Top 10 US cities for online nonprofit donations released by Convio

Tracking the changes within nonprofit fundraising is always an interesting task, thankfully the exceptional work by organizations such as Convio, Inc provides us with a better understanding of how the industry continues to evolve. Each year Convio release a report that compiles an evaluation of the ‘Most Generous Online Cities’ based upon online giving trends. The data is compiled from those who use Convio’s existing online marketing and fundraising suite. Of course that doesn’t represent every online donation made in North America but it provides a really interesting snapshot of trends from city to city within the United States. While it’s hard to determine the exact rate of increase associated with online donations in the last five years, different analysts project year-over-year increases of between 15 and 30 percent which at the high end would result in a doubling of online donations in just over three years. It’s also difficult to assess the overall impact it’s having on traditional fundraising methods such as telephone campaigns, events and mail campaigns. The only true gauge is the composite financial performance of all non-profits which once again can a difficult thing to pinpoint. Some early reports suggest that 2010 overall showed greater improvement than expected although fundraising totals are yet to match the levels achieved pre-ecession (in the North American market).

The report released by Convio ranks the 273 cities in the US with populations greater than 100,000 people by compiling a per capita online giving/total amount for the calendar year. As I mentioned the data is to be taken as an indicator of trends but the sample size is large enough to hold significant value; the reporting broke down the donations of over 5.9 million individuals across the 273 cities. One very encouraging finding was that the average gift (online) increased from $62 in 2009 to $65 last year, a significant increase of about five percent. While average donation size is important it would be interesting to find the regional variances in online giving versus traditional methods and also which sectors of the nonprofit industry are performing most effectively online.

Here is a list of the most generous cities (> than 100,000 residents) in 2010 based on per capita giving:

1. Alexandria, VA
2. Cambridge, MA
3. Arlington, VA
4. Seattle, WA
5. Washington, DC
6. Berkeley, CA
7. St. Louis, MO
8. San Francisco, CA
9. Ann Arbor, MI
10. Minneapolis, MN

Recent reports estimate that the United States approximately 12 percent of all fundraising in 2010 was completed online, if the projections are accurate it is reasonable to assume that this figure may grow to increase to 20 percent by the year 2015. One should always consider the shifting demographics which will take place in the next decade as a new generation of donors will enter the equation and be much more likely to donate online.

Date for this article provided by Convio Inc. To learn about the findings within the Convio report please visit their website.

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