In a recent and potentially disheartening article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy, they boldly proclaimed that most nonprofit organizations (the charitable flavor specifically) are failing at online fundraising. There are a couple of trends worth noting.
1) The article asserts that online fundraising only accounts for less than 10% of all charitable gifts. There are a couple of different ways to look at this. You can say, “Great, so I suck at it, but at least it’s not important.” Or you can say, “Great, I suck at this, but I have the time to get good at it now.” Here at PiP, we’d recommend the second attitude. And that brings us to our second point.
2) Even though it’s not incredibly important now (although no one wants to give up 10%), it’s becoming more and more important with time. There was a world (within the memorable grasp of many of us), where 10% of charitable giving coming through an online medium was unthinkable! This is a skill we should all aim to develop.
So even if most of us suck at online giving now, take this time (while it’s not very important) to get better! See this as a training period. You have the opportunity to experiment, even though you’ll get it wrong at first (and most of us already are). Do it wrong until you do it right. Good luck failing your way to success!