Thursday April 26- Impulse giving

Hi !

Cassie McKay: What’s cookin this week 

In this week’s enews…

• The poll: New car addition

• Ozempic and your purchases

• Ozempic and your fundraising

• Try Shirley, your friendly nonprofit helpbot

• Great post: How to fix donation page abandonment

• A humorous look at The Pitt

• P.S. It never ends

The solution to last week’s Triple E (enews easter egg): Song lyrics to the famous Perfect Strangers scene when they make the bibbi babkas.

This week I’m gonna dive into a topic you might think has nothing to do with fundraising:

Ozempic.

Yes, Ozempic and weight reduction drugs like it. Stick with me because we’re gonna dive into weight loss, impulses and your donors. It’ll take me a little bit to get to where we’re going but I promise we’ll get there.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile and wanna share my thoughts with you. Let’s dive in.

Frank Langdon: Suppressing impulses

I’m overweight and I know it.

It’s a constant battle. I walk 75 minutes in the morning. I have a daily exercise routine. I’m trying to eat right.

But it’s still been something I’ve dealt with for a long time. There was never a magic button to push where I could reduce my weight by a lot in a relatively short period.

Until now.

Ozempic and other type medicines work at helping to reduce weight. I have seen the results on someone I know and it’s amazing. Not just weight loss but the potential for massive weight loss.

I’ve considered Ozempic but decided against it for a few reasons:

1. Not enough long term research into possible side effects. Not necessarily a deterrent but…

2. As I understand, you have to take it for the rest of your life. Stop taking it and you’ll gain back the weight and more.

3. At some point it plateaus and that’s it. You’ve lost weight but it might not be all the weight you want/need to lose.

Yet the fact is that 1 in 8 Americans (12%) have already tried weight loss reduction medicines. That’s an astounding number!

These GLP-1 type medicines help suppress a person’s appetite. Eat less, exercise, do the right thing and voila- you go from size 40 pants to 32 in a short time.

They also suppress cravings and impulses. Cornell University researchers found that GLP-1 users have been able to reduce their grocery bills, which includes a reduction in buying sweets, snacks and impulse items.

This is fascinating because of the possibilities of GLP-1 medicines helping with addiction (drugs, nicotine etc.). Maybe it can suppress the need for certain cravings.

Now’s where things get interesting!

We’ve all made an impulse buy. You’re at the supermarket waiting in line and you notice the headline on the National Enquirer: 3 headed alien baby born to Kim Kardashian! Well, I gotta know more so I buy the paper. Maybe that’s just me.

Or you’re shopping online and you’re looking for a shirt. The seller offers you a second shirt at 50% off. You weren’t planning on buying two- you might not even need two shirts- but you buy on a whim.

In 2025, 40% (!!!!!!) of money spent on ecommerce was due to impulse buying.

WOW!!!

That’s a lot of money that we spend without having thought about it first. We see, we buy.

The research into how Ozempic et al could affect impulse purchases is still in its infancy. Is the reduction in grocery spending because Ozempic is tied to losing weight (people are more conscious of it and therefore avoid snacks and impulse food buys) or could the craving reduction also affect impulse buys- i.e. fewer impulse buys by GLP-1 users?

This leads me to your nonprofit, fundraising and how donors consider their giving. And how Ozempic could potentially affect that.

Mel King: The potential for fewer donations

12% of charitable donors give spontaneously, according to a Blackbaud Institute report. They define a spontaneous gift as “an unplanned, first-time donation of any amount.”

That’s a LOT of money given spur of the moment. $592.50 billion was donated in 2024. What amount of that was an impulse gift?

Not sure. The research talks about percent of donors but not the total amount of dollars donated from those gifts.

(Important to note: 72% of spontaneous gifts went to organizations donors were already familiar with. Remember when I said this was the year of “constant and consistent communications?” That includes donors who have yet to give a gift!

I highly advise you check out what factors 75% of spontaneous donors cited as mattering a great deal in their decision to give a second gift. If these things aren’t front and center, you’re losing a lot of potential second gifts and your retention takes a hit!)

I know that first time gifts may be smaller than other types of gifts. But 12% of donors is a LOT and I’ll bet spontaneous giving is in the billions of dollars each year.

Starting to see why I brought up Ozempic? Given the number of people taking it, I started to wonder if that could negatively affect impulse donations (suppression of cravings and impulses).

