Blackbaud annual charitable giving report shows smaller organizations enjoyed largest overall growth

One of our favourite nonprofit fundraising reports that we have been writing about for the last few years is the Blackbaud Nonprofit Giving Index. Each month the index compiles data from more than 3,200 individual nonprofits across the United States which brings remarkable clarity to fundraising trends both online and offline as well as dividing the data by nonprofit sector and the overall size of the organization.

Recently the 2014 annual report for Blackbaud’s research was published and is called the 2014 Charitable Giving Report and you can register to receive a free download via eBook/PDF via this link. In the meantime I wanted to highlight what I thought were some of the most interesting data from the annual summary from a genuine mountain of interesting information that I strongly endorse you to take time to review.

Overall giving was up over 2013

According to the report the final percentage for overall improvement in giving versus 2013 showed an upward tick of 2.1%. If you followed the monthly reports with us last year that figure won’t surprise you although it falls far short of how things looked to be shaping up in the middle of the year. There was quite a large discrepancy in gains based on the size of the organization with growth limited to 1.3% for both medium and large nonprofits as opposed to a very healthy leap of 5.8% for small organizations.

Online Giving continues to show the largest growth

Online fundraising continues to be the pacesetter in overall fundraising growth and in terms of technology, changing demographics and the ever increasing ratio of nonprofits that offer the option of donating online there is no logical reason to suggest that this trend will not continue both this year and next. If anything it would be very rewarding to see traditional fundraising growth begin to close the gap but in real terms as more and more donations are made online it may well be that one day online fundraising will become the benchmark figure for the industry although that could take as long as another decade unless there is a ceiling somewhere on the horizon. It’s very hard to project what sort of technology we’ll be relying on in another five to ten years when you consider the changes of the last decade. For 2014 online giving increased by 8.9% overall and in keeping with the trends overall small organizations saw the largest increase.

Eight of Ten nonprofit sectors saw growth in fundraising in 2014

A very promising 80% of the ten sub-sectors that Blackbaud splits organizations into saw fundraising growth in 2014 and of those Public and Society Benefit organizations had the largest increase in year-over-year fundraising reporting very strong growth of 9.3% growth. This figure stands well above other groups followed by Higher Education institutions with a 3.3% growth rate with Arts and Culture organizations in third with 3% growth versus 2013. The only sectors to show a fall in donations were International Affairs which fell 1.1% and Healthcare dropping by 3.8%.

Online Fundraising has much room to grow into

While so much is written about the continued growth of online giving (and I am certainly guilty of that too) the reality is that the most of the total volume of giving is still very clearly via traditional/offline methods including telephone fundraising, email, special events, planned giving and other donor retention vehicles. While the Blackbaud study only captures a fraction of all organizations the reported data is still very telling. Please review the graphic to the right for the full breakdown but it’s very interesting to note that at present (based on 2014 data) some 6.7% of all nonprofit fundraising is via online giving. The size of the organization made little difference to that ratio of contribution but it’s again worth noting that smaller organizations are currently leading the way with 7.4% of all funding via online sources.

I do hope that you take the time to download the full report and I’d be very interested to know how your organization fits the overall profiles within the report and how well you feel they reflect how the sector performed in 2014.

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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 values in all our business decisions  and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.