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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