Sarah Ford | April 15, 2015
How Nonprofits Can Raise More Money from Millennials
The millennials don’t want to merely donate money, check a box, and receive matching gifts. They want to engage with the causes they care about. This means giving money, but also donating through service.
Kelly Alvarez Vitale, President and Founder of Strategic Philanthropy, claims that millennials have a keen interest in skills-based volunteerism. Young people want to use their individual talents to provide specific services that can help nonprofits to do more. Marketing professionals want to design advertisements for nonprofits, COO’s want to offer strategic plans, and tech-savvy millennials want to share their social media skills. More so than through money, the up-and-coming generation of workers wants to deliver tangible benefits for nonprofits that require engagement with organizations, real-world problems that need solving, and visible proof that donations are actually making things better.
That all sounds great. Nonprofits can get a lot accomplished with all the free help and can transform into efficient, 21st century organizations, but they still need money to survive. Will service donations be enough to keep nonprofits afloat?
Yes and no. Yes, because of dollars for doers programs, which we’ll get to in a minute. No, because service donations are not all that millennials are giving.

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