Sector Report: Fundraising 2009-2010

What will 2010 look like? Certainly much depends on how nonprofits' current end-of-year 2009 fundraising campaigns go. If nonprofits raise good sums of money from online donors during the October to January time frame, then they will be emboldened to keep investing in online donor acquisition and cultivation in 2010. But if the end-of-year fundraising goes poorly, then some nonprofits may fearfully pare back spending in the new year. While that's just human nature, it actually would be a dubious strategy, since decreasing investment would make it much harder for an organization to start growing again as donors recover. For that matter, even in good times, an organization's e-mail list experiences a natural "churn rate" of about 30 percent, meaning that about a third of the list turns inactive (with or without the users unsubscribing) every year. So just to offset this natural churn, you need to attract an additional 30 percent to your e-mail list every year — and more if you want to grow the list.