US online giving up 52% in 2007

Last week, Ted Hart released his latest estimate of US online giving figures, showing overall online income to US nonprofits in 2007 as $10.44 billion - up 52% from 2006.

Accurately measuring online giving on a national level is clearly maddeningly difficult. However, this is the seventh annual estimate calculated by Hart, apparently based on “the review of hundreds of first hand reports of giving he receives from charities and review of third-party research projects completed during the time period” . So, assuming the methodology is consistent, this should at least provide a good basis for observing the overall growth trend.

By comparison, according to the Giving USA Foundation’s latest figures just released this Monday, overall US charitable giving in 2007 is estimated at $306.39 billion - up just 3.9% on 2006.

Looking beyond the US, Hart believes the US figures represent slightly more than 50% of world-wide online giving, which he estimates to have now passed $20 billion.

 

Causes App celebrates first birthday - but surely there is more potential for Facebook fundraising?

Last Saturday was an important anniversary in Social Networking terms, marking one year since Facebook launched Facebook Platform, the toolkit that enables the development of 3rd party Applications (Apps) that integrate directly with Facebook user data. The sudden explosion in Apps resulting from this was a significant driver of the site’s massive growth in popularity throughout 2007, and according to Facebook stats site Adonomics it has led to the release of almost 27,000 Apps to-date.

The same day was also the first anniversary of the biggest non-profit Facebook App, ‘Causes’ from Project Agape (now also available on MySpace).

A runaway success from launch in terms of installations, Project Agape marked the anniversary with the release of statistics on its first year’s activity. Apparently they now have a total of 12 million registered users (95,886 daily active users when I just checked) supporting over 80,000 US and Canadian non-profit organisations. Other countries are still being considered for inclusion, but in a post on the Causes discussion board earlier this month it was explained that “Supporting donations to UK-based charities is still a project we’re interested in, but we are strapped for resources and cannot provide a date”.

80,000 non-profits being represented on two of the world’s biggest Social Networking sites is undoubtedly great news, with the App clearly tapping into a widespread desire amongst site users to share their support for charitable causes.

However, when you look at the figures released in terms of hard cash it seems like Causes still has some way to go before it becomes a significant income generator for the organisations involved. Over the last 12 months, $2.5 million has been raised through Causes for 19,445 organisations - equating to an average of just $126 per organisation. No donations at all have been made to 75% of the 80,000 organisations being ’supported’.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think Causes is a great initiative and I do understand when other commentators have observed that this is $2.5 million that these organisations would not have had otherwise. However, I wholeheartedly believe that supporter engagement on Social Networking sites has the potential to deliver massively more in fundraising terms than what currently appears to be the equivalent of an online small change collection tin.

Perhaps it’s simply that the Causes ‘Digital Badge’ approach to supporter engagement just doesn’t lend itself to generating higher levels of financial engagement? Is it just too easy to install the App and choose a few organisations to support by putting their badge on your profile and that’s it - job done?

By contrast, those Apps which extend the tried-and-tested sponsored challenge fundraising approach to Social Networking sites seem to better illustrate the real Community Fundraising potential of sites like Facebook. For example, Justgiving.com (which enables individuals to set-up fundraising pages in support of their sponsored activities) has seen significant uptake of its Facebook App (see their latest stats here) and identified Facebook as its second biggest referrer after Google - a trend confirmed by Hitwise UK.

Anyone else got any examples of where organisations are managing to raise significant amounts on Social Networking sites?

A quick Community Fundraising 2.0 conference session plug

There was some great feedback following my Community Fundraising 2.0 session at the Institute of Fundraising’s Direct Marketing Conference back in February. So I thought I’d post a quick plug for a couple more conference’s I’ll be speaking at later this year - not just as an invitation to anyone attending to come-along and say ‘hello’, but also to see if anyone has relevant case studies of online fundraising they’ve been involved in that they’d like to share. I do my best to keep-up with the latest fundraising campaigns, but there’s so much going-on these days that it’s easy to miss things!

The first conference is the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention held here in London on 7th July. I’m co-speaking there with Natasha Hill, a former WWAV colleague and now Director of Supporter Marketing at Cancer Research UK, on the subject of ‘Fundraising in a Facebook World - Empowering Community Fundraising Online’.

The second is the International Fundraising Congress in October over at Noordwijk in The Netherlands, and the title of that session is ‘Community Fundraising 2.0 - the future of fundraising in a networked society’.

If you’ve got any suggestions for online community fundraising campaigns that you think I should take a look at, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. Thanks!

Online fundraising benchmarking study - how well is your email activity performing?

The 2008 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study has just been released by M+R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network, and contains a wealth of data which will be of real interest to you if you’re involved in online fundraising or campaigning.

Covering everything from click-through and conversion rates (by cause) to how much you might expect your email list to churn, it provides some really valuable data to help benchmark your own organisation’s performance. As an update of an equivalent report released back in 2006, it also provides insight into how performance against key metrics is changing over time.

The findings are based on the analysis of data from 21 US nonprofits involved in online fundraising and campaigning, but seem to tally well with the equivalent data I see for the range of UK charities I work with.

The report is free to download here.

Anyone know of an equivalent report for any other countries - or interested in contributing data to a broader benchmarking study? Let me know.

