This on-demand video builds on insights from our paper, “AI in Fundraising,” providing an opportunity to learn from leading experts and practitioners in the field. Learn how AI can and may already be used by your team, additional opportunities to leverage it for fundraising, and where to start with AI integration, including ethical considerations.
In this article about grateful patient fundraising, we explore using data to curate a communication journey that best cultivates grateful patients, converts them to donors, and creates a pathway for annual and consistent future giving.
Learn about Custom Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs), their application in fundraising, and how you can harness their capabilities to streamline your fundraising efforts and forge deeper connections with donors.
In part two, we dive into the next stage of engagement: using data to curate a communication journey that best cultivates grateful patients, converts them to donors, and creates a pathway for annual and consistent future giving.
Effective Grateful Patient Fundraising starts with tailored communication
There is a reward for soliciting the masses through direct mail and email. While you have gift officers queued to qualify and cultivate high-prioritized prospects, effective annual giving programs are most frequently the entry point for individuals to convert to donors. These donors may become your best major and planned giving prospects in the future.
But how can you make an annual giving program effective with grateful patients? Create a communication journey that taps into their overall patient experience at your healthcare organization. In other words, leverage your knowledge of patient and donor populations to craft targeted messages that recognize their experiences as patients and highlight reasons for deeper engagement with the organization. Retail brands have found customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for a product or service if the company provides a great customer experience. They do this by leveraging customer journey mapping—a tailored roadmap for how customers interact with the brand. An annual giving program can do the same between patients and the healthcare organization. Where do you start?
Separate Grateful Patient Acquisition and Retention communication Strategies
While this seems obvious, it is important to think of acquisition and retention completely separately, as they are geared towards different audiences and require different types of data.
new patients are Your grateful patient acquisition audience
This audience has just experienced your healthcare organization for the first time and should be communicated with as such. Focus on acknowledging your new patients, welcoming them into the community, demonstrating the institution’s resources, supporting them on their healthcare journey, and converting them into donors.
New Patient ‘A’ 123 Sample St, Sample City, ST newpatient@sample.com Clinical location: East Hospital Doctor: Dr. Doe (Cardiology) Hospital Visit: 14 days prior
Existing donors are your grateful patient retention audience
Your retention audience (grateful patients who have made at least one gift to your organization in the past) has not only experienced your healthcare organization as a patient, but they decided it was worthy of their philanthropic support at some point. Their communication journey should acknowledge their grateful patient relationship and focus on what you know about them through their giving preferences, priorities, and overall interests.
Retained Patient Donor ‘B’ 123 B. Sample St, Sample City, ST retainedpatientdonor@sample.com Clinical location: West Hospital Doctor: Dr. Sample (Primary)
Last Gift: $50 to Orthopaedics Last Gift Date: 4 months prior Giving History: Consistent donor 5+ years to several priorities, but all at West Hospital
Define the Data needed for Grateful Patient acquisition and retention
Separating your acquisition and retention audiences in grateful patient fundraising is important when you consider your data needs for each constituency:
Quantitative Data is key to new patient communication
Your acquisition audience of new patients means you will only have access to basic patient information permitted through Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) compliance (name, address, email, hospital location, physician name, and dates of care), and sometimes even less depending on the healthcare organization. At a minimum, contact information is the most important. If that is all you can access, you can make general assumptions about your new patients by leveraging relevant quantitative (population-based) data through market research.
You may conduct research based on the following questions:
What is the average household income in their county?
What is the average family size?
What health needs does their community have as identified by a Community Health Assessment Report?
These data points help guide your content choices and suggest appropriate gift sizes when making a specific ask. Consistent patient information, like hospital location and care dates, enables personalized communication journeys for those treated at community hospitals or specialized centers. For example, with a new pool of 1,000 people seen last week across various hospitals, you can customize email copy to reference the care they received at [hospital name variable].
make the most of Qualitative Data to cultivate grateful patient donors
Alternatively, retention audiences (grateful patient donors) have already given you valuable qualitative data through their past engagement with the organization. At this stage you know their:
Giving preferences: What did they make their gift to, when, and why (for example, did they respond to a specific appeal)? How much was the gift? Have they increased their gift over time or remained static? Do they continue to support the same priority, or has their giving designation varied?