I chatted last week with fundraising expert Cherian Koshy on this topic. He is the author of the fantastic book Neurogiving (I highly recommend you buy it, read it and implement what he suggests) and here are some of the thoughts he shared with me on the topic:

• Does Ozempic interact with brain chemicals to stop impulse giving? It might not. TBD.

• Are purchasing a product and donating a gift using the same brain wiring? No. When we give, our brain is tapping into our compassion and empathy. Those are not tied to buying behavior.

• If you’re scrolling Instagram and see a picture of a poor child and it causes you to give- that could be an example of more human driven action than an impulse gift.

• On the opposite side of all this is rage giving, which yes could be defined as impulse giving.

I followed up by asking how this could affect fundraising thermometers and urgency in campaigns (e.g. giving days, “only 7 hours left to give,” using the word “urgent” in an email subject line). I’ll save that for an upcoming edition of the enews.

Giving is a very emotional action. We read or see something, it tugs at our hearts, we give. It’s not necessarily rational.

Know what else isn’t rational? Impulse buying. We didn’t think about it. We didn’t weigh the pros and cons of purchasing the product. We just took action and charged it to the credit card.

I have no data to back this up but I’m putting this out there: I believe that Ozempic and other such drugs do affect impulse giving. They suppress the urge to donate spontaneously and that could mean a reduction in donations.

Campaigns for immediate help after a disaster (lot of impulse giving), crowdfunding (time sensitive), text to give and checkout counter campaigns could be affected. What does that mean for your fundraising?

• Be clear: Who is being helped? How are they being helped? Why is a donation needed now? Don’t make people guess.

• Be present: If ¾ of spontaneous donors gave to causes they know about, that only happens because they’ve heard from you previously. Email, social media posts, media appearances, direct mail. If they don’t see you, you don’t exist.

• Tomorrow: Not every campaign is URGENT and not every campaign is “last chance to give!” Fact is, they can give tomorrow. With impulse behaviors, urgency and time sensitive can work. But if impulses are suppressed, you’ll have to consider moving away from such tactics.

Lemme be clear: It’s only 12% of Americans. Could be that none or a very small number of your donors have tried it. Will you see a reduction in dollars because of givers on Ozempic? Probably not right now.

BUT about 40% of American adults are considered obese. (According to the CDC, as of 2024, at least 1 in 4 adults in every U.S. state was obese.) Gallup data in 2025 shows that percentage is dipping because of… Ozempic like drugs.

Now reconsider your donors. X percent will be obese. What happens when the percent of Americans using Ozempic and like drugs goes from 12% to… say, 25%??? I could see a day where insurance companies will force overweight people to take Ozempic, knowing that obesity leads to quite a number of health problems down the road. Cheaper for the insurance company to put the person on Ozempic now rather than paying out more later in life.

Those are my thoughts on the topic. I don’t know for sure if Ozempic like drugs will change how a percentage of people donate.

But I do think some change is coming. It will affect giving, acquisition and retention.

One positive: If suppression means people spending less, they have more money in their pocket. If they were worried they wouldn’t have enough to donate, now maybe they will. A positive side effect to go along with reduced pant sizes.

Dana Evans: Shirley is still available

In last week’s edition I debuted Shirley, your friendly nonprofit helpbot. Shirley helps you find the answers to your nonprofit questions using only sources which I have verified.

You can still take Shirley for a ride for 14 days if you’re a staff member at a nonprofit. Simply reply to this email with the word “Shirley” and I’ll send along everything you need to get started.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me last week and is busy using Shirley as a learning tool!

Whitaker: A little of this and that

In this section I’m going to share with you great content I’ve picked out that you can learn from.

1. Why donors abandon your donation page. And how to fix it. MUST READ!!! (4 A Good Cause)

2. How to onboard new Board members effectively (Blue Avocado)

3. Tips on how to grow your organization (Clairification)

4. How to raise more at the checkout counter (Joan Garry)

5. How to optimize your site for DAF donations (TrueSense)

Michael Robinavitch: Very funny and accurate

Fan of The Pitt? Watch this parody and laugh.

SOTW (Song of the week): Actually, this week there was no music. It’s Remembrance Day here and so I’m keeping the music off.

I’ll be back in your inbox next Thursday. Have a great weekend!

P.S. Does every week of 2026 feel like this?