Above: Photo by Wichita Community Foundation.

This spring, Knight Foundation supported five community foundation partners to host online Giving Days, as part of its multi-year effort to help these foundations democratize philanthropy. As part of ongoing research, Third Plateau conducted an evaluation of these campaigns, and found that a number of the Giving Day trends we’ve seen over the past few years have remained steady. Here are some highlights:

Giving Days are increasingly driven by smaller donations, but they struggle to attract a demographically diverse or representative donor base. This year, the average donation decreased by 4 percent in comparison to 2014, and the majority of donors made donations of less than $50—indications that Giving Days are making philanthropy more accessible to smaller dollar donors. However, the campaigns are not attracting a diverse or representative set of donors from their communities, as the majority of Giving Day donors continue to be Caucasian women over the age of 40. This is a challenge we have seen in many communities, and is the theme of Knight Foundation’s upcoming webinar, Reaching Diverse Donors, on Oct. 15.

Giving Days are helping community foundations fundraise and engage their donors online. The community foundations that listed themselves on their Giving Day platforms raised an average of more than $15,000, and most credited the Giving Days with changing the way they use social media. Additionally, Giving Day trainings provided a platform for the community foundations to teach these skills to nonprofit participants, who reported that they are more effective at raising money online and that they increased their own social media presence as a result of their participation.

Community foundations are using the Giving Days as a tool to engage Donor Advised Fund (DAF) holders and, to a lesser extent, raise money for nonprofit endowment funds. All five of the community foundations enabled Donor Advised Funds, or DAFs, to participate in their Giving Days, and they saw an 18 percent increase in dollars raised from DAFs and a 36 percent increase in DAF donations in comparison to last year. (For tips on how to engage DAF holders, check out the Donor Advised Funds section in the Giving Day Playbook). Only two of the community foundations used their Giving Days to raise money for nonprofit endowment funds, but we expect more community foundations to do so as they seek to bring more benefit to their own institutions through the campaigns. (Fo more insights in that vein, see the Knight Foundation blog post Beyond the dollars: How Giving Days can support community foundations’ missions).

Photo by Silicon Valley Gives.

Community foundations are increasingly looking to corporate sponsors to help fund Giving Days—but with varied success. All five of the community foundations are looking to forge partnerships with corporations for future Giving Days to help offset the operating costs. To help community foundations improve their ability to attract corporate sponsors, Knight Foundation hosted a webinar earlier this month on Landing Corporate Sponsorships for Giving Days. One major theme was that companies generally provide sponsorships for marketing purposes, not charity, so it is important for community foundations to be able to articulate the marketing value of Giving Day sponsorship to potential corporate partners.

Platform-wide matches/bonus pools are on their way out, but prizes and matches that are specifically structured to influence nonprofit and donor behavior continue to be effective. Two community foundations moved away from offering platform-wide proportional matches for their Giving Days. Community foundations have had increasing difficulty raising such funds, and have in turn witnessed a diminishing amount awarded to each nonprofit (down 21 percent from last year) as the number of nonprofit participants increases at a faster rate than the match dollars. The most powerful prizes continue to be time-constrained, direct matches, which raised 317 percent more dollars through 250 percent more donations than hours that did not offer a match. For additional information on how to structure prizes and matches for your Giving Day, visit the Incentives chapter of the Giving Day Playbook.

The foundations evaluated in this set of research include Central Carolina Community Foundation, Centre Foundation, Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Wichita Community Foundation.

Want to learn more? Join Knight Foundation and community foundations from across the country on Facebook in the Giving Day Exchange to ask questions, share findings and contribute to the Giving Day field.