Communication behaviors and preferences: Are they opening your emails and clicking through content? What content are they clicking on (patient stories? expert opinions)? Did they choose to make a gift online or in response to direct mail? How long after a communication did they make their gift?
Engagement behaviors and preferences: Although this is not a direct interaction with a communication journey, this long-term cultivation aims not only to retain and upgrade grateful patient donors but also to build a pipeline that leads them to qualify as a major gift prospect. To do this, interaction with the organization beyond their communication journey is a significant step! Additional engagement data you can incorporate into their journey includes event attendance, gift officer interactions, volunteer positions, and more. Defining a hierarchy of data points to prioritize will help streamline when and where qualitative data like this can be incorporated.
New Patient ‘A’ 123 Sample St, Sample City, ST newpatient@sample.com Clinical location: East Hospital Doctor: Dr. Doe (Cardiology) Hospital Visit: 14 days prior First communication: acknowledge recent patient experience, feature past interview of Dr. Doe, share resources for East Hospital patients
find your grateful patient Data sources
Healthcare organizations vary in what data is accessible for new patients and retained grateful patient donors. Electronic medical record systems have enabled us to implement efficient and sophisticated fundraising strategies that more hospitals and health systems are able to leverage now than ever before. Now that we have defined what type of information is most impactful in guiding a communication journey for both new patients and retained patient donors, how do we retrieve the data?
Data will come from several streamlined sources, which funnel into one database for fundraising purposes. The sources you should prioritize incoming data from include:
your health system or organization’s technology services
Data is delivered directly from this source, ideally as a daily/weekly patient data feed automatically transferred through a CRM. This will require coordination with your clinical information and technology services and an investment of time and funding to implement, but it is a significant way to increase efficiency and intelligence in your program. For organizations that cannot implement this data transfer, a consistent, manually exported spreadsheet of new patient data (within HIPPA regulations) will still provide the same quantitative data points that enable you to efficiently execute your acquisition communication journeys.
Your communications
Consider your communications your biggest source of qualitative data that will inform how best to customize the journey for your acquisition audiences and grateful patient donors. Each communication offers several key opportunities to collect engagement data to guide the next ‘step’ in a journey:
Did they open the email?
How much time did they spend reading the email?
Did they immediately delete it?
Did they click any of the links? If yes, which links did they click? (examples include a patient story, clinician spotlight, patient resources, ways to get involved, philanthropy information, etc.)
Did they make a gift?
Did they unsubscribe?
Was the email delivered, or did it bounce back?
Similarly, was the direct mail letter returned due to a bad address?
Did they send a reply envelope? Or make a gift via mail?
New Patient ‘A’ Opened the first communication and clicked on link to read interview with Dr. Doe. Second communication (one week later): Email asks Patient A if they enjoyed the interview with Dr. Doe, promotes additional spotlights Dr. Doe is featured in on the website, and offers ways New Patient A can thank Dr. Doe for their care with giving information.
Trends from other advancement teams and colleagues
Especially if a new patient is rated highly or a recurring donor has the potential for major gifts, they may move in the pipeline earlier than anticipated, giving you additional data points your colleagues enter directly into the database for you to consider long-term.
Although the qualitative data generated from your communication is specific to just one email or one direct mail piece, over time, it leads to a significant wealth of knowledge and trends that inform how effective the communication journeys are when it comes to increasing engagement and donor conversion.
consider using AI
This is a significant opportunity to use artificial intelligence (AI). Leveraging these insights, AI could help you codify how likely a grateful patient of Dr. Doe at East Hospital may make a gift if your initial communication features a patient story from the same hospital, also seen by Dr. Jones.
Further, AI may be the solution to quickly help generate ways to customize further the communication journey beyond what your email software can do to automate and populate variables to increase personalization. This is an opportunity for AI to be effective if the data is thoughtfully collected and used to inform current and future grateful patient fundraising strategies.
