State of the Union: Non-Profit Online Fundraising

A new report was released last week called The 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study. Put out by the Non-Profit Technology Network and M+R Strategic Services, it looked at hundreds of non-profit and charity organizations in the States in every non-profit sector, and analyzed how their online fundraising was doing, especially focusing on e-newsletter campaigns.

You can check out the results in the cool infographic below, but here are some of the highlights:

  • Overall, the news is good. E-newsletters, which are the backbone of many NFP fundraising campaigns, experienced a 15% overall growth in list size. Online campaigns are also mostly up–by 21% (except for International charities, which experienced a decline). E-newsletter open rates were around 13-14%, but click-throughs were down.
  • In terms of social media, growth of followers of NFP orgs was up, especially on Twitter. But, having said that, for each 1,000 e-newsletter subscribers an org has, they only have 149 Facebook Fans and 53 Twitter followers, which, to me, shows that, while there’s been growth, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area.
  • Part of the reason social media might be lagging a bit is because it is harder to prove ROI with a FB page or a Twitter account, whereas with e-newsletters, it’s easier to track, via click-throughs, whether or not people are completing the donation. Additionally, we know that donor bases still tend to be older, and therefore more comfortable with e-mail than with social media, which tends to be populated by a younger demographic.

2013_Infographic

Download the entire report for yourself here.

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Rebecca Coleman

Social Media Marketing Strategist, Blogger, Author, Teacher, Trainer. Passionate foodie, mom to Michael, fueled by Americanos. I love my bike. Soon-to-be cookbook author. Localvore with a wanderlust.

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