Wooing Millennials

Donate.ly, a new, open-source funding platform for nonprofits, wants to make it easy for any charity to show donors where their money is being used and let people create personalized fundraisers. Calling the platform a Kickstarter for charities, Donate.ly founder Javan Van Gronigen believes such detail and customization is key to appealing to young people brought up in the information age.

“Before our generation, you saw my parents would be like, ‘Oh, we want to give to the Red Cross,’” he says. “My generation would say we want to give to education or to fighting child slavery. Now it’s going even deeper and the next generation is saying, ‘I want to save that person right there.’”

Compelling narrative also plays a key role in wooing many donors, particularly young people. A survey of more than 6,000 people between 20 and 35 for the Millennial Impact Report found that 42% chose to donate to “whatever inspired them at the moment.”

Invisible Children, a nonprofit focused on stopping the abduction and use of child soldiers in central Africa, struck viral gold with young people last March when it released Kony 2012, a dramatic 30-minute short film about Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. The video racked up 100 million views in less than a week and helped the organization double its revenue year over year. Van Gronigen’s nonprofit-focused creative studio, Fifty and Fifty, devised the marketing scheme for Kony 2012.

This entry was posted in Fundraising, Philanthropy by Grant Montgomery.