Young people are donating less to charity because fundraisers are failing to engage with them, a fundraising director insisted yesterday.

Catherine Miles, of blood cancer charity the Anthony Nolan Trust, was speaking at the CFG members’ meeting in London, where she predicted three key trends in fundraising for the next three to five years.

The first of these was that the tendency for a large proportion of donations to come from a small percentage of donors is likely to continue. “It means that your fundraising team’s relationship with supporters is absolutely critical,” she said.

Young people 'will give if properly engaged'

This led her to bring up last month’s CAF and University of Bristol ‘generation gap’ research, which revealed statistics such as that people in their sixties contribute six times more to charities than those under 30.

“I actually don’t think the issue is with younger donors,” Miles said. “I think it’s actually with fundraisers.

“We as a fundraising sector haven’t adjusted coherently enough to what younger donors want, their different attitudes, how they actually engage with charity, and particularly how they engage with social media.

“I think young people will still give, it’s a question of how your charity engages with them.”

The other two presentations at yesterday’s meeting – by Anne-Marie Huby, founder of JustGiving and Vicky Browning, director of Charity Comms – both extolled the virtues of implementing social media as at the core of a charity’s fundraising strategy.

Charities 'must adjust to donor needs'

This tied into Miles' second key future trend, which was that what modern donors want has changed – and charities need to make sure they change with it.

Specifically, many donors today have “microscopically short attention spans” and are cause-driven, rather than displaying loyalty to any particular organisation. They want to engage with the charities directly, and so must be reached on the platforms that they use.

“Things like Facebook and Twitter define this generation – and were created by this generation,” Miles said.

Finally, Miles insisted that charities that can deliver holistic ‘supporter journeys’ will substantially grow income.

So to pigeon hole a donor by the first contact they make, for example by classifying someone who runs a marathon solely as a marathon-runner, could mean missing out on opportunities for them to help in other ways, cutting their supporter journey short, she said.

“Most supporters can and want to support and charity in a range of ways,” she added.