TechTalk: Why Silver Surfers Use Phablets

As I was thinking about a topic for this month's column, a recent study caught my attention. It was conducted by Dunham+Company and found that older donors are just as likely to donate online as younger donors. More specifically, the percentage of donors age 66 and older who are giving online increased from 29 percent in 2010 (the first year of the study) to 59 percent in 2014. This puts the 66+ donors on par with younger audiences in terms of how likely they are to donate online.

In my time as an online fundraiser, I've had many conversations with people who assume that the audiences on their websites, Facebook pages and online donation forms are young. This just isn't the case.

Last month I was standing in line at the grocery store checkout next to an older man. He looked sophisticated. Like a hip grandfather. He pulled out his Samsung phablet (one of those really big smartphones that are a cross between a phone and a tablet) and started checking his email. I happen to use a smaller Samsung smartphone (smaller than a phablet, but larger than an iPhone) so I asked him how he liked his device. He grinned and said he loved it. "Why did you choose such a large screen?" I wondered. "When you get to my age, you need the font to be REALLY BIG" he explained.

Of course.

So this leads to one of my questions for you: How does your website look to your "silver surfers"? Let's define this audience as your 66+ aged online audience. Now we know that these supporters are just as likely to donate to you online as your younger crowd. And I bet they're much more likely to read your "Leaving a Legacy" page about your wills and bequests program. But is your font big enough? And how does your legacy page look on a tablet, which we know from other studies trends much older than smartphones.

Demographic data has never been as easily available to online fundraisers as it is now. If you haven't already, make sure someone on your team enables the Demographic and Interests tracking on your Google Analytics account. Once this is done, you can start to answer questions such as: How female is our general website audience? How does that compare to the people who donate? How old is the website audience who spends more than 60 seconds on our legacy page?

Facebook is another source of rich demographic data for your team. If you spend some time exploring the Facebook Insights tab of your administrator login, you'll find a new set of reports that will help you shape your stories to better fit your audience. Notice the gender and age breakdown of people who like your page. But also compare that view to the demographic breakdown of people who are most engaged with your page (measured by comments, posts, etc.). You'll find they are not the same.

We can use demographic data to segment our online audiences, which will allow us to become more effective communicators and therefore better fundraisers. Some of you are building your major gifts capacity and may be spending a fair amount on building that part of your team. Are you using your websites to deliver qualified lists to that person or team? It's now possible to do this in a very cost-effective way.

Let's all try to be better at using demographic data to dispel old myths and make fact-based decisions about how to allocate our precious time and budgets.

Philip King is founder of The Donation Funnel Project, an experiment in online and mobile fundraising. Reach him at philip@donationfunnelproject.com