New Patient ‘A’ Did not open second email for one week. Resent same email with new subject line reminding New Patient A of the email. Opens follow-up email and clicks on links to learn more about Dr. Doe’s work. Next step in communication journey: Explicitly solicit a gift of $25 to thank Dr. Doe for his care ($25 generated from average first gift size across acquisition audiences). Feature blurb from Dr. Doe thanking patients for choosing care at East Hospital and for accelerating their work and impact with a gift to the hospital. New Patient A makes a $25 gift in Dr. Doe’s honor, automatically adjusting his communication journey to stewarding his support.
grateful patient fundraising is supercharged by data-informed communication
Lastly, as you consider the best communication journeys to implement for your grateful patient fundraising, here are four tips to help you get started:
As shared in part one of this series, insights indicate a patient or patient’s family is 76% more likely to make a gift if they receive communication within the first 30 days of post-hospital visit or care.
Your acquisition audience is your best testing group for content, messaging, and timing. Because you consistently receive a new set of patients to contact, you can adapt the communication journey as you evaluate what generates the most engagement.
While you can see engagement almost immediately through email, giving your program a full one or two years to identify larger trends in engagement and donor conversion is important. You will start to see what communications generate the most interaction and tweak your engagement strategy to maximize the successful tactics.
Be patient and remember that every communication is an opportunity to gather more intel and data regarding who your patients are. Take advantage of each one!
This report provides a comprehensive look at the current state of US philanthropy, compiling and analyzing annual data from Giving USA and other prominent research to ensure your organization stays up-to-date on the most significant industry trends.
The High Holidays bring a time of reconnection and renewal for Jews worldwide. It allows us to recommit to living out our Jewish values, reminds us of the comfort that our Jewish communal spaces offer, and gives us an opportunity to rededicate our practice of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). With so many congregants and constituents turning to their communal organizations this time of year, clergy, lay leaders, and professionals have a ripe landscape to meaningfully engage donors to inspire greater generosity in the year to come.
This article offers five ways to leverage this time of year to cultivate deeper relationships and inspire your donor base toward another year of generosity and impact.
1. Acknowledge the Challenges of This Year and Celebrate Resiliency for High Holiday Donor Engagement
5784 has been fraught with challenges for the Jewish community. Just as the New Year began last fall, the attack on October 7, 2023 and subsequent events across Israel and the Middle East have changed global Jewry for a more than a generation. In the months since, we’ve seen antisemitism reach an all-time high across the US and around the world. However, in the face of everything, giving to Jewish organizations has increased significantly over the last year as individuals and families have risen to meet funding needs across every facet of the community. CCS recently published a report on Jewish Philanthropy Since October 7 which showed significant increases in support across the sector for both regular and crisis funding, particularly in October and December 2023, and March 2024.
We encourage you to find an opportunity over the holidays to formally acknowledge and celebrate the ways your community has supported one another over the past 12 months and the impact it has made, even in this challenging landscape.
Synagogues: Consider highlighting this increased generosity in the congregation president’s High Holiday remarks.
Summer camps: Consider sharing a summer impact report with parents and alumni of your camp.
2. Share New Year Wishes with Donors
This time of year gives us an easy touchpoint for donor engagement: Reach out to donors and wish them a sweet new year! Be it with a personalized video message from your leadership reaching a broad audience, or phone calls to individual donors, use this time to thank your community for all they have done to advance your shared mission and inspire them toward what’s ahead in 5785.
3. Engage Donors by Connecting In-Person at Synagogues or Campus-Based Organizations
At least six in 10 Jews will attend High Holiday services this fall. With so many donors and prospects entering our religious homes, clergy, lay, and professional leaders have an opportunity to prioritize personal connections with families over the High Holidays.
Synagogues: Identify a few loyal donors and relevant prospects and equip clergy and lay leaders to make personal contact with each of them before or after services, or in the days leading up to or following Rosh Hashanah.
Campus-based organizations: Consider inviting donors to attend upcoming holiday-related programming to allow them to experience the impact of their giving first-hand.
4. Create Custom Appeal Plans for Renewed Annual Giving
Leverage your existing donor data to identify those who often give or pledge their annual commitments this time of year and invite them to do so again through a customized appeal sequence. Renew expiring payment plans and invite increased giving in the year ahead given the growing and evolving needs across the community.
