Online fundraising is growing up. Triple-digit growth in online donations is a thing of the past for many nonprofits, and to keep the revenue flowing as the technology matures, organizations are testing their online strategies carefully, integrating them with more traditional fundraising tactics, and hiring experts dedicated to online efforts.
“When you first start online fundraising, it’s so easy to get started and then to double how well you’ve done because those numbers are so low,” says Wendy Marinaccio Husman, a senior account executive at Donordigital, a consulting company. “But once you get more sophisticated, you have to invest more to keep getting that return.”
The Chronicle surveyed all the organizations in its Philanthropy 400 rankings of the largest charities about their online fundraising in 2013. Of those, 100 responded, and their data were used for the analysis. The responses showed that Internet gifts climbed 13 percent over 2012.
The results track closely with other recent studies of online giving:
- The Blackbaud Index found that online giving rose by 14 percent in 2013, compared with an increase in total giving of only 5 percent. The software company’s results are based on online giving data from 3,359 nonprofits and overall giving data from 4,129 charities.
- Network for Good, a nonprofit that helps small and medium-size organizations raise money online, processed $190-million in online donations in 2013, up 20 percent over 2012.
Twenty-five nonprofits in the Chronicle survey collected more than $10-million each online in 2013. The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society topped the list with more than $98-million in Internet gifts.
Among the techniques helping big nonprofits: Some have simplified their email appeals and web pages to stand out on potential donors’ mobile devices, while others conduct tests to see which approaches work best.
Testing Ideas
While online fundraising continues to gain steam, it still accounts for a very small portion of the money charities rely on.
Among the 76 nonprofits that provided both their online and overall giving totals for 2013, the median share of online gifts is just 2 percent of all donations from private sources.
But some organizations are doing much better. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation says more than 27 percent of the money it raises comes in online, largely because of gifts made at charity events.
One sign of charities’ increasing investment in online fundraising: A growing number of nonprofits are creating senior positions to lead their online efforts.
When Yoonhyung Lee joined the Smithsonian Institution as its first director of digital philanthropy, she prodded the organization to be more assertive in asking for online gifts, an approach she honed when she directed KQED’s online marketing.
During her first year-end campaign, she experimented with an introductory splash page that popped up over the Smithsonian’s main page vividly asking visitors to make a gift and linked directly to the donation form.
It was a limited test. The splash page was used the last three days of the year, and visitors saw it only on their first visit.
“We were a little hesitant about it,” says Ms. Lee. “We were trying to make sure we weren’t annoying our visitorship.”
But the splash page yielded gifts: 129 people gave a total of $17,765.
Just as important, Ms. Lee says, employees at the Smithsonian who crafted the stories and images on the web page that the splash page momentarily blocked raised no objections, as she had feared.
The following year the organization ran the splash page every day starting December 17. Regular visitors saw it once every three days until December 29 to 31, when they saw it daily. In all, 172 people gave $23,548.
This year, Ms. Lee says, she plans use the splash page not only to ask people to donate but also to educate members and help build a list of supporters.
The Smithsonian has also focused on streamlining its donation page and making its website easy to navigate on mobile devices. The new approaches helped the organization garner $1.4-million in online gifts last year, an increase of 20.6 percent, even as overall donations remained flat.
Coordinated Campaigns
Charities are realizing that for their digital approaches to be compelling to donors, the efforts have to be integrated into the organization’s overall fundraising strategy.
Online fundraising efforts need to be tied to something tangible to be successful, says Patricia Goldman, chief marketing officer at the March of Dimes.
Online gifts to the charity’s 2013 March for Babies events totaled $23.8-million. But the group depended on in-person kick-off events and appeals to reach nearly $100-million.
“I have yet to see pure online fundraising really take off,” she says. “It has to be connected to the real world. That’s why we’re still doing runs, walks, and rides.”
Social media provide a complementary approach to those events.
March of Dimes posts behind-the-scenes photos of celebrity supporters on Instagram and tweets important dates and times about its walks. Supporters can also spread the word using “e-cards” on Facebook that allow them to send cute photos to their friends encouraging them to make a pledge and thanking them after the walk.
The group’s social-media efforts are paying off. Last year for the first time, Facebook generated more referrals to the charity’s website than Google.
Email solicitations and postal appeals work better together than they do individually, says Diana Keim, associate vice president for annual giving at City of Hope, a research hospital in Duarte, Calif.
The organization raises millions of dollars more through direct mail than it does online, but it still loves the Internet. When the hospital started coordinating the fundraising letters and email appeals it sends to donors, it saw increases both in online donations and in the mail.
“Sure, we had people click on the link and make their gifts online,” says Ms. Keim. “People were also using the email as a reminder to then go back to their mail basket and send that in.”
Follow-Up Phone Calls
Some organizations are seeking leads on potential donors online and then asking them to give offline.
AmeriCares set up a petition on Change.org to enlist support for its work to provide medicine and supplies to charity workers traveling overseas. The petition garnered more than 14,000 signatures. The international health charity’s telemarketers called people within 24 hours after they signed the petition and reached about 1,000 of them. Of those, 5 percent made a gift over the phone.
In 2013, 30 percent of all gifts of less than $10,000 that AmeriCares received came in online.
Lee Weiner, the organization’s vice president for direct response, thinks the continued growth of the Internet and the “obsessive-compulsive data craziness” of his staff will help drive that number to 50 percent within 10 years.
Sometimes It’s Serendipity
In some cases, nonprofits see big gains when they make popular offline fundraising options available online.
Fans of the University of Michigan’s powerhouse basketball, football, and ice-hockey teams can make contributions of $75 to $600 for the right to buy season tickets with good seats.
In December 2012, the university let supporters make those gifts online for the first time, resulting in about $13.8-million in donations, a big reason for its eye-popping 295.6-percent jump in online gifts in 2013. The university collected more than $19-million through the Internet.
Sometimes success on the Internet is less about careful planning and more about serendipity.
As drivers careen around the turns at the Indianapolis 500 this week, race fans will see a video showcasing MAP International’s work in Africa—thanks to a tweet.
A supporter in Canada was moved by one of the charity’s Twitter messages about helping families in Africa and spoke to a member of her church who, in turn, convinced her employer, Grazie Media, a Canadian marketing firm, to create the video and donate air time at the race, a gift worth roughly $88,000. The public-service announcement will run twice an hour on the speedway’s huge screens.
As nonprofits chart their online strategies, they should start by making sure they’re getting the fundamentals right, says Steve MacLaughlin, director of the Idea Lab at Blackbaud.
Too often, he says, organizations aren’t. As evidence, he points to a study released in January that found many large nonprofits make missteps online, like failing to make their websites easy for smartphone users to navigate or making visitors click through three pages or more to give online.
Charities could raise a lot more money online just by mastering the basics, says Mr. MacLaughlin. Right now, he says, “organizations may be successful despite themselves.”
Sarah Frostenson contributed to this article.
