A Jan. 11 USA Today article excerpted from The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that last-minute gifts boosted some charities’ holiday fundraising.
A third of the nearly 400 nonprofit groups that responded to a poll in mid-December said donations since November were higher than they had been at the same time in 2008. Of 181 charities polled in early January, 48 percent said giving rose during the holiday season. “We think donors are more optimistic,” said one fundraiser.
As we know, giving tracks the stock market, which means more donors may have been in a better position this year to make gifts. Yet as is typical of these polls, most of the nonprofits surveyed were big national ones. So the results may not be an accurate reflection of how community-based charities did. We had clients who did well, but it wasn’t so much the result of their year-end mailings as it was their ongoing donor-cultivation efforts.
How did your end-of-year giving fare? If your results were better than expected, was it because you did something different? We invite you to share your comments below.
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