Highlights of 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study (infographic)

This is the second of two articles on NTC 2013. Also see:
• Highlights of 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, journalists, general public.

Every year, Socialbrite takes a look at the annual study of online nonprofit trends put out by the communications firm M+R Strategic Services and the Nonprofit Technology Network. This year, we waited a couple of weeks after the report’s release to hear directly from Madeline Stanionis, creative director of M+R, who dissected the annual survey of the nonprofit sector at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis.

The 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study offers the sector’s only in-depth look at how nonprofits fared with email marketing, online fundraising and nonprofit advocacy over the past year. The report studied data from 55 generally large nonprofits in the environmental, health, human rights, international and wildlife and animal welfare sectors. As I’ve said in the past, a study of 55 large organizations — which sent 1.6 billion emails to 45 million list subscribers and raked in more than $438 million online donations during 2012 — is hardly representative of the 1.5 million mostly small nonprofits in the United States. Still, the trend lines are worth examining.

Here, then, are a few of the top-line takeaways:

• Online revenue was up 21 percent last year. One-time gifts continue to make up the bulk of online giving, with monthly giving programs across all groups bringing in 43 percent more revenue than the previous year.
• The average monthly gift was $19, while the average one-time gift was $60.
• Twitter had a big year. Nonprofits began paying serious attention to their social channels, and their Twitter followers increased by 264 percent in 2012.
• But perspective, people: For every 1,000 email subscribers, participating nonprofits reported just 149 Facebook followers and 53 Twitter followers.
• Email had a Jekyll and Hyde year. Subscriber lists grew by 15 percent. And open rates remained steady at 14 percent overall.
• But email response rates — the percentage of people who responded to a call to action — were way down. Click-through rates for all sectors stood at 1.7 percent (down 22 percent), and fundraising message click-throughs stood at 0.42 percent (down 27 percent).

Infographic shows email, social media trends at a glance

You can download a PDF version of the study at e-benchmarksstudy.com. Here’s an infographic that summarizes some of the findings:

“The world is changing,” Stanionis told the packed room. Some 33 percent of online donations to nonprofits come from email (down from 35 percent last year). I asked about the 67 percent that doesn’t come from email solicitations — how much of that is from social media? M+R and NTEN don’t know, partly because reporting of online donations is hard to track in a reliable way. (Next year, folks? Please? Please?)

Secrets from the Obama campaign

Stanionis shared these surprises from Obama’s new media staff about what worked — and what didn’t — during the most successful online fundraising campaign in history:

• Segmentation based on donor behavior is the only fundraising segmentation worth doing. Donor behavior turned out to be far more significant than demographics, past history and the like.
• Novelty works, until it doesn’t. “Try new stuff,” Stanionis advised. “But you may have a short lifespan of only two weeks before it gets old.”
• Short emails. Long. Whatever. No patterns were discernible.
• The same email sometimes elicited the highest donation rates — and the highest unsubscribe rates. “Push the envelope to elicit emotion and responses. Touching a nerve is a good sign,” she said.

Some final lessons learned

Participating nonprofits also saw a healthy spike in their Facebook fans — a 46 percent increase over the previous year. Nonprofits posted about once per day on Facebook, though larger organizations posted more frequently. Photo posts were the most popular content for users to like, share or comment on. But photos were ineffective at driving people to webpages beyond the confines of Facebook.

The median number of Facebook fans, across all nonprofit sectors, was 35,538, which tells you only that the survey is skewed toward larger organizations. The median number of Twitter followers? 21,788 or, again, probably far more than your organization has.

Interesting factoid shared by one of the attendees, who works at Edutopia: “This year for the first time, our website’s referral traffic is pulling in more visitors from Twitter than from Facebook. And we spend a lot more time on Facebook than on Twitter.”

There are tons of interesting datapoints in the study. Download it and check it out for yourself.

The post Nonprofits, online giving & secrets from the Obama campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

And tips on how to reinforce habits for social good

This is the first of two articles on NTC 2013. Also see:
• Nonprofits, online giving & secrets from the Obama campaign (the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study)

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, journalists, general public.

Last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis was the fourth NTC I’ve attended in the past five years. I spoke twice at last year’s event, but this year I had the freedom to roam the hallways in search of interesting people and ideas that are shaping the nonprofit sector.

