February 23, 2006 | Read Time: 4 minutes
More than a quarter of the names on nonprofit e-mail lists drop off each year because supporters unsubscribe from the lists or change their e-mail addresses without alerting the organizations, according to a new report.
The “eNonprofit Benchmarks Study” is based on detailed analysis of online communications, fund-raising, and advocacy efforts at 15 large nonprofit groups that focus on topics such as the environment, civil and legal rights, and international aid. Organizations participating in the study included Amnesty International, CARE USA, Earth Justice, Environmental Defense, and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The report was published by M+R Strategic Services, a consulting company in Washington, and the Advocacy Institute, a charity in Washington that helps social-justice groups become more effective. The Beldon Fund and the Surdna Foundation provided $10,000 and $15,000, respectively, to support the study. Three online fund-raising companies — Convio, GetActive, and Kintera — and two technology consulting companies, Beaconfire Consulting and Donordigital, each contributed $5,000 toward the cost of the study.
The goal of the study is to give nonprofit organizations a tool they can use to measure the performance of their online activities and compare that performance with other charities, says Benjamin Smith, a vice president at M+R Strategic Services.
“As consultants, our clients are always asking us, ‘Well, how does my online communications program compare to all the other nonprofits out there? How do my e-mail open rates compare, and my online fund-raising response rates compare?’” says Mr. Smith. “And we never really had good information to give them.”
The study found that the size of an organization’s online-communications budget had a bigger effect on the success of such efforts than the group’s overall budget or size.
In the year ending September 2005, the five organizations in the study with online-communications budgets of more than $600,000 recruited an average 224,000 new people to their e-mail lists, compared to an average of 79,000 for the four groups with budgets between $300,000 and $600,000 and 31,000 for the four charities with budgets of less than $300,000. (Not all 15 charities had the data necessary to be included in every calculation.)
E-mail messages sent by the 15 nonprofit groups that asked supporters to sign an online petition, send a message to a legislator or other decision maker, or take some other action generated responses from, on average, 10 percent of the recipients. By comparison, fund-raising appeals sent by e-mail prompted an online donation from only 0.3 percent of the recipients, on average.
That average was slightly higher for the three international-aid charities, 0.6 percent, compared with an average of 0.2 percent for the six environmental groups and for the six legal and civil-rights organizations. Those rates were essentially the same for the year before.
Of all the e-mail messages the 15 charities sent from September 2004 to September 2005, 25 percent were opened by recipients, down from 30 percent the year before.
The report’s authors are not sure if the drop in the frequency with which the organizations’ e-mail messages were opened reflects “e-mail fatigue” — people being overwhelmed by the number of e-mail messages they receive from all sources — or if a change in e-mail technology might be responsible.
Organizations measure the percentage of people who open messages that have been created in an HTML format by embedding a tiny graphic in the message that is loaded and tallied when the recipient opens the message. Increasingly, however, e-mail programs are giving people the option of not loading graphics in the messages they read, except in specific instances when they ask to open them. That means it is possible that more people opened nonprofit messages than would have been reflected in the organizations’ numbers.
While the organizations’ data about online communications may not be comprehensive, the numbers pointed to some interesting patterns.
For example, the study found that an average of 18 percent of people who received e-mail messages from the charities on Thursdays and Fridays clicked on a link in those messages to get more information, compared to an average of 12 percent of those who received mail on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a consulting company in Washington, and a member of the study’s advisory group, thinks that the study is a “critical and overdue first step” in creating online benchmarks for nonprofit groups. Mr. Rovner hopes that it will stimulate discussion on what are the most important measures to be looking at, but cautions charities against putting too much stock in the study’s specific findings.
“Because the data set is small, the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt,” says Mr. Rovner.
He adds: “The most important thing any organization should do as a result of this study is not break into a sweat if their open rate is 15 percent, but start developing benchmarks of their own and try to build and improve on their own stats.”
To read a copy of the report: Go to http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com.
