Where do we take the future of fundraising?

I'm writing this from Raisely's fourth virtual retreat... so I'm writing this from home in my usual office. But despite my view being the same, this week is different at Raisely. Like the nine other bi-annual retreats we've held in the past, this is when we pause, reset, and plan our next move.

Each retreat has a theme. This time, we're looking to the future of fundraising. Oh and before you ask (or get extremely confused by the rest of this article) – no – I'm not talking about venture capital. This is about giving.

In the lead up to this week, I framed the challenge ahead of us in a short memo to our team. It might provide food for thought for you as well.

Many countries are emerging out of this pandemic into a world that looks very different. How we behave as a society has changed a lot. We spent more time at home, and less time commuting. We’re more aware of our communities, and our governments have had a larger role in our lives than they have before. We’re more digital, but more divided.

When we started Raisely, part of the reason was because global generosity was declining. That meant that charities, and the important role they play stepping up where governments fail us, were at risk. In a large part that was due to online giving growing too slowly, it wasn’t making up for declines elsewhere – government support, postal fundraising, face-to-face fundraising.

In the years since a lot has changed, and this pandemic forced digital transformation on stragglers who were slow to move. But still, online fundraising makes up just 13% of all fundraising, and still overall fundraising is barely growing. It’s certainly not outpacing inflation.

Where digital commerce has sky-rocketed with growth of nearly 80% over the pandemic, digital fundraising has underperformed, growing less than half of that. Two trends that generally correlate, are looking more different than they ever have.

Of course commerce is a central pillar of our economies. It’s much larger than global philanthropy and has billions of investment poured into it each year. But it’s hard to ignore that innovation within fundraising is lagging behind. It’s on us, and other companies like us, with our comparably meagre resources to step up.

So what are we working with, where has fundraising come in the last few years? Well:

• Virtual exercise challenges have exploded as a new way to motivate people to fundraise, and their friends to give.
• Fundraising pages across the board have improved, with better UX, an emphasis (for some) on mobile, and more prominent charity branding. But still, so many platforms get away with claiming "branding" is the ability to change a logo and a colour. We must demand better.
• Fundraising campaigns are more personalised, with charities and their consultants getting more sophisticated with their segmentation and email marketing.
• Reliance on Facebook advertising has grown, often being the only growth driver for new donors and peer-to-peer fundraisers. The lack of diversification is a real risk for the sector.
• Charities have more (but still not much) digital expertise in-house.

These improvements have served charities well, it’s been a regular and consistent evolution. We should be proud of the role we’ve played in that. Together with our main Australian competitor – Funraisin – we’ve lifted the local charity sector out of a world where high fees, awful and dated fundraising experiences, and lack of technical innovation was considered the best we could get.

Our peers are doing similar things in the US, but for the rest of the world it’s not as rosy.

The gap in the growth of digital commerce and digital fundraising represents an opportunity, and that bolder steps are needed to keep charities growing after a period of such compressed and intense change. As a fundraising platform, we’ve got a large part to play.

Right now we have ideas, but not answers. In all those ideas we come back to how does Raisely need to change to play our essential role of growing fundraising, and pushing innovation, for the wellbeing of people and planet.

Feel you need a call to action? Join our retreat from afar. Comment with what we should be considering, or what you think is next for giving.