March 15, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Internet contributions were one of the few bright spots in fund raising last year. Now two big fund-raising software companies have analyzed their clients’ 2010 online-giving data.
Blackbaud: Online gifts to the 1,812 charities that Blackbaud tracks in its Index of Online Giving totaled more than $495-million in 2010, an increase of more than 34 percent, according to a report released by the Charleston, S.C., company.
Nonprofit groups with annual budgets of more than $10-million saw the biggest gains, with an increase of more than 55 percent. Online contributions increased by 22 percent at organizations with budgets of less than $1-million and by almost 16 percent at groups with annual budgets of $1-million to $10-million.
Online giving represented more than 7 percent of overall fund raising, based on the 1,438 charities for which the company had both online and total fund-raising data. Those groups raised $5.1-billion over all in 2010.
Blackbaud reviewed fund-raising data from 2,190 nonprofit organizations and found that 88 percent of the groups had received at least one online gift or $1,000 or more in 2010, up from 77 percent in 2009.
Convio: Online gifts to the roughly 1,400 nonprofit organizations that use Convio’s online fund-raising system totaled $1.3-billion in 2010, an increase of 40 percent over 2009, according to a report released by the Austin, Tex., company.
The report took a closer look at 600 charities that had two to three years’ history using the company’s system. For those groups, the median rate of increase was 20 percent—meaning that half of the charities saw giving grow by more than that amount and half did less well—compared to 14 percent in 2009. Over all, 79 percent of the organizations raised more in 2010 than they did in 2009, while 21 percent raised less.
The median gift size was almost $92 in 2010, up from more than $83 in 2009.
The median number of e-mail addresses charities had in their files grew 22 percent, to 48,700 constituents.
Convio found that online giving grew fastest for small organizations. Internet contributions increased 26 percent for nonprofits with fewer than 10,000 e-mail addresses.
Both reports also break down the information by type of nonprofit group, such as education, health care, and human services.
