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GiftWorks Partners on Groundbreaking Charitable Giving Survey
January 3, 2007 - Mission Research, makers of GiftWorks, has joined with the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) to facilitate the first-ever Fundraising Effectiveness Survey, which will enable fundraisers, CEOs, and board members to assess their organizations' efforts to accelerate giving. The survey is the initial activity of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP), a partnership of research, charitable, professional, and service organizations to help nonprofits increase overall charitable giving from current and potential donors.
Mission Research and other participating software firms, serving more than 50,000 nonprofit clients, have customized their software applications to help their clients extract the required data from their donor databases with minimal effort. Mission Research has built a free software add-in that automatically summarizes the statistical information needed for the survey. Results can be transmitted directly to the FEP through GiftWorks.
According to Charlie Crystle, Mission Research CEO, "Knowing how strapped nonprofits are for resources and management tools, we are excited to lend a hand in helping the nonprofit sector make the most of the enormous giving potential out there. The ability to gather and compare fundraising data from year to year is key to growth-in-giving." Crystle added, "We donated our developers' time to make our customers' participation easy."
"For decades, research has indicated enormous untapped giving potential in the United States," said Elizabeth Boris, director of the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. "Until now, fundraisers, CEOs, and board members have lacked the performance data they need to make informed, growth-oriented budget decisions that can accelerate giving. This new tool will show them where and how they can most effectively invest their development dollars."
According to Cathy Williams, Ph.D., project director and vice president for research at AFP, working with the donor software community will increase charities' response rate many times over, greatly improve the accuracy of the data gathered, provide significant savings in data entry and other costs associated with completing the survey, and speed data analysis.
Bill Levis, project manager and senior associate at the Urban Institute's Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, noted that nonprofits will be able to compare their growth-in-giving results across a variety of measures with the performance of similar organizations. These measures include total amount raised, average gift size, type of organization, age of development program, location, fundraising budget, and staff size, as well as combinations of these criteria. In subsequent surveys, the FEP plans to collect more detailed information, including costs (by fundraising method) and gift type (annual, capital, and planned gifts).
The survey for 2005-2006 is expected to begin in February 2007. Repeat survey participants will be asked to update their 2004-2005 data, while new participants will be asked to provide data for 2004-2005 and for 2005-2006.
All information survey respondents provide will be kept strictly confidential and will be reported in aggregate form only. Survey results will be published on the Urban Institute and AFP web sites.
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