2. 2
The Social Impact Statement – piloted by GreatNonprofits and
The Pittsburgh Foundation provides transparency to donors and
a direct link between their gift and the positive change
affected in the community.
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It’s a fact we face daily in the nonprofit
sector: philanthropy has been relatively
stagnant for years. Giving has only been
growing at two percent, year over year.
What’s the cause of this lack of real growth
and more importantly, how can we change
it? There is a definite lack of tools in the
sector for connecting donors to their direct
impact. Donors want to know the on-the-
ground difference that their money is
making. Foundations, and their grantees,
face a difficult task in communicating this
impact to donors. And while overall
philanthropy is sluggish, community-based
giving is growing. So we know that donors
want that kind of local connection—they
want to know how their dollars are changing
their communities.
Keeping this in mind, GreatNonprofits is
developing tools for community foundations
and nonprofits to show donors their direct
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social impact. This past year,
GreatNonprofits piloted one of those tools --
the Social Impact Statement with the
Pittsburgh Foundation. The goal was to test
the theory that awareness about the direct
impact of one’s giving should positively
influence future charitable giving. The
Social Impact Statement provides
transparency to donors—a direct link
between their gift and the positive change
it affected in their community.
Together, we provided highly personalized
email statements to nearly 10,000 donors.
Each donor received specific information
about what impact each of their donations
had, photos, reviews and recommendations
for other, similar local nonprofits. We
reached out to each nonprofit to provide an
accurate picture for each donor. We wanted
to know, what does a $50 dollar donation go
to, for example. Each donation was linked
with a specific action taken by the
nonprofit.
3. 3
The Nonprofit of the future is going to need to be
able to connect the dots for their donors and the
Social Impact Statement is the way to help the
sector move toward emotionally engaged giving.
For instance, a $50 donation to Network of Hope provided one week’s
worth of food, purchased at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank,
to supply the Braddock Men's Recovery Home.
What did we learn? Donors loved
it! The emails had an open rate
of nearly fifty percent and nearly
fifty percent of respondents gave
the statement a 10/10 rating.
Plus, by using an algorithm based
on actual donation patterns, the
statement generated
recommendations of 3 additional
nonprofits per donor. Of the full list, we were able to generate
recommendations for all but 27 donors. We heard that donors were
excited to see their personal impact. Making the donation impact
digestible to donors can lead to more donors giving more money, while
rewarding the most high-impact community nonprofits.
The nonprofit of the future is going to need to be able to connect these
dots for their donors and the Social Impact Statement is one way to help
the sector continue to move in this direction of increased transparency
and emotionally-engaged community giving.
What do you think? Is this something that your foundation would be
interested in using to communicate to donors? To learn more about
getting involved, contact Perlani@greatnonprofits.org.
4. 4
Process Overview
To test the theory of impact of
giving The Pittsburgh Foundation
partnered with GreatNonprofits.
Overall 17,000 donors were
identified who gave to 700
organizations; some of which gave
during the Day of Giving.
To create a highly personalized
email that could test future
activities, we created a control
group of 6.9k records that did not
receive any communication and two
test groups: one group of donors
who gave to 1-2 organizations;
another which gave to 3+
organizations.
We used three primary data sources
with many data inputs to make the
experience and report rich. Here’s a
sampling of the data set:
1. Pittsburgh Foundation Data
included organization name, EIN and
URL
2. GreatNonprofits data included
EIN, number of reviews, star rating,
featured reviews and photos
3. The Day of Giving data
included the contact details, the
organization’s mission statement,
recent results, and what could be
done with donations of different
denominations.
This data was amalgamated to put together a statement that was emailed to users (see following
page).
We received nearly a 50% open rate; 24% click through rate, and nearly 50% of the respondents
gave the statement a 10/10 rating. The control group will be used in subsequent years to
measure impact of the personalized experience.
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The Social Impact
Statement can solve a
critical need in the
nonprofit sector to engage
donors…by providing
valuable information on how
donations made a
difference
Perla Ni, GreatNonprofits
Findings and Next Steps
Following are findings for future implementations:
Initial Findings
• The high poll results indicate a high level of donor satisfaction with the content
• The high open rates of emails indicates that the subject line was compelling
• The poll enabled us to get short-term feedback since the donation day did not happen
again until October
Learn More:
Is a Social Impact Statement of interest to your organizations? Do you want to leverage
community feedback to show impact? Then contact us today about how to get started
with a Social Impact Statement. For details, email support@greatnonprofits.org or our
founder, Perla Ni at perlani@greatnonprofits.org.
