Spanish non-profits must work harder to integrate digital into fundraising

Regular givers and donors provide half of the third sector’s income in Spain, but charities must work harder to integrate digitalisation into their fundraising, according to the Spanish Fundraising Association (AEFr) .

The main income drivers globally and nationally were discussed  at the association’s event Fundraising Radiography, Trends and Visions of the Future in Barcelona in December. Building on the findings of the recent The Reality of the Partner 2019 study, the event explored the role of regular givers as the main source of individual donations for non-profit organisations in Spain, incentivised in part by the ease of giving via Direct Debit.

The Reality of the Partner study showed that 9 out of 10 Spaniards have supported a non-profit organisation in some way and 2 out of 10 donate regularly. More than €500 million was raised through donations from both regular givers and donors in 2018 across the 16 organisations that collaborated in the study, including Action against Hunger, SOS Children’s Villages Spain, and Amnesty International. These contributions represented 49% of the 16 charities’ income, with private contributions on an upward trend.

In fact, additional data presented at the event from IFM Forum, an international study of fundraising by the 15 largest INGOs in the world, showed that Spain attracted the largest number of recurring donations in 2018, recording a total of 348,000 new regular givers, with face-to-face and telemarketing remaining the main recruitment channels.

However, the event also highlighted that the country’s non-profits are playing catch up with other nations when it comes to the development of digital channels.

In addition to analysing both global and Spanish fundraising data, trends and visions for the future were discussed with contributions from Óscar Cereijido Ferreira, Business Director of the Institut de Formació Continua Universitat de Barcelona​ and Jaime Gregori, president of the AEFr, who said that “the fundraising sector in Spain has to work to maintain and increase collaboration of regular givers, but also to integrate digitalisation into fundraising to meet social challenges and have a greater impact on society.”

The event included a roundtable on marketing and digital fundraising, with Sergi Pallarès, co-founder and CEO of StockCrowd, and Juan Pablo Sánchez, founder and CEO of A Small Job. Other sessions saw Nerea Plaza, responsible for the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Projects of AGBAR, and David Camps, DKV Integralia Foundation’s Director of Communication and Marketing, discuss company and NGO collaboration, and Julián Pindado, associate account Director of Kantar, and Ana Lisbona Bañuelos, doctor of Psychology and Professor of Social Psychology at UNED, give a talk on the motivations and profile of donors.