Why a wealthy donor is withdrawing his support

What makes a donor keep supporting a charity over a length of time and what makes them stop?

“I saw an article about the charity in The Guardian, showed it to my wife and we both said we wanted to support it.” This was the start of a lengthy conversation with a donor I met at the AGM of a small charity I work with.

Thirty-five years on, this donor continues to support the charity. He’d come to London from Scotland specially for the event, and clearly took a strong interest in the way the charity was run.    

This particular man intrigued me. From our conversation it sounded like his family supported a range of charities, but he was currently doing some kind of audit as to which he would continue to donate to. Some he was going to let go.

One hadn’t sent him any correspondence in a couple of years. He got in contact with them to find out why, and their quick response said that his details had been left off a database. Despite reassurances that his details would be changed, this charity lost him as a donor.

He wrote to another charity to try to find out why they hadn’t had any media coverage during the last year (he monitors things online), but he didn’t get the courtesy of a reply. He told me he didn’t want to be bombarded with annual reviews as he could find these online, and that all he wanted were updates of the charity’s activity.

Simple enough on the face of it, but it just made me realise how different we all are as donors, and that we all have different expectations about communication. It then made me consider our own company donation scheme. At the start of this year, sounddelivery funded 12 carers to have a five-day break through a small London-based charity. I sourced the charity carefully, spoke to someone on the telephone about why I wanted to donate to them (and gave an extra £1,000 because I was so impressed by the passion of the fundraiser on the end of the phone). Now I’ll be interested to see how the ongoing communication continues.  

Last year we gave a similar amount to two different charities and have had absolutely no feedback a year on. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money like the donor I met today, but we tend to support charities and projects where small amounts can make a huge difference, so their loss is another charity’s gain.

As we enter increasingly uncertain times many donors – from individuals like this man today, to larger foundations – will no doubt be doing their own charity audits. It’s now up to us to ensure that our communication is relevant, targeted, engaging and personal so that they remain loyal this year and beyond.