NTEN’s NTC serves an invaluable role as the one central gathering spot for the nonprofit community — a place where those of us involved in the sector (I run Socialbrite, a leading social media consultancy for nonprofits) can see friends and colleagues, keep abreast of new trends and, most importantly, encounter smart, interesting, passionate people we haven’t met before.

Oh, and I took a few photos, as usual. Here’s my 70-photo set on Flickr.

Highlights from the Nonprofit Technology Conference

There were far more interesting sessions than I was able to attend, so here are just a few takeaways that I managed to scribble down:

• Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, at lunch: “Storytelling without data is just an anecdote. Asking people to donate on the basis of anecdotes – those days are long gone.”

• Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Foundation: “Make sure your data is actionable. It’s not just about creating a pretty spreadsheet.”

• More Danielle (@starfocus): “People are your supporters when they think they’re your supporters.”

• Joanne Fritz at About.com has a roundup of the DoGooder Video Award winners. In the Best Nonprofit Video category, the Rainforest Alliance won for Follow the Frog (great video — and here’s where to shop the frog). In the Change Agent Award category, the winner was Raf Bauer for 350km Message for Women with Ovarian Cancer.

• Ken Bess of CARE: “If a campaign doesn’t have an email element, it fails.”

• At “Introduction to User Centered Design,” Golli Hashemian and Lauren Hayes reminded us of Henry Ford’s classic quote about innovation: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

• At one session: “In order to have influence today, you must have networks.”

• “Charity muggers”: The term for people who accost you on the street on behalf of a charity.

• Even though Blackbaud bought it, Convio (pronounced con-VEE-o) is still operating as a brand. Convio is among the services that enables A-B testing of email messages. If you’re a small organization, a DIY solution is to split your list in half and send different emails to the two groups of recipients.

• To the gentleman who used the real name of someone whose lifetime giving to CARE.org totaled $241,500, you may want to black out those real names in your next presentation.

• Zerista, the communications platform NTEN uses year after year, continues to suck.

Using behavioral science to create habits for social good

One of the conference’s most interesting sessions was Thursday’s “Creating Habits for Social Good: Using Insights from Behavioral Science to Increase Engagement and Repeat Behavior,” with the marvelous Katya Andresen of Network for Good and Allan Burstyn of See3 Communications. Some highlights:

• Six main types of donors: The Repayer (someone whose life was changed through an experience, like going to a university), the Casual Giver (buy Girl Scouts cookies or plunk down a dollar at Safeway for cancer research), High Impact (we give to the Red Cross and Save the Children because they’re high-impact relief organizations), Faith-based (about a third of all giving goes to religious institutions), See the Difference (“I only give to small organizations where I feel I can make a difference”) and Personal Ties (your niece runs in a race for the cure). The two categories that attract the most donations are Repayer and Personal Ties.

• We make decisions more emotionally and justify them after the fact with facts. You can’t show an emotional argument and a factual argument at the same time – we have different pathways in the brain for reason and emotion. Words affect us more on a rational level and pictures affect us more on an emotional level. Make sure the very beginning of your video has an emotional hook. Use images, and less text, for more long-lasting impact.

• 60 percent of donors are “lost” every year by nonprofits. On the one hand, nonprofits need to do a much better job of not just cultivating new donors but maintaining existing ones. Still, as someone who gives to a wide range of nonprofits — and not the same ones every year — I wouldn’t panic about churn among donors.

• Great advice from Katya: Step out from the role of communicator and look at the fundraising experience from the POV of a donor for a good reality check.

• One genius aspect of mobile giving: $10 text donations are effective because they eliminate the barrier of entering billing information.

• Katya: “A lot of fundraising is bad because it’s about how big and bad the problem is. You need to juxtapose that with a way to take corrective action.”

• More Katya: “You blow people’s minds by thanking them.” So, do it. Send a hand-written thank-you or even an email.

• Check out childrensmn.org for a good example of an interactive infographic on impact.

• If you missed this from Katya 10 days ago, it’s worth a read: How to make your donors twice as generous.

A whirlwind of connections

I was in Minneapolis for less than three days. Here are some of the new and old friends I spent a little time with:

John Haydon, Beth Kanter, Brian Juntti, Matt Haugen, Danielle