Blackbaud report offers key findings in online nonprofit fundraising trends

In a follow-up to an earlier article that I wrote about nonprofit fundraising results for 2010, the same source of that report that I had discussed further reveals the extent of growth for year-over-year online fundraising. Blackbaud Inc. have published a companion report that follows on from the earlier piece they have published about projections for 2011 from nonprofits that they are associated with. The new report (which is focused on the US market) is their “2010 Online Giving Report” which purports to be the most comprehensive view of online giving trends within the nonprofit sector.

While the overall percentage of funds raised online in 2010 is still just below 8% of all donations received, the bench-marked nonprofits studied demonstrated a year-over-year increase in online donations of 34.5 percent. These changes were demonstrated even more tangibly by large organizations which themselves showed a gain of 55.6 percent over the previous year. Beyond that the trend is somewhat erratic with medium nonprofits showing online increases of 15.9 percent whilst the smallest tallied increases of 22 percent. Therefore the statistics only partially lend themselves to the preconceived notion that the ability to invest in social media and online marketing is automatically restricted by the unique budget of each individual nonprofit organization.

Extrapolating the numbers out over the next few years and even reducing the growth down to 25 percent (which would be an unexpected drop over the 2009/10 comparison) would project the following growth in the percentage of fundraising completed online over the next few years.

2011 9.5%
2012 11.9%
2013 14.9%
2014 18.6%
2015 23.2%

Overall of course nonprofits will be more concerned with the continued return to pre-recession levels of donor support which results in a more stable economy which cemented some of the growth seen last year. According to Blackbaud the expansion of online fundraising in 2010 was due to that same economic recovery, online responses to disaster relief plus the growing role of social media. The depth of the report provides a worthy profile of the sector with data compiled from nearly 2,200 nonprofit organizations. Some of the other findings mirrored the trends that are demonstrated via traditional giving such as the final quarter of the year providing a significant portion of all fundraising for the 12 months plus similar results were experienced with the ratio of large donations received. Professional fundraising services will need to continue to provide a quality blend of fundraising methods which allow for the online component to match the growth of social media and of course the wants of the donor.

The full 13 page report is available for free download as a PDF from Blackbaud Inc via this link and provides fascinating data that you will want to read.

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