5. Build on these high Holiday donor Engagement Efforts into the New Year
Capturing the energy and connection following the High Holidays will keep the sweetness of the new year present and be a smooth transition into fall fundraising. Track each interaction over the High Holidays and find time in the upcoming weeks and months to sit down with donors to personally share your outlook for the year ahead, emphasizing how their continued generosity will lead to greater impact. As you make plans for the fall, find ways to align donor cultivation, donor engagement, and other constituency events with upcoming holidays and festivals like Sukkot and Simchat Torah to forge closer connections with both your mission and shared Jewish identity.
CCS Fundraising is proud to partner with Jewish organizations across the sector to advance their important missions. We wish all who celebrate a sweet, meaningful new year. Shana Tova!
Family foundations are an excellent source of nonprofit support. Read this article to learn about their goals, concerns, and how to connect to maximize impact for your nonprofit.
Learn about Custom Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs), their application in fundraising, and how you can harness their capabilities to streamline your fundraising efforts and forge deeper connections with donors.
This report was jointly produced by ICSC and CCS. It stands as a comprehensive analysis of stewardship and development practices across 75 Catholic dioceses and archdioceses in the United States, and is a testament to the unwavering dedication and commitment of our diocesan communities to fostering a culture of advancement and generosity.
Among national trends, fundraising best practices, and recommendations to elevate your Catholic advancement office, this report also reveals:
Percent increases in offertory contributions and which dioceses saw over 20% growth in contributions
The impact of the rise in annual appeal pledges from from $278.1 million in 2019 to $300.4 million in 2021
How to respond to the widespread decrease in donors
Which digital fundraising platforms have seen the greatest adoption
How to harness the potential of a reported $778.2 million in unrealized gifts
Which arch/dioceses are leaders among foundation initiatives
How some respondents garnered nearly 200% of their campaign goals
Which strategic innovations arch/dioceses are prioritizing
Funding Catholic Causes Since 1947
Discover how CCS leverages our experience with Catholic organizations.
Explore the transformational potential of artificial intelligence in modern fundraising practices in this video featuring leading experts and practitioners in the field.
This report provides a comprehensive look at the current state of US philanthropy, compiling and analyzing annual data from Giving USA and other prominent research to ensure your organization stays up-to-date on the most significant industry trends.
For the past 13 years, CCS’s Philanthropic Landscape reports have compiled and analyzed data from Giving USA and other leading industry sources to reveal an accurate, laser-focused look at the current state of philanthropy in the US.
In addition to sharing key stats, in-depth analysis, case studies, and insights on individual, foundation, and corporate giving in 2023, the 13th Edition report also reveals:
Election Year Insights: Understand how the US presidential election might affect philanthropic trends.
Sector Highlights: Find out which sectors raised the most money and why.
How to Build AI-Readiness: Learn how your organization can build a culture ready for new technologies integration.
The Jewish Philanthropy Since October 7 report compiles and analyzes data from 73 Jewish organizations to capture how philanthropy in the Jewish sector was impacted since the events of October 7, 2023. This report offers key insights to support effective fundraising, including:
Changes in philanthropic income over the past months
Allocation of funds to humanitarian and other efforts
The difference in donations between Israel- and non-Israel-related causes
Explore the transformational potential of artificial intelligence in modern fundraising practices in this video featuring leading experts and practitioners in the field.
Whether you’re a synagogue, summer camp, federation, or other Jewish organization, the High Holidays offer a time of thoughtful reflection and ripe opportunity for connection across the Jewish community.
The next generation is inheriting twice as much as a decade ago, which means that nonprofit organizations must learn to cultivate younger donors for successful fundraising in the short- and long-term. In fact, approximately $84 trillion is transferring from Baby Boomers to younger generations over the next several years. Engaging family foundations will ensure that your nonprofit is building relationships across generations as the Great Wealth Transfer takes place.
In this article, we help you understand how family foundations function and how to leverage them, among other methods of family philanthropy.
family foundations Are Growing in Impact
Families are reflecting on their purpose and practices. Many are now increasing their annual payout rates by making larger, long-term, and more flexible unrestricted gifts, predominantly through family foundations. Others are examining their family’s beliefs that have been upheld for generations in order to respond to a contemporary and ever-changing landscape.
Nonprofit organizations must cultivate this new wave of donors – a more diverse generation that is making their own wealth while inheriting significant assets and has already shown different interests than those that came before them. This shift in mentality can rock the boat of nonprofit relationships with these high-net-worth families.
