Opinion: It’s time for equitable access to digital fundraising

The Grand Bargain in 2016 saw the international humanitarian community make clear commitments to fundamentally change the way humanitarian aid is delivered. One of the primary objectives of the Grand Bargain was to “get more means into the hands of people in need and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the humanitarian action.”

The Grand Bargain’s target was that by 2020, 25% of humanitarian funding would reach local and national responders as directly as possible. By 2020, the result was just 3%.

In short, the big players still hold the purse strings and therefore set the agenda.

The vast majority of the funding that local and national nonprofits can access is controlled by donors who insist on myriad compliance stipulations in order to award it. This is despite the fact that donors’ distance from the organization means they may not understand where investments should go to have the most impact.

Organizations not only struggle to have their voices heard but also to finance their work through traditional fundraising. Furthermore, most funding is restricted to project costs, which means that smaller organizations often struggle to fund important costs such as back-office staff, technology infrastructure, and safeguarding processes.

This is why equitable access to the means of generating unrestricted funding — alongside ongoing restricted funding — is essential if local and national organizations are to lead humanitarian and development agendas.

Donors must recognize the importance of shifting the power in a meaningful way, supporting locally-led action, and recognizing that the existing system has been built upon foundations of deep-rooted colonialism and even racism. They can do this by supporting equitable access to digital tools and skills, which provides nonprofits with confidence and competence to raise more unrestricted funding and to have more ownership over where money is spent.

The pandemic as a driver for change

COVID-19 has catapulted the world into the digital age, forcing us all to change the way we do almost everything. For nonprofits, often reliant upon physical events and face-to-face collections, the fundraising landscape has radically changed.

Unlike large international NGOs that had resources to shift to digital fundraising, smaller charities struggled to pivot to using digital tools due to a lack of resources. This inequitable access to digital fundraising has meant that organizations working on the front line — supporting the hardest hit by COVID-19 and the nature of their work — providing vital services to their communities, risk being left behind.

However, according to the M+R Benchmarks Study, smaller nonprofits in the United Kingdom and the United States alone saw just a 32% increase in online revenue during 2020. This growth was driven by more people giving, with online fundraising opening up new avenues for charities to generate funds, provided they knew how to use the right tools.

These figures show us that if organizations know how to use digital tools to fundraise, there is huge potential to open up new channels of unrestricted funding which can be spent as they see fit, and contribute to a real shift of power toward locally-led interventions.

The solution

For small and medium nonprofits working on the front line of development and humanitarian issues, opportunities to learn important new skills can be few and far between. They’re faced with a stark choice between using expensive, inaccessible training programs led by consultants and agencies or low-impact, self-guided, generic online courses.

Lightful, a tech-for-social-good business, designed the Building Resilience in Digital Growth and Engagement program in response to this and has worked with over 1,000 organizations from over 55 countries. By partnering with funders, BRIDGE empowers nonprofits, charities, and grassroots organizations to develop digital strategies, tell powerful stories online, and run effective digital fundraising campaigns.

Through a combination of expert-led masterclasses, online learning modules, and one-to-one coaching, participants are provided with vital skills and tools to support them to adapt for the digital age. This leads to genuinely impactful results for organizations. For example, the Jessie Ball du Pont Fund funded 90 charities and nonprofits to take part in the BRIDGE program, empowering them to raise over $5 million within just three months with their new skills.

Case Study: Introducing AdvocAid and Lightful

AdvocAid works with women and girls caught up in Sierra Leone’s often unjust legal system. It provides holistic access to justice via free legal representation, educational empowerment, support for women in detention, and a “moving forward” program, ensuring detainees leave as stronger women with brighter futures.

As a small civil society organization based in western Africa, funding is always a high priority with AdvocAid’s small team working tirelessly to support clients in areas across the country. COVID-19 added additional pressure as new regulations, such as curfews and limits on freedom of movement, led to more marginalized women being arrested as they sought out work. Having developed strong relationships with core donors, they were able to secure mobilized emergency funding quickly in the early stages of the pandemic, but more long-term funding proved harder to access.

With many services globally quickly shifting online at the start of the outbreak, AdvocAid saw this as an opportunity to increase its digital fundraising efforts, targeting more individual donors as well as continuing to work with institutional funds.

Through Global Giving, AdvocAid joined the BRIDGE program. The team learned new ways of reaching a global audience through digital marketing and engagement campaigns. The potential to supercharge fundraising through these means is massive. Furthermore, they were able to target donors more effectively by adopting audience personas, with storytelling proving to be an essential way to engage new donors and build long-term relationships.

According to AdvocAid, its new digital fundraising strategy enabled them to raise 151% more than a tracked control group of similar-sized nonprofits over a period of 12 months. The team has also achieved impressive audience growth on their social media channels.

The money that AdvocAid raised translated directly into building valuable resources for the women and girls they work with, as well as the purchase of COVID-19 supplies. This flexible funding is widely recognized as being a key resource that feminist and women’s rights organizations like AdvocAid need.

Equitable access to digital fundraising isn’t optional

All of this doesn’t mean that investment from traditional donors isn’t essential, even if it is restricted to certain activities. But, the sector needs to recognize that it is time for institutional donors and the international community to hand over the baton of power to organizations that truly understand their communities’ needs. Enabling powerful storytelling and effective digital funding campaigns is one way to support this shift and contribute to the localization of humanitarian response and development interventions.

Learn more about Lightful.