What’s your giving style?

Over the last few months, Charitable Impact’s Research team has been conducting a series of donor interviews across Canada. Andrea Telfer, our Market Researcher and Strategist, talks us through some of the valuable insights you, our users, have been sharing with us, and the importance this work has on the future of charitable giving. Take it away, Andrea:

Here at Charitable Impact, we love getting to know our donors – it’s part of being a donor-centric organization. We serve our donors first and foremost and we pride ourselves in doing whatever we can to get to know them better. To do this, the Research team spends a bulk of our time interviewing donors, finding out what they care about, and discovering how they like to act on their passion for causes.

We wanted to take some time to tell you what we’ve been learning. After conducting interviews with a variety of 26 – 65 year old donors across Canada, we now have a database of very rich qualitative data, to complement our existing quantitative intelligence. As part of our research, it’s necessary to learn as much as we can from both sides. Numbers and statistics are great in helping us to understand trends and majorities, while interviews help connect the dots, and allow us to bring storytelling and personalization to the forefront our work.

So, what have we learnt from all of our interviews?

Well, there’s one thing that we know for sure: everyone cares about something in the world. This wasn’t surprising, we’ve always known that our donors are generous and passionate. But, we also learnt that motivations to donate are rarely simple. People give for a variety of reasons, and those reasons can change over years, months, or even days!

Everyone has their own giving style. Donors have their own preferences for the kinds of devices they use, or tools they give with, or how private or social they are with their giving. If we continue to listen to our donors, and learn about their preferences, we can tailor their giving experience to make each interaction with Charitable Impact smooth and satisfying.

Our donors are also very creative and passionate. They are using the tools on Charitable Impact’s platform in a way that makes most charitable sense to them, as individuals. Some donors use Giving Groups to raise money as part of a larger campaign, others use them to increase their impact through matching funds. We have a large amount of donors using Charitable Investment Accounts (CIAs) to donate complex assets, while others choose a CIA in order to leave a lasting legacy for as many causes as they want.

The bottom line: we’re here to support our donors in the ways they want to be supported. Our Research team loves hearing what our donors have to say. If you have any feedback for Charitable Impact or would like to be interviewed by our Research team about your donating habits, we would love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected] to book an in-person or phone interview!