Blackbaud Index reveals which nonprofit sectors are performing best in 2014

Welcome back to the Miratel blog and as we’re at the beginning of another month it’s time to take a look at one of the most important reports to assess the performance of nonprofit fundraising in the United States as the latest Blackbaud Index has been published. The data provided by Blackbaud provides a three month rolling analysis of how nonprofits are performing year-over-year and in addition the data can be broken down based on the size of the organization or the sector of the nonprofit world in which they operate. The Blackbaud Index compiles fundraising information from more than 3,200 charities throughout the United States.

The October results just published are actually quite disappointing with the comparison with last year showing just 0.2% net growth on the year with essentially identical donations being reported, online fundraising declined too but was able to report growth of 10.6% which sits right around the 2014 average. Last month we looked at how organizations of different size are performing so far this year and the October results showed smaller organizations having the best month compared with the overall results.

For October small organizations (donations of less than $1 million) improved by 1.9% over 2013, medium organizations ($1-$10 million) grew by just 0.4% whilst the largest organizations ($10 million plus) fell by 0.4%.

Today I wanted to look at the performance so far this year of charities by sector compared with 2013. To make a quick comparison overall growth this year is running just above 3% year-over-year whereas when comparing last year with 2012 the improvement was a fraction above 5%. On the chart below I’ve prepared a summary of each sector’s performance so far in 2014 by month compared with last year in addition to a YTD summary.

Please click to enlarge chart

Higher Education so far this year is showing the greatest improvement at 6.4% followed closely by International Affairs and Arts & Culture. In the middle of the pack rest Environment & Animals (4.1%), Human Services (3.5%) and Medical Research (3.0%). The sectors struggling the most so far this year include Faith Based charities (2.3%), Public & Society (2.0%), K-12 Education (0.4%) and the only sector showing a negative result this year is Healthcare sitting a surprising bottom at -0.6%.

Finally I’ve included the graphic on the right which compares the overall rankings for each sector in both 2013 and 2014 to date along with a total change in ranking for each. Interesting to note that the changes in ranking were for the most part quite small with only K-12 Education showing a large change falling from 3rd last year to 8th thus far in 2014. Next month I’ll take a look at how online fundraising results are performing for each sector so far this year and see if we can determine a relationship between online growth in donations and the overall results for each sub-sector.

As always I highly recommend taking a visit to Blackbaud to review the index in addition to their other resources.

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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.