Blackbaud Index reveals medium sized nonprofits having most difficult 2014 to date

The warmest of welcomes back to the Miratel blog, it’s a cold morning as I write and a reminder that we’re rapidly heading to the end of the year. With a new month we also see the latest release of the monthly nonprofit fundraising report from Blackbaud which provides us with invaluable data to measure the progress of nonprofit fundraising results in our sector. The Blackbaud Index carries such muscle as it captures  fundraising information from more than 3,200 charities throughout the United States.

The updated report brings data through to end of September and I’ll admit to being a little surprised with the results for the month which showed year-over-year fundraising improving by just 1.8% compared with 2013. That growth was the lowest rate reported so far this year and will not have been welcomed when it seemed the trend was gradually heading upwards. In fact last month I projected the likely results for the remainder of 2014 and the 1.8% was well below what I had anticipated so I hope October will be more encouraging.

Quite interesting to note that while overall fundraising growth diminished online fundraising had very healthy year-over-year growth of 12.6% and continued an upward trend, the September result was the best seen since March of this year.

This month I wanted to take a look at this year’s results based on the size of the organization and for clarity we’ll focus on overall fundraising results. The Blackbaud Index breaks out organizations as small (revenues of less than $1m), medium (revenues between $1m-$10m) and large (revenues greater than $10m). Below we’ll break out the performance of each so far this year versus the benchmark of the overall results to hopefully achieve a more clear understanding of how organizations are performing in 2014.

Large organizations: As you can see on the chart above the largest organizations are performing above the baseline throughout the year with the exception of only one month. Generally speaking its felt that the large nonprofits define the ‘tone’ of the overall results which certainly seems to be the case in 2014 so far.

Medium organizations: Here is where things get very interesting and slightly concerning for the charities that Blackbaud classify as medium in size. Not only have these organizations failed to reach the monthly gains once this year but the year-over-year increases have only exceeded 2% twice and even then only just.

Small organizations:  Finally for the smallest nonprofits who are sometimes the last to benefit from growth according to other studies that doesn’t seem to be case here. While not having quite as consistent a 2014 as large nonprofits they have exceeded 6% growth four months so far this year whereas medium and large have not had similar achievements.

Really interesting data overall and I wonder aloud whether you’d identify similar trends so far this year within your organization?
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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business