Study highlights benefits to community foundations from ‘giving days’ campaigns

• Date: 01 October 2016
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nba.30241

OCTOBER 2016

7

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DOI: 10.1002/nba

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Study highlights benets to community

foundations from ‘giving days’ campaigns

A new report looking at “giving days”—limited-

duration online fundraising campaigns typically host-

ed by community foundations that focus on engaging

the citizens of specic communities or regions—shows

that such campaigns herald numerous benets for the

foundations that orchestrate them, well beyond the

actual dollars raised.

The research, conducted by the John S. and James

L. Knight Foundation, started out as a pilot project

evaluating whether giving days provided good op-

portunities for community foundations to experiment

with social media, online fundraising and other digi-

tal tools with which they had been struggling. That

small pilot program evolved into the much broader

Giving Day Initiative through which the Knight

Foundation supported 18 giving day organizers that

ran a total of 49 campaigns. Looking at the results

of those campaigns, the foundation said, certain les-

sons can be drawn:

• Giving days help to grow and democratize phi-

lanthropy, furthering the mission of many community

foundations. According to the Knight Foundation,

community foundations were able to activate a sig-

nicant number of donors—including those with

smaller giving capacity—and bring in new funding

to their nonprot partners by heightening awareness

and excitement around local causes. Some 36 percent

of donors surveyed for the initiative said they donated

more than they would have had the giving days not

occurred.

• Giving days increased community foundation vis-

ibility and credibility in their communities. According

to the research, giving days helped community foun-

dations communicate their missions and services to

larger audiences and establish themselves as valuable

to, and trusted by, nonprots and donors in the areas

they serve. Signicantly, nearly half of nonprots

and donors surveyed said they had heard about the

community foundations for the rst time as a result

of the giving days.

• Giving days strengthened the capacity of commu-

nity foundations to raise funds and engage a broader

set of donors online. These campaigns helped many

community foundations learn how to use digital

tools such as social media and online fundraising, the

Knight Foundation said. And they were able to nd

and engage donors online and raise funds for their

own institutions in addition to the nonprot partners

participating in their campaigns.

• Giving days positioned community foundations

as hubs of information in their communities. Ac-

cording to the Knight Foundation, the logistics of

giving days—especially relating to the gathering and

centralization of information about local nonprots

and donors—meant that community foundations

became central sources of a wealth of community

information.

Community foundations also found ways in which

to make them more cost-effective and mission-

aligned, the Knight Foundation said. For example,

they:

• Cut and recuperated costs by ceasing to cover

donation processing fees or by charging a fee or

According to the Knight Foundation, commu-

nity “giving days” come in many shapes and sizes.

The campaigns included in the foundation’s Giving

Day Initiative reect this diversity:

• They utilized different time horizons, some

spanning a 24-hour period and others multiple

weeks or months.

• They employed different participation struc-

tures, with some open to any community nonprot

group, some open only to a select group of non-

prots and some open only to nonprot endow-

ment funds held by the community foundations.

• They covered different-sized geographic areas

and populations, with some focusing on small rural

communities, some on large metro regions and

some on entire states.

They engaged communities with vastly different

levels of wealth. ■

Giving day variations