The vagaries of Individual Giving

This morning, we found ourselves wondering how exactly an ‘individual giving (IG)’ job is defined.

We assumed it was a direct marketing role, with the odd charity using the term interchangeably with major donor fundraising.

We thought we’d put our theory to the test by taking a look at a snapshot of roles advertised by charities and agencies.

Broadly speaking, (for charities at least) the primary purpose of an IG fundraiser is to ‘solicit funds from an individual, or facilitate a way to do so’.

This makes sense.

But when it comes to mid-level giving, IG roles fall into a grey area between direct marketing and major donor fundraising. So we’ve erred on the side of direct marketing.

The major donor roles indicated below fall under the IG umbrella.

Findings for jobs advertised by charities:

And for agencies:

So, it seems our suspicions were in the right ballpark. Although charities seem to agree that IG is mainly direct marketing, the odd charity defines it as a pure major donor role.

Agencies, it seems, agree that direct marketing is the king of the IG castle, but they believe major donor fundraising plays a much bigger role in the catch-all of ‘individual giving’.

As for the other results, your guess is as good as ours.

We would have thought corporate and statutory fundraising are about as far away as you can get from individual giving, but who are we to judge?

Conclusions

If we were going to advertise a pure major donor role, we’d title it as that.

With Direct Marketing, it’s a judgment call.

We’ve started collating stats on the number of job titles across fundraising advertised by charities.

Here’s a graph showing the roles advertised as either IG or DM from mid-December to today.

Assuming the majority of charity advertised roles are direct marketing, you can see there’s a preference for charities calling direct marketing roles ‘individual giving officer/manager’, with the trend increasing in the last few weeks.

Is this a move to ‘soften’ the job title in the wake of various ‘scandals’ (as the tabloid press would call them) and GDPR making people more aware of marketing in general?

It’s impossible to say as we only started analysing a couple of months ago.

As with all our stats-based bloggery, we’ll revisit it at a later date to see how things have changed.

Stay tuned.