Online Fund Raising Grew in 2010 Mostly Because of Haiti, Report Says

Washington

Internet gifts made after the earthquake in Haiti made up a good portion of the increase in giving last year, according to a new study released here at the Nonprofit Technology Conference that analyzes online fund raising and advocacy at 40 national charities.

The 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study was published by M+R Strategic Services, a fund-raising consulting company in Washington, and the Nonprofit Technology Network, in Portland, Ore.

The total amount of money the groups collected online was 14 percent higher in 2010 than in the previous year. When international aid groups were excluded from the analysis, the increase was 10 percent.

The number of online gifts, rather than the average size of the gifts, fueled the increase.

The number of Internet gifts the groups received increased 7 percent in 2010, but the amount of the average donation increased by only 2 percent. (The percentage change in the number of Internet gifts and average gift size remained the same when international aid groups were excluded from the analysis.)

Counterintuitive Finding

Online fund raisers often watch very closely the rate at which people unsubscribe from their organizations’ e-mail lists. But the study found a correlation between higher unsubscribe rates and higher open and response rates.

“You’d think, ‘Oh, if people are unsubscribing that’s bad news. It must be that we’re doing something wrong,’” said Sarah DiJulio, an executive vice president at M+R Strategic Services. “But it tended to be the case that if you have a highly responsive e-mail list, you also happen to have higher unsubscribe rates.”

Social Media Growing Fast

On average the charities in the study had 110 Facebook fans and 19 Twitter followers for every 1,000 people on their e-mail lists.

But the rate of growth of the nonprofits’ social-media groups far outstripped that of their e-mail lists. The median rate of growth for the organizations’ number of Facebook fans was 14 percent a month, while the number of people on their e-mail lists grew 20 percent annually.

Social media have a lot of potential for fund raising, but today it’s where e-mail fund raising was in 1998, says Ms. DiJulio.

“It wasn’t exactly a joke, but people said, ‘You’re not going to make things happen with e-mail,’” she says. “The whole idea of it was ludicrous.”