Charities raised a median of 23 percent more online last year than in 2016, in part because they sent more email appeals and attracted more monthly donors, according to a new study by the marketing and fundraising firm M+R.
Fundraising revenue in response to emails jumped a median of 24 percent for each nonprofit in 2017 over the previous year, accounting for a median of 28 percent of all online dollars raised.
M+R calculated the percent change of various online metrics for all 154 participants in its study. It takes the median of each percent change when producing its results.
Nonprofit email lists also grew 11 percent last year over 2016, and fundraisers sent a median of 66 emails per subscriber in 2017, an 11 percent increase from the previous year. That perhaps shows that charities’ concerns over sending donors too many messages are overblown.
“We’re reaching more people with more messages,” said Will Valverde, vice president for creative development at M+R and the lead writer of the report. The median size of one-time gifts from email solicitations was $76 in 2017, according to the study. It was $113 for all other forms of online donations, such as gifts from social-media appeals.
Nonprofits need to send lots of emails to attract donations. For every 1,000 fundraising messages sent, nonprofits raised of $42.
Online giving is still a small part of overall contributions for many organizations, though its share of fundraising has grown in recent years, experts say.
The study analyzed digital data from 154 nonprofits.
Among the findings:
Mobile traffic is rising. The share of mobile donations grew to 24 percent of all online gifts in 2017, up from 12 percent the previous year.
Mobile traffic accounted for 40 percent of nonprofit website visits in 2017, an increase of 9 percent over 2016. “In a couple of years, if we see this growth continue, the majority of website traffic for nonprofits is going to be on mobile devices,” Valverde said.
That means nonprofits need to ensure that they’re building mobile sites that can effectively accept donations on smartphones, he added.
In the meantime, contributions from desktop computers matter, too: Sixty-eight percent of online gifts were made from a desktop, accounting for about 76 percent of digital revenue.
Monthly giving is on the rise. Monthly giving online jumped 40 percent in 2017 over 2016. Monthly donations as a share of all online dollars grew to 16 percent last year, 2 percentage points higher than in 2016. The median monthly gift last year was $23.
Nonprofits have started pushing monthly gifts more aggressively, Valverde said, because such programs help them retain donors and budget more accurately. Increasingly, he said, recurring gifts are the default option on charities’ donation page.
Digital ads are growing. Nonprofits increased their spending on digital advertising by a median of 24 percent in 2017. A median of nearly two-thirds of that spending was for fundraising appeals.
Some types of ads don’t pay off immediately. Nonprofits lost 32 cents for every dollar spent on display ads — such as banner ads on websites — and 3 cents per dollar on social-media ads, including on advertising on Facebook newsfeeds and promotional paid posts on Twitter and Instagram. However, charities gained $2.81 for every dollar spent on search-engine ads, like those that pop up when searching on Google.
Still, those numbers only represent how well the ads performed in the short term, Valverde noted, and not whether they helped retain donors over a longer period of time — which might underplay how effective advertising is.
Other findings:
- Nonprofits attracted followers on Instagram at a faster rate than any other social-media platform in 2017, with charities seeing a median 44 percent increase in followers over 2016. Facebook fans jumped 13 percent last year, and Twitter followers 15 percent.
- Nonprofits post to Facebook a median of 1.5 times a day and on Twitter 3.3 times a day.
- Thirty-eight percent of donors who made an online gift in 2016 made another one in 2017.
- Of supporters who made their first gift online in 2016, 25 percent gave again in 2017.
