Texting: “What Nonprofits Can Learn from Gen Zers’ and Seniors’ Mobile Habits”
Are you using text messages to reach your audience with effective appeals? You can do this with CiviCRM, and all indications are that you probably should be at least considering it.
The Giving USA Foundation publishes a series of annual reports and updates on philanthropic giving in the United States, and it recently released its “Special Report - Giving by Generation UPDATE”, which highlights several salient points regarding the intersection between age, mobile device usage, and charitable giving.
You can purchase the report for your own use, or you may prefer to see what others have to say about it, such as this article from NonProfit Pro.
Or you can just take my summary of bullet points — hooray for low effort!
Gen Z and Millenials are continuing to grow in charitable giving.
The Baby Boom generation has long been seen as the bedrock base of charitable donors, but how long can this last?
Millenials have increased their annual donations by 72% in the last 10 years, compared to Gen X’s modest 8% increase.
And, Gen Z’s generosity trends, adjusted for inflation, have surpassed the point where Millennials’ giving was in 2015, when Millennials were similar in age.
Everybody’s texting.
“Everybody knows” the cool kids among Gen Z and the Millenials are heavy mobile users. But 88% of Baby Boomers own mobile phones, and on average use them for about 3-and-a-half hours per day — no small amount!
Your Gen Z constituents are more likely to respond to text messages from charities that any other channel: 3.8 out of five for text, compared to email (3.6), social media (3.6) and direct mail (3.4).
Even your Boomer constituents are more likely to prefer receiving a receiving a monthly text message than a monthly mailing (29% for text, vs 19% for the mailing). And that’s up from two years ago, when 23% of them said they were open to receiving a monthly text, and up from just 16% in 2016.
Here’s the thing:
Everybody on the Internet will tell you that SMS has an average open rate of 98% or higher. Some will tell you that 90% of them are opened within 3 minutes. Nobody’s saying where those numbers came from, and most of them are trying to sell you something, so take it with a grain of salt.
But I think that roughly matches my own experience. People read texts.
And,
if Boomers are texting more (they are), and
if GenZers and Millenials are giving more (they are), and
if sending automated and segmented SMS messages is supported in CiviCRM (it is) …
… then … maybe … it’s worth considering how you can start to leverage this whole new (30-year-old) texting thing?
All the best,
A.