Passion & Purpose: Summer 2024
‘Shaping Tomorrow’ explores charitable views, habits of donors under 40
Headlines and memes aplenty remind us of the differences between generations, and multiple sources report that younger generations give less. But are millennials really killing philanthropy?
In 2023, Giving USA’s “Giving By Generation” report unearthed a stark feature of younger generations: they seem to be less generous charitable givers. In addition to a general decline in giving — individual donors gave 13.4% less in 2022 than in 2021, when adjusted for inflation — the report noted a specific generational divide in the amount of donations.
While the findings of the report are important and interesting, our former president and CEO Brian Fogle found himself curious as to whether there wasn’t more to the story. Why was this phenomenon happening? What do millennials and Generation Z think about philanthropy and using their dollars charitably? What would encourage them to give more?
The CFO enlisted the services of Habitat Communication & Culture, a Springfield-based consulting firm, to research and report on these questions with a local population sample.
As Paige Oxendine of Habitat says, “You see these headlines like, ‘Gen Z can’t decide what causes they’re going to support; they might not support any.’ So we wanted to figure out: Are these folks genuinely less charitable, or, do they simply think about charitable giving through a different lens?”
The resulting report is “Shaping Tomorrow: A Study on Young Donors’ Perspectives on Charitable Giving in Southwest Missouri.” Released in February, it found that donors under 40 are in fact charitably-minded — they simply think about charity differently than their parents and grandparents. For example, they tend to be more skeptical of established charitable institutions. Most importantly, they’re more likely to view crowdfunding services like GoFundMe as legitimate charitable giving. These services remove a middleman they’re already skeptical of to give directly to families and individuals.
Paige Oxendine and Spencer Harris with Habitat Communication & Culture, which researched and produced the “Shaping Tomorrow” report, offer insights on developing donors under 40 to a room full of CFO agency partners.
Additionally, the report recommends that, to garner more attention, trust and dollars from the below-40 crowd, nonprofits must maximize their online presence. This is because, by a wide margin, younger donors prefer to not just give through an online platform, but through a website that is easy to use, up-to-date and well-branded; when done right, a nonprofit’s online experience can improve younger donors’ perception and trust of an organization.
In light of the limited capacity and budgets in the nonprofit community for the innovations needed to cater to younger donors, the CFO created a grant program to help nonprofits get a leg up in adapting fundraising strategies to this generational divide. In early May, and with the support of David and Stacey O’Reilly, the Shaping Tomorrow Grant Program granted to 11 regional nonprofits with the goal of helping them gain the attention, trust and donations of younger folks.
“It was important to us that, if we were going to tell our nonprofit partners that they will need to make significant changes to appeal to younger donors, that we put some dollars behind that effort,” said Winter Kinne, president and CEO of the CFO. “With the help of the O’Reillys and in partnership with Habitat, we want to make sure our partners are ready to strategize for the future.”
By Matthew Stewart · This essay is featured in the summer 2024 edition of Passion & Purpose: The CFO Magazine.
