COVID’s impact on Food Bank Fundraising, with Matt Hackler

Matt Hackler is Vice President of Strategic Capacity Building with Feeding America. Like many of us, Matt says he “fell into” fundraising before joining Feeding America. In his current role, Matt leads a team of experts across multiple disciplines to help local member food banks increase their capacity to serve children, families, seniors and individuals experiencing hunger across the U.S.

Matt and I connected recently to talk about COVID-19’s impact on fundraising in general, on Feeding America nationally, and on individual member food banks. 

We covered a lot of ground, including:

• How food banks learned from the 2008 – 2010 financial crisis and changed their approach to crisis fundraising as a result.
• The spike in giving due to COVID-19, and whether donors who came on file as a result of COVID are “emergency response” donors, or “recession” donors (and what that means for your future fundraising efforts).
• When is the right time to stop talking to donors about COVID-19?
• The role of brand in fundraising, both nationally and in local communities across the U.S.
• How food banks have historically relied on volume-based tactical fundraising efforts instead of relationship-based philanthropy — and why that needs to evolve for the future. 
• Feeding America is seeing that donors who gave in response to COVID-19 are giving more frequently, retaining at higher rates, giving higher average gifts, and converting to monthly ongoing support at higher levels than the average donor — and what this means for the future of hunger relief funding.

Whether you’re working in hunger relief or a completely different kind of nonprofit, you’ll want to catch this episode with Matt. His insights are relevant no matter what your organization’s focus!