Grounded in values and shared beliefs, families are coming together to make their mark – establishing a powerful legacy through family foundations and philanthropic impact made across the community and the world. The definition of a family foundation can look different from family to family, ranging from:
Two individuals or 100
One generation or 20
An established governing body or philanthropic decisions being made organically once a year
Managed solely by family members or including community voices
Engaging all generations in decision making or only the matriarch/patriarch of the family
Every family is unique and should be treated distinctly from their peers. Through family foundations and philanthropy, families are bonded – they come together, learn from one another based on individual interests, and build a tradition of giving back to the causes that matter most. While family foundations usually start with a single vision, it grows over time to include the vision of not only family members, but also other community members.
Accountability: Ownership over the impact made across the community including reflection/assessment.
Equity: Commitment to learning, breaking old habits and taking action to reduce or eliminate inequities across staff, family, grantees, and the community.
Reflection and Learning: Address difficult internal and external questions and sharing learnings broadly – resulting in a shift in impact strategies.
Relationships: Build relationships grounded in trust, transparency, breaking down power dynamics and leading with empathy.
What is a family foundation?
A family foundation is a private foundation set up by a family, funded with family assets and often run by family members who determine how assets will be used to meet their mission. A foundation has no required length of existence and can shift as the family’s composition and charitable focus changes. Each year, at least 5% of their net investment assets must be distributed to charity. About 50% of private foundations in the U.S. are family foundations.
Inside philanthropic families and multigenerational giving
Family foundations are not always simple. Parents, children, and their philanthropic institutions must address a number of challenges and reflect on key questions as they determine their purpose, strategy, legacy and operations for their collective philanthropy.
Families often face the following challenges while managing their foundations and philanthropic initiatives:
Addressing the tension between individual versus collaborative philanthropy.
Remaining nimble to try new practices that create deeper impact and respond to the community.
Embracing a dialogue around power and privilege that focuses on equity.
Considering the role of those outside the family when it comes to philanthropic decision making.
Identifying how evolving technology can affect traditional ways of giving and family engagement.
Families often consider questions like the below while managing their foundations:
What is our motivation for engaging in philanthropy?
What values do we cherish?
What outcome and impact are we hoping to achieve?
What percentage of family wealth are we willing to give? What percentage of our wealth do we need to live comfortably?
How can we make gifts that meets our needs and the needs of those we want to serve?
How do I work with grantees? What is my role versus what is theirs?
What philanthropic role, if any, should the next generation play?
How can nonprofits engage with family foundations and family philanthropy
Nonprofits have an opportunity to be proactive in building relationships with multigenerational families while leveraging relationships with family or community foundations and well-known wealth advisors to advocate for the organization and open the door to philanthropic families.
Six ways to prepare for engaging a family foundation:
Assess your current donor base — focus on access, affinity, and ability. Prioritize donors that have made gifts through a DAF or family foundation.
Research and identify family foundations whose vision and priorities align with the organization’s mission and programs.
Utilize existing relationships with younger generations to gain access to additional family wealth.
Ensure your organization has mapped out transformational funding opportunities with defined outcomes.
Elicit discussion with high-net worth individuals and their families to build trust, transparency and alignment with your organization. Sample questions to consider for discussion include:
How do you and your spouse/family make your philanthropic decisions?
How are you hoping to engage your children/family in your philanthropy?
If you were to accomplish only one thing with your philanthropy, but it would be your legacy, what would that be?
Is it important to you to be active in the mission of the organizations you support (i.e. volunteering, attending events)?
Through your philanthropic investments, how would you define success?
Out of all your philanthropic investments to date, what has brought you the most joy?
Leverage opportunities to engage across generations. You may consider the following three options for personalized outreach:
Experience the Mission in Action: onsite tours, events, volunteer days
Volunteer Leadership Opportunities: board involvement or event hosts
Communication/Outreach: Story telling through impact or utilization of social media
Other Forms of Family Philanthropy
Selecting a charitable vehicle or vehicles is one of the most important choices a family makes to support their philanthropic goals. If not a family foundation, the following vehicles are tools or entities established to manage a family’s philanthropic resources and achieve social impact.
