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.

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.

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.

@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.

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/).

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.