Nonprofit Bridge

If you haven’t yet seen it, take a look at the latest eNonprofit Benchmarks Study released last week where you can also listen to the recording or view slides from the May 14 event.  The report covers major ephilanthropy topics: email messaging, online fundraising, and online advocacy.  Major takeaways:

• email open and click through rates continue to decline, although less than in previous years;  but a message that is ‘opened’ may not be actually read by the constituent
• the number of online gifts and total dollars raised online continue to increase;  the increase in number of gifts helped to offset a decline in average gift from $86 to $71
• email lists continue to grow, but at a slower rates than in past studies;  almost 20% of email addresses go bad every year due to bounces or unsubscribes
• email results vary dramatically by audience sent to;  are you still making the mistake of sending everything to everyone?
• gifts of under $250 represent 97% of all gifts, yet donations of $250 or more make up 41% of revenue – don’t forget to recruit and acknowledge your major donors
• while social media gets most of the buzz lately, email clearly is still king, at least for now.

Thanks to Nten and M&R Strategic Services for updating this very useful report.  Network for Good, which continually offers wonderful guidance in online fundraising and marketing, offers Creating an Online Fundraising and Marketing Strategy to Thrive in Tough Times next Tuesday, May 26 at 1 PM EST.  Also see my previous post, Online Fundraising Strategies for Tough Times, where you can also listen to a recording of the event I moderated at the Foundation Center in NYC. earlier this year.

According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, online giving continued to increase in 2008, but at a slower percentage than in 2007.   M&R Strategic Services reports that while the average online gift has decreased, the number of online donors has gone up, more than making up the difference for most organizations.  And while online donations are still a small piece of total giving for most nonprofits, some such as the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society have raising a significant portion over the Internet.  Some techniques that are most effective:

• Including deadlines in e-mail appeals
• Seeking small sums
• Combining text messages and e-mail appeals
• Asking corporate sponsors or like-minded charities to send ‘chaperoned’ e-mail messages on an organization’s behalf
• Using multiple channels, e.g. social networks, video, e-mail, and text messages

Many nonprofits (including mine) raise significant revenues through athletic events, such as walks and endurance type events.  But the Chronicle reports this too is also getting harder, encouraging us to provide lower-cost ways to participate, adding new types of events, encouraging more constituents to actively fundraise, and aggressively seeking more participants.  This article encourages us to stay positive and seek creative approaches to stay afloat.  Helping supporters to raise funds through third party events is sometimes overlooked as a further stimulus to overall fundraising.

More online fundraising tips are available from Alica McKee of Sea Change Strategies at Nonprofit Marketing Guide and the Nonprofit Blog Carnival.

Nten and M&R Strategic Services have released a fascinating study which provides metrics for online messaging, fundraising and advocacy.  Some highlights and observations:

• open rates (compared to a study in 2006) declined from 21.3% to 17.6%;  click-through rates dropped from 4.9% to 3.6%.  I’ve found that many NPO staff don’t take the time to analyze reports which clearly demonstrate that most constituents who get email are not bothering to open them, fewer are clicking on any included links.
• on the average, constituents are emailed 4 times / month.  Seems like once a week is still too often, making more of a case to use segmentation to target content to selected constituents.
• About 20% of an email list ‘goes bad’ each year due to unsubscribes and other changes in email addresses.  So a nonprofit that wants to grow its list needs to first make up for this loss in numbers first.
• Advocacy mailings consistently show higher response rates than other types of mailings.  How many of these constituents can be effectively converted to other types of engagement?
• $1000+ gifts were only 1% of the total number of donations, yet represented over 20% of online giving revenues.  Major gifts still deserves consistent attention.

Thanks to Holly Ross at Nten, and Sarah Dijulio at M&R  for collaborating on this report and the 21 nonprofit organizations that participated in this analysis; a webinar discussing the study is available.