Family Office
Family offices are private entities that manage the personal and financial affairs of wealthy individuals and families with assets at or above $100 million. Although philanthropy isn’t the primary focus of a family office, they can facilitate philanthropic decisions through outright gifts, grantmaking, impact investing, and other means. About 71% of family offices are engaged in philanthropy, but only 41% have a philanthropic strategy established.
Donor Advised Funds (DAF)
A low-cost opportunity to manage one’s philanthropy. This vehicle allows families to give anonymously if they choose. A sponsor organization, such as a community foundation, manages and administers DAFs, offering families expertise and guidance on which organizations to support. Families receive an immediate tax deduction for what they contribute to a DAF even if the gift comes at a later date. Grants from DAFs increased 9% ($52.16B) in 2022, a new high. Individual Giving Across Generations
Some families value philanthropy and have yet to set up a formalized structure or have no interest in exploring complex giving vehicles. Multigenerational gifts can still be made outright to a nonprofit by having family members agree on a charity they care about and each making a separate contribution to it – these gifts can vary in size depending on the individual’s capacity.
Nonprofits can effectively engage family foundations
Every family is unique. One’s financial and philanthropic goals will look different so we must enter every engagement with curiosity. Family philanthropy takes time and effectively engaging across generations can take years before seeing a significant gift come to light. We can control the experience we provide families and the relationship we offer them with the organization. Always lead with donor intent and remember to view yourself as a partner on a long journey of achieving transformational impact through philanthropy.
In this article about grateful patient fundraising, we explore using data to curate a communication journey that best cultivates grateful patients, converts them to donors, and creates a pathway for annual and consistent future giving.
Whether you’re a synagogue, summer camp, federation, or other Jewish organization, the High Holidays offer a time of thoughtful reflection and ripe opportunity for connection across the Jewish community.
If your nonprofit is global or pursuing donors in the UK, this article will highlight charitable giving in the UK and how geography impacts the structures and tools linked to fundraising success.
The US and UK are statistically among the most charitable countries in the world, operating as global financial centers in New York and London and home to populations with enormous wealth. However, while the US and UK both maintain extremely influential positions within the global philanthropic landscape, the differences between the two countries’ cultures of giving are as notable as their similarities.
Consider the following four factors that impact UK philanthropy to tailor your fundraising strategy.
1. Donor Wealth and attitudes toward wealth impact charitable giving in the uK
While it’s true that the US and UK rank as some of the world’s wealthiest countries, the US has a much larger Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than the UK, and consequently, more money goes to philanthropy. As a percentage of the total GDP, US individual giving is more than double that of the UK at 1.37% to 0.52%. This difference reflects the wealth disparity between the two countries; people in the US have more money and thus give more to philanthropy.
However, it’s important to note that in terms of charitable giving as a population percentage, 71% of UK adults report donating annually to charity, compared to 61% in the US. This suggests that a larger proportion of individuals exhibit generosity in the UK by giving smaller amounts; conversely, fewer individuals in the US make larger gifts.
This divergence in donor behavior should inform your fundraising strategy accordingly—bigger gifts from a smaller group of donors are expected in the US; smaller gifts from a larger group of donors are more common in the UK.
2. the social safety net shapes UK donor motivations
At face value, social spending, or the measurement of how much a country spends to support the standard of living for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, is similar in the US and UK. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as a percentage of GDP, the US and UK governments spend 22.7% and 21.1%, respectively, on health, education, family, unemployment, housing, and benefits for older adults or those with disabilities.
cultural expectations of Governmental Support affect uk charitable giving
However, voluntary private social spending, or benefits offered by privately operated organizations, including most nonprofits, accounted for almost 13% of GDP in the US versus a mere 5.85% in the UK. This discrepancy suggests that, while the cultural expectation in the UK is that the government will meet (or highly subsidize) most social needs, the US population is far more accustomed to relying on support from other sources, including employers, insurance companies, and other privately supported entities, including nonprofits. The higher education sector illustrates this point—the British government standardizes, caps, and subsidizes university fees. In contrast, top-ranked colleges and universities in the US often have extremely high tuition fees (financial aid and scholarship opportunities notwithstanding).
