Canadian charities need to upgrade their digital games to upend giving declines

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Canadian charities have talked the talk about digital transformation for years, but with the unexpected arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic they were suddenly forced to walk the walk. Yet it’s clear that without adequate digital expertise and infrastructure much of the Canadian charitable sector spent the pandemic treading water in the face of a ‘sink-or-swim’ situation.

Both in-depth surveys and plentiful anecdotal evidence reveal sector-wide shortcomings when it comes to investing in the strategies, skills, and infrastructure necessary to harness the potential of digital fundraising.

Data from CanadaHelps’ 2023 Giving Report shows digital giving in Canada grew steadily from 2010 to 2020, but the rate of growth has slowed since 2021 — a finding all the more worrisome given the many other organizational pressures facing charities, including inflation, donor fatigue and staff burnout.

And yet, despite these challenges, the road to renewal is clear: it’s digital or bust. 

So how can charities start to gain more digital traction? Let’s find out.

MORE THAN JUST TOOLS AND PLATFORMS

Jen Love has worked in the sector for more than two decades and is co-owner of Agents of Good, based in the Waterloo, Ontario area. The agency works primarily with small to medium sized charities and straddles the overlap between individual, annual, and legacy giving with an emphasis on storytelling.

“Digital has opened up a much bigger potential audience, which is fabulous, and also challenging, and it comes with some serious growing pains in the individual giving space,” she adds. “Many organizations realized that, from a basic infrastructure and hygiene perspective, they didn’t have the kind of digital chops that they wanted or needed.”

One thing Love asks her clients is, “When was the last time you made a donation to your own charity? When was the last time you went through the flow of: I follow this Facebook page to a landing page to make a donation? I think many people, including bright talented, plugged-in fundraisers would be surprised at how laboured or challenging that whole journey is.”

Aine McGlynn, a consultant who has worked with non-profit and fundraising teams on digital training and transformation for about a decade, said while many charities focus on donor acquisition, donor retention is where the deeper work and greater rewards lie.

“I often say that anybody can raise money online once with a timed ask and good campaign assets, but only organizations that manage their donor data and donation information well can raise money again from that same group of people,” she said.

“The cycle charities have gotten into around focusing on compelling campaigns that primarily focus on new donor acquisition rather than spending time and investing in ways their donor information is organized in an ongoing and automated basis—that’s where we’re seeing a separation,” McGlynn said.

Cloud computing has never been more affordable, and a wide array of free resources and training is available to nonprofits. During the pandemic, for example, organizations like the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resiliency (CCNDR) cropped up with an emphasis on helping organizations navigate digital infrastructure and cybersecurity. Programs like NTEN’s Nonprofit Tech Readiness Program and CanadaHelps’ Charity Growth Academy also offer charity cohorts the opportunity to spur change on an organizational level. And yet, too many Canadian charities haven’t learned the lessons necessary to thrive in the digital age.

“I think Canadian organizations have an increasing reliance on digital fundraising, but haven’t made the investment in time and money to train their teams and educate their donors,” said Nejeed Kassam, CEO of Keela, a fundraising and donor management platform. He added many charities continue to focus on offline fundraising and analog methods at the risk of ignoring the emerging digital landscape.

“Traditionally there’s been kind of a wall between fundraising and marketing—now it’s more like a fence with holes in it,” he said.

“I think sooner or later, you’ll see digital fundraising teams and digital marketing teams become increasingly close. We see the symbiosis, and I think it’s an incredibly exciting frontier.”

Coming out of the pandemic, charities continue to face increased demand for their services, as well as inflationary pressures affecting charitable giving. Imagine Canada’s 2018 report, Thirty Years of Giving in Canada, found charitable giving was already on the decline and that donors have also become older.  This signifies the importance of tapping into a younger demographic.

“We see that, particularly in times of crisis Canadians respond – at the beginning of COVID, at the beginning of the Ukraine War, with the wildfires this year, the same thing happened,” said Duke Chang, CEO of CanadaHelps “So, inherently I think Canadians are still generous and they want to give, but where it becomes challenging is they’re facing the same pressures in the economy we’re all facing.”

Not all organizations are adapting to technological change equally. According to Blackbaud’s 2022 Status of Canadian Fundraising Report, organizations that increased their income year over previous year are more likely to be larger (have income of more than $10 million).  They also say that individual giving is now contributing more than before the pandemic. And significantly, while three quarters of respondents say they understand how technology can help them, only a little over a third say they get the most out of technology.

With the rising importance of digital tools and platforms, skills and talent have become a spotlight issue when it comes to charities’ digital maturity. In 2021, CanadaHelps’ Digital Skills Survey found the majority of charities that responded rated their skill level as “fair,” “poor,” or “not aware” regarding 12 of the 15 digital tools they were asked about.

McGlynn, who trains non-profit leaders on new processes and workflows, sees challenges first-hand when it comes to adopting new technologies. “Their shame or their feeling of not being able to keep up can sometimes derail the attempt to train at all,” on top of what she’s observed as “work-around culture” that has become woven into the fabric of many organizations, she said.

“Which is to say, ‘I need to get this board report done by Friday and for some reason this dashboard our consultant set up for us, I don’t trust the information,” McGlynn explains. “I don’t have time to diagnose if there’s an integration broken or someone hasn’t been following a procedure, so I’m going to manually wrangle it for the purposes of getting this report done.’”

“Using technology well requires both data governance and technology governance and this is not sexy work. It takes time and effort, consistency and habit,” McGlynn said.

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