“Age as a determinant of new donor acquisition and year-on-year retention in the university healthcare fundraising context”

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners have long viewed an individual's age to be a key predictor of giving outcomes. Specifically, older individuals are expected to be more philanthropic than younger individuals are. Utilizing a ten-year dataset from a Research One university in the United States, donation histories to health areas of the campus are matched with patient visit records from the university's affiliated hospitals and clinics system to empirically examine this accepted wisdom. The initial findings confirm basic expectations around donor acquisition as older prospects are acquired at higher rates than younger prospects. However, once the organization acquires and solicits donors, age's associative impact on retention rate becomes flat to negative, which indicates support for the alternative view that many younger donor prospects may have capacity and willingness to give. The role of giving purpose is also compared and contrasted among younger and older donor prospects, showing that managers of nonprofits can strategically solicit each population uniquely with targeted approaches to drive higher total fundraising success. The key results are discussed and both implications for theory and practice are derived in the process.