These differences align with the popular, though perhaps not entirely accurate, assessment that American culture lends itself to smaller government and more individual responsibility compared to the higher taxes, stronger social safety net, and collectivism favored by European societies. Indeed, 13% of US donors cite inadequate government support as a motivation for philanthropic giving.
3. donors are Partly motivated by tax benefits, which differ in the UK
The US offers more donor tax benefits for charitable giving than the UK and encourages donors to give through various wealth vehicles, including their estate and noncash assets, like art and real estate. US taxpayers can also offset their annual tax bill through cash deductions from donations made throughout the year to registered nonprofit (501(c)(3)) organizations. US-based donors also receive the same tax benefits for giving to nonprofits abroad through equivalency determination, which is nonexistent in the UK.
The US offers donors more options to give to nonprofits and opportunities to reap the financial benefits. It is common in the US for the highest income earners to view donating to nonprofits as an annual necessity for tax purposes, which makes sense considering that a smaller percentage of donors gives more money in the US.
Meanwhile, the UK offers various tax benefits for UK donors giving in the UK, but these benefits do not apply when a UK donor gives outside of the UK.
4. gDPR limits fundraisers’ use of UK Donor Information
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the world’s strongest set of data protection rules. Implemented in the European Union (EU) in 2018 and retained in UK law following their departure from the EU, GDPR limits how US organizations and fundraisers can use personal data, creating a substantial difference in privacy and data-sharing norms in the UK compared to the US. While federal- and state-level privacy regulations exist in the US, they vary across states and do not offer the same level of data protection as GDPR.
While the benefits of GDPR for privacy are indisputable, GDPR does impact fundraising strategies by placing strict guardrails on publicly available information. You cannot use the prospect identification and fundraising research software nonprofits commonly employ in the US—such as Wealth Engine and iWave—for British donor research. Instead, you will need to rely on publicly available information from specific sources, including public registry data, the Charity Register, and the news media. Further, US fundraisers must comply with GDPR regulations, as its rules apply to any organization, regardless of location, that processes the personal data of individuals within the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes the UK.
Understanding Charitable Giving in the UK can strengthen your Fundraising Strategy
As the global philanthropic landscape continues to grow and change, now is the time for your nonprofit organization to consider where it is headquartered, where its donor constituencies are located (or could be located), and where its programs make an impact.
While there are pros and cons to US and UK fundraising, norms and circumstances in the US tend to foster more significant philanthropy than in the UK. Nevertheless, a larger percentage of the UK population participates in charitable giving than the American population. By leveraging this key distinction and the other influential factors we have identified, you can meet UK donors where they are and expand your fundraising.
Whether you’re a synagogue, summer camp, federation, or other Jewish organization, the High Holidays offer a time of thoughtful reflection and ripe opportunity for connection across the Jewish community.
This comprehensive survey report of stewardship and development practices across 75 Catholic dioceses and archdioceses in the United States was produced by CCS and ICSC.
In this video, our keynote speaker, Dr. Una Osili, leading researcher and producer of the Giving USA report, presents the latest trends from the Giving USA 2024: The Annual Report on Philanthropy. Our esteemed panelists then examine the significance and implications of 2023’s trends for nonprofit organizations.
The culture of philanthropy remains strong, according to the new data released by Giving USA. Charitable giving reached over $557 billion across America in 2023, up 1.9% from 2022. Religion, human services, and education totaled over $322 billion, more than half of all gifts received. Giving by individuals totaled $374 billion, accounting for 67% of all contributions. Giving by bequests grew 4.8%, totaling about $43 billion, reflecting demographic shifts in donors. Four subsectors saw year-over-year double-digit growth, including education by 11.1% and arts, culture, and humanities by 11%. Additionally, the IRS reported 1.48 million 501(c)(3) charitable organizations in 2022, a 3.4% increase over 2021. This report should give nonprofits confidence in the future of philanthropy.
This comprehensive survey report of stewardship and development practices across 75 Catholic dioceses and archdioceses in the United States was produced by CCS and ICSC.
This report provides a comprehensive look at the current state of US philanthropy, compiling and analyzing annual data from Giving USA and other prominent research to ensure your organization stays up-to-date on the most significant industry trends.
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