Despite fundraisers’ hopeful expectations, online-acquired donors often cost as much as theur DM-acquired counterparts.

By Kimberly Seville

TESTING

Statisticians will argue that test results are not reliable if your test cell quantity is tiny, which it often is for nonprofits that have not yet acquired a sizeable number of online donors. Let the stats folks grumble, and just keep repeating the test. If you get the same results several times, you’ll have more confidence in your conclusions.

THE NUMBERS
Here’s the lowdown on online- versus direct mail-acquired donors for one nonprofit:

2002 Online Joins 2002 Direct Mail Joins

27.1% active in 2003 40.7% active in 2003

2.74 gifts/donor in 2003 2.06 gifts/donor in 2003

$43.28 average gift in 2003 $35.04 average gift in 2003

22.4% active in 2004 31.5% active in 2004

2.67 gifts/donor in 2004 2.31 gifts/donor in 2004

$40.81 average gift in 2004 $36.76 average gift in 2004

Puzzled about why your online donors aren’t renewing? Simple ... they’re different, those donors who give online. For a time, prevailing conventional wisdom was that a donor acquired online is most likely to renew online.

And the great hope was that online donors would be so much cheaper to re-solicit because we wouldn’t have to spend money on postage and printing and production … we could just e-mail them!

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No Such Thing as a Free Donor