Blackbaud list most generous cities for online nonprofit fundraising

Which US cities are the most generous when it comes to online fundraising to nonprofits? A new report from Blackbaud provides us with the answer.

Blackbaud bring us some of the most interesting nonprofit fundraising data with their monthly Blackbaud Index. The ‘charitable giving report’ which we review regularly on the Miratel Blog tracks data representing almost $13 billion of annual charitable giving in the United States and breaks down the figures by sector and traditional/online giving.

Regular watchers of the index or our blog will know that online giving has been the most encouraging aspect of industry trends in recent years, seeing online donations consistently improving in year-over-year tracking which represents growth that now represents 12% of all donated funds. In 2013 amongst the organizations researched, online giving resulted in donations of $1.7 billion, a total which represented 13.6% of overall giving. Equally impressive is that for the calendar year 2013 online giving improved by 13.5% versus the year before whilst overall giving increased 4.9% for the same period.

Therefore we were excited to see a new report from Blackbaud that tracks the most generous online US cities from 2013 based on giving per capita. The report studies 265 cities with populations greater than 100,000 and within those 8.3 million donations were almost exactly half of all Blackbaud’s tracked online donations. Steve MacLaughlin, director of product management for Blackbaud explains:

“Online giving continues to be an important part of a nonprofit’s overall strategy. We continue to see growth in online giving and it is helping to drive fundraising results across nonprofits of all sizes.”

Here are the top 10 ‘most generous online cities’ (all cities with populations greater than 100,000)

1. Seattle, WA
   

   Seattle ranks as ‘most generous online city’ according to new Blackbaud study

2. Alexandria, VA
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Washington, DC
5. Cambridge, MA
6. Ann Arbor, MI
7. Arlington, VA
8. Cincinnati, OH
9. Bellevue, WA
10. San Francisco, CA

Below are the top 10 large cities for online giving; the most generous cities in the US (cities with over 300,000 residents)

1. Seattle, WA
2. Atlanta, GA
3. Washington, DC
4. San Francisco, CA
5. Minneapolis, MN
6. St. Louis, MO
7. Pittsburgh, PA
8. Austin, TX
9. Miami, FL
10. Denver, CO

The data ranked the composite donation amount per 1,000 members of the population with Seattle heading the list at $53,542 per 1,000 people which represents $53 of online donations per resident in 2013. From the 265 cities Alexandria and Atlanta are the others that join Seattle at rates above $40 per resident. Across all cities measured the average amount was almost exactly $10 per resident. Of large cities only Detroit MI, El Paso TX and Fresno CA averaged below $3 per resident in online donations.

If you were looking for the largest three cities on the list, here’s the data in 46th – Chicago at $13.48 per resident, 54th New York at $12.08 per resident and 107th Los Angeles at $7.31 per resident.

The ‘most generous online cities’ © Blackbaud is a very interesting report which I’ve uploaded here if you’d like to review it it’s in excel. It must be noted that this measures only cities that report to Blackbaud so does not represent all online nonprofit giving in the United States which of course would significantly alter the rankings. Hopefully we’ll see similar examinations in online giving over the coming year.
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