Steve MacLaughlin wrote me today about giving trends for users of Blackbaud’s Internet solutions. It’s the kind of data I’d love to see released more often so that we could better understand how online fundraising was being affected by macroeconomic trends. Here’s an interesting finding:
Organizations had steady growth in their online giving through the first and second quarters of 2008. There was a slight decrease in online giving during the third quarter of the year, specifically the month of August. The final months of the year saw online giving rebound leading up to the typical end-of-year giving spikes. December and June were the two largest months for online giving.
My only wish is that more vendors were more transparent about the data they were collecting for their donors. It’s not impossible for Convio, Blackbaud, Salesforce Foundation, JustGiving, Network for Good and FirstGiving to produce charts that showed fluctuations in giving in real-time. This would serve as a great way for nonprofit development directors to measure their organization’s progress against a nominal index (short of Giving USA’s yearly figures). It would be trivial to create a Giving Index out of the information that Steve mentions in his post. Come on Steve and Blackbaud, give me a chart and I promise I’ll shut up about it. As usual, you can file this under nonprofit transparency 
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Hi Alan,
Speaking on behalf of Justgiving – you’re right, there is a lot more we could do to be more transparent with the data we hold. And that’s something we’re aiming to do a lot more in 2009 – share data and insight about the masses of donations and fundraising activities that take place on the site. We’ve got some research into how charities who use Justgiving think about online fundraising coming this month, but a look back at 2008 in numbers is something we could do if there’s demand.
I’m highly skeptical of the $152 figure claimed here and that skepticism is only bolstered by the fact that there is no data being provided to back up the $152 figure. For instance, the article never claims that all 2000 client orgs were included in the average online gift analysis.
I also don’t think that it is useful as a benchmark to the vast majority of organizations. A small regional non-profit would do best in comparing themselves to benchmarking from other small regional non-profits — not some sort of blended average that could be heavily weighted by large, nationally recognized orgs that could have received the majority of their online gifts from contributions on the heels of a disaster.
Other vendors are participating in and leading studies that are of much greater value to non-profits than random statistics that don’t have data to back them up, such as the Wired Wealthy study released last year(http://my.convio.com/?elqPURLPage=104) and the online benchmarking study that M&R has produced (http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/).
@Jonathan: Please release what you can of Justgiving’s statistics. I’ll take anything except for statistical documents festooned with marketing blurbs. That is, part of the reason I like real-time charts and graphs is that it’s more useful and is much more transparent.
@Michelle: Can you please have Convio produce statistical work that doesn’t require me signing up to be on some e-mail marketing database? I’m hoping for a simple chart to refer to from time to time that development directors can look at. This is probably better for Convio in that interested parties can visit a Convio-related site time and time again instead of a one-shot at the end of the year. Multiple touches > one big marketing document.
Sometimes, I ask and I receive. Steve MacLaughlin again wrote me to give the link to a chart based on a different set of data from their Target Analytics Group. It’s at:
http://www.blackbaud.com/targetanalytics/benchmarking/nationalindex.aspx
No, it’s not the same data I talked about in the original post but hey, it’s a chart on the Web and Blackbaud doesn’t ask for my e-mail so they can spam me later.
Allan, I’ll see what I can do on the stats front – I’, not sure we’re in a position to release a real time feed, but I’ll try to share some stats from 08. And don’t worry, it certainly wouldn’t be in the form of a marketing filled stats doc…
Hi – We do a lot of sharing of our data and am happy to answer any of your questions. You can find a sample of the kind of information we disseminate from this month here: http://www.fundraising123.org/article/year-end-giving-snapshot-generous-procrastinator. Probably the most comprehensive piece is our White Paper on the first $100 million we processed. That’s here: http://www.fundraising123.org/search/node/young+and+generous I’m also happy to share that this year we processed about $70 million in donations. We’re crunching our final numbers (which I’ll post on my blog when we have them), but our initial impression is we had a significant spike in donors this year, but the average donor gave less than previous years. A sign of the recession, we think.
Here, here, more transparency, please. In fact, I’d like to see more vendors offer annual benchmarks based on organization size, type, and housefile size.
It’s important for organizations as they assess their strategies, and as they select a consultants and vendors to help them implement their donation programs.
True, a great first step with these numbers, now let’s see the real breakdown.
Katya, those are great numbers. If Network for Good can present those numbers in real time, they would be a great help to development directors. Anyway, that’s great information and I’m glad you posted it. Any chance we can get the spreadsheet behind the chart?
Also, those of you who work with direct mail might want to prod your providers to give up their stats as well. I’d love to see a comparison between Network For Good and a traditional direct mail firm. Indeed, I think Blackbaud does direct mail as well and they ought to do side-by-side comparisons as well. One of the longest-held nostrums by us techies is that online fundraising will eventually be responsible for a larger part of fundraising than direct mail but it’s been a while since I’ve seen comparisons.
Well, Katya, it's certainly good to know that Network For Good is sharing data! Any chance we can see this updated in real time?
I would be interested to know on average how much is raised per cause and by how many people contribute to the average donation. Also is there any way to find out if someone donates to a friends cause what is the ratio of them using the site again for their own charity fundarising efforts.