10 Key Online Fundraising Trends

While direct mail is still king in bringing in funds, online fundraising remains an ever-growing channel that is vital to the future of every organization. Studying the trends and understanding where opportunities lie going forward as today’s online generation reaches prime giving age are musts. To that end, nonprofit technology provider Convio recently released its Online Nonprofit Benchmark Study.

Here are some key findings from the study:

1. Online giving grew 14 percent despite a difficult economy. Overall, 69 percent of organizations raised more in 2009 than 2008, while 31 percent saw declines in their online fundraising.

2. An increase in gifts drove fundraising gains. Of those that grew fundraising in 2009, 92 percent saw an increase in the number of gifts in 2009 compared to 43 percent of organizations seeing an increase in their average gift amounts.

3. Donors were still giving, but smaller amounts. Sixty-one percent of all organizations saw their average gifts drop in 2009.

4. Regardless of mission, online fundraising continued to grow. The only exception was disaster and international relief organizations; there were more significant disasters in 2008 than 2009.

5. Small organizations grew fastest. Organizations with fewer than 1,000 e-mail addresses on file grew online revenue by 26 percent and gifts by 32 percent.

6. E-mail files continued to grow strongly. The total e-mail file grew 27 percent in 2009 to 39,100 constituents.

7. Web traffic continued to grow for most organizations, but at a slower rate. Sixty percent of organizations grew their website traffic from 2008 to 2009. Web traffic growth in 2009 was at 6 percent compared with double-digit growth seen in previous years.

8. Web traffic was strongly correlated with e-mail file growth. Thirty-eight percent of an organization’s success building large e-mail files could be directly attributed to the amount of traffic to the organization’s website.

9. Registration rates dropped. The rate at which organizations converted website visitors to their e-mail files declined to 2.12 percent in 2009.

10. Constituents more reluctant to open e-mails and click through. Open rates for fundraising appeals and newsletters remained around 20 percent, but clickthrough rates for both declined in 2009.

To view the entire study, click here.