More thoughts on Community Fundraising 2.0

I’m afraid that a combination of some especially busy weeks at work and my home broadband going down for a while has left my blog rather sparsely updated since last month.

However, I have had the opportunity to write a short piece for the e-newsletter of the Resource Alliance on one of the subjects I’ve been working on quite a lot recently - Community Fundraising 2.0.

So, while I work on getting the blog back up to speed, do take a read and see what you think - as always all comments welcome.

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

I chose a broad and much discussed topic for my hosting of this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: Creating and developing online communities through Web 2.0.

We kick-off with a very useful thought piece, originally guest posted by Beth Kanter on techsoup.org, entitled Determining Your Social Network Needs.

Then it’s over to Katya Andresen and Stacie Mann from Network for Good who offer a handy 11 Steps to success with Social Networking.

Staying with Social Networking, Josh Catone at Read Write Web marks Facebook’s fourth birthday earlier this month with a post considering whether Facebook might become a catalyst for wider social change.

On to a Social Network with a difference, NetSquared generated a load of discussion in response to its recent Think Tank question How Can Nonprofits use Twitter? - including the story of how the American Cancer Society is using twitter to promote its breast cancer research ‘Frozen Pea Fund’!

Joanne Fritz is struck by the potential to use Web 2.0 to engage with large numbers of donors giving small value gifts in her post The Long Tail of Fundraising: how small donations can make a difference.

Then we have a whole host of Web 2.0 Tech Tips from Social Signal - covering everything from blogging, del.icio.us, and RSS to advice on community content.

And finally a post from DonorPowerBlog by my old Seattle-based friend and colleague Jeff Brooks, with some suggestions on how to have Kiva’s problem - namely raising too much money!

That’s it for this week. But you can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it wends its weekly way across the blogosphere by subscribing to the carnival feed.

Flipping the funnel - the future of fundraising?

Recently I’ve been using an analogy originally promoted by online marketing pioneer Seth Godin to help illustrate how individual donor fundraisers, steeped in traditional direct marketing, need to evolve their thinking to capitalise on the new opportunities being offered by Web 2.0.

In his free to download ebook ‘Flipping the Funnel’ (with a tailored version for nonprofits), he highlights how fundraisers should re-evaluate the traditional approach of funneling high volumes of prospects into a fundraising programme to convert low volumes of supporters.

In Godin’s analogy, when you ‘flip the funnel’ (with the help of Web 2.0 tools) what you end-up with is a megaphone, through which passionate supporters can shout-out to their network of personal contacts on your behalf - overcoming the decline in mass-market appeals and reaching people traditional fundraising communications can’t reach.

In his own words “A new set of online tools makes this approach not just a possibility, but also an imperative for any organization hoping to grow. Give your fan club a megaphone and get out of the way.” I couldn’t agree more!

Kiva goes from $1m to $16m in one year!

As a Kiva supporter (or ‘lender’ as they’re called) I always look forward to emails from them updating me on how the projects I’m helping fund are progressing. However their Holiday Newsletter made for an especially great read as it also provided details on what has been a truly incredible year for this wonderfully innovative charity, using the power of online social networking to enable everyday donors to directly support micro enterprise projects around the world.

Apparently they now have over 170,000 individual lenders from over 71 countries, supporting 25,000 small business entrepreneurs across 37 countries - with the loans total now over $16million.

Those are some amazing numbers for an organisation which this time last year had only just passed the $1million mark!

And a fantastic example of how really big amounts can be raised online through a truly innovative ‘Community Fundraising 2.0′ approach.

Crisis ‘Send a Singer’ Christmas online fundraising campaign hits its £1m target

Back at the end of October I wrote about an innovative online corporate fundraising campaign that our team at WWAV Rapp Collins had just developed for homelessness charity Crisis.

Based around the microsite Sendasinger.com, the idea was for companies to replace their traditional Christmas cards with video e-cards of carols sung by choirs made-up of folks who have been helped through Crisis projects - and the target was to raise £1 million.

The great news is that this ambitious target has now been met! A success celebrated through a double page advertisement in the Financial Times today (using space donated by the paper) listing all of the companies who took part.

All in all, a great example of how the video capabilities of today’s high speed internet can be used to deliver innovative, fun, and highly successful online fundraising.

Anyone else out there using video to raise money from either corporate or individual donors? If so, let us know how you’re getting-on by using the comment function below.

Christmas online corporate fundraising from Crisis

With Christmas just around the corner, we recently launched a fun online corporate fundraising campaign for UK homelessness charity Crisis - aiming to raise £1million by getting corporate sponsors to replace their traditional Christmas cards with a ’singing’ video e-card.

Depending on the company’s Christmas card budget, at the microsite sendasinger.com they can select a four, eight, or fourteen piece choir, made-up of people who have been helped through Crisis projects. Every video e-card card is personalised to the sponsoring company for distribution to their own address list, and all companies taking part will also be formally thanked through double-page advertisements in the Financial Times.

The fun, seasonal approach certainly seems to have struck a chord with companies preparing for Christmas, with a range of organisations already signed-up. So, here’s hoping the campaign reaches its £1million target by 25th December.

UPDATE… Great news - we hit the £1million well before the 25th!