Think global, act local with your data

Welcome to my weekly LinkedIn newsletter! Connected Fundraising Weekly will be?my way?of providing easy-to-engage insights around donor behavior, fundraiser enablement, and technology. I hope you enjoy the content, and please share if you think someone would benefit from what I'm writing!

This has been a very tough past few weeks. Many times, people will retreat into framing what is happening outside of their control as things that either they do have an immediate vested interest or passion about or want to pretend that things aren't their problem.

Yet, I am firmly convinced in the vision that Scots town planner and social activist?Patrick Geddes outlined back in early 1900:

"'Local character' is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.

Otherwise, we have heard this phrase as:

Think global, act local

Philanthropic Implications

When I was doing research for the donor report, some of the most exciting data I found was from the 2015 edition of Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. Within that edition, there is an article that outlines the influence of how long a donor has resided in their community around the donation choices they are making. The article summarizes previous academic research by stating:

• Where one donates has been empirically linked to where one lives in relationship to recipient nonprofits
• The greatest portion of giving takes place within a donor's own community and helps support activities in which the donor is directly involved
• Suburbanites tended to support the creation of new nonprofits in their local suburban areas, moving philanthropic dollars away from older inner-city nonprofits where they used to live
• Geographic proximity to a disaster increased the likelihood of individuals donating to disaster relief?

The researchers went on to propose a hypothesis that indicated the stronger local ties were, the more likely the donor was going to give to nonprofits in their community. They found that the longer an individual stays in the community that they live in, the more likely they are going to give to arts and human services organizations where they live.

More recent research the Lilly School did on donor-advised funds and community foundations found that more often than not, people will disperse their money back into the community that they live in.

How People Give Where They Live

Something that I have been deeply obsessed with is understanding geographic giving by individual donors and what causes may be attracting more interest depending on where someone lives. There's been some correlation that the Northeast is going to attract a heavy amount of higher educational money than schools in other parts of the country. Or that religious giving is particularly strong in the South.

Is any of this surprising? Not at all, but what it means is that giving and historical/cultural growth in a region have a major impact on what causes people may want to give to where they live.

That is why I'm thrilled that Neon One just rolled out a new expansion of our Donor Impact Data Hub that focuses exclusively on geographic giving in the United States. By going to our website, anyone can simply click on a map or list view to look at all 50 states and Washington, DC to learn:

• Total online donations and number of donors
• Total offline donations and number of donors
• Filters by major NTEE groupings for understanding giving by mission
• State compliance registration information for their state, courtesy of our partners at Labyrinth, Inc.
• A handy way to find their state association's website, courtesy of our partners at National Council of Nonprofits

The future of generosity is thinking global, acting local

There's so much more research to do here when we think about what makes up a community. We could look at demographic trends in the country; we can dive more deeply into socio-economic questions; we can look at what cultures are influencing philanthropy and giving and then also see if that traditional philanthropy is leaving out certain groups who turn to mutual aid instead.

I firmly believe that the future of understanding generosity and the path forward is to tie these larger questions to what is happening in our communities. There will be no one size fits all solution to the biggest questions facing our country, but if we can focus on a foundation of embracing the true diversity in our country and prioritizing equity, inclusion, and justice for everyone who lives here I see a light in the darkness.