, it is essential that Christian charities and funds demonstrate the impact of their programs to donors who will be comparing them with other organisations.
The good news is that as donors have become more concerned with impact, charities and funds have begun to adapt – and some have led the way, encouraging donors and others in their sectors to more intentionally consider the impact of their giving. One of our primary goals at Eido is to help with this adaptation process: to assist charities in becoming more focused on impact, evidence, and learning. We do this through impact strategy and research services. If you’d like to find out more, please send us an email at info@eidoresearch.com. We’d love to talk with you!
References
¹ NPC. 2013. ‘Money for Good UK’. Available online at: https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/money-for-good-uk/
² Ahmet Koksal, Aaron Johnson, Somak Banerjee & Sujay Dutta. 2022. The effect of evidence in nonprofit donation requests: how does mindset play a role? Journal of Marketing Communications.
³ Whillans, Ashley. (2016). A brief introduction to the science of fundraising.
⁴ St Mary’s University. 2018. Europe’s Young Adults and Religion.
Eido Research exists to help Christian organisations measure and improve their social and spiritual impact. We do this through impact strategy and research services.
