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Five Years of Online Giving!

By Dana Rinderknecht, GivingFirst Manager, Community First Foundation

GivingFirst.org turns five today!

Five years ago, Community First Foundation brought this giving resource to nonprofits and donors in Metro Denver. Sixty nonprofits signed up and put their profiles on the site to show their transparency and accountability to donors. In the first year, an additional 113 nonprofits signed up and more than $680,000 was raised from more than 1,600 gifts.

Today there are 930 nonprofits participating from all over the state of Colorado and we have raised more than $1.2 million so far this year.

The GivingFirst team has been pulling data and looking at the trends to see what this all means. Of course we have the big numbers:

·       $30,086,272 dollars raised

·         57,336 donors

·         125,169 donations

·         1,028 participating nonprofits

But some of the numbers that stick out for me are:

·         50:  the number of states from which donations have come

·         23:  the number of countries from which we have received donations

·         62: the number of Colorado counties where donors live (out of 64 total)

·         53:  the number of donors who have given each of the five years

Let’s look at that last number: 53. There are 53 donors who have come back each of the five years and given to their favorite nonprofits; actually, 161 of their favorite nonprofits. They have given on average almost $5,000 for a grand total of $264,692 in 840 donations. It is exciting to me that they have been with us since the beginning and are still helping nonprofits today. So we are giving each of one of them a Giving eCard to thank them and to help them give a little bit more to their favorite nonprofit.

One of the things I hear from my friends and family is that they don’t think they can really help nonprofits: They think their gifts don’t make an impact. They aren’t the big philanthropists like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

I say to them that our data shows otherwise: It is the small gifts that when combined together make the biggest impact. We have had 73,134 donations made for under $100 and an additional 32,123 for under $250. That’s some serious impact.

We will be sharing more of our findings with everyone in the next month as we reflect back on the past five years and look forward to the next five. To the nonprofits, we say thank you for participating with us. To the donors, we say thank you for contributing to these amazing organizations doing fabulous work in our community.
Let’s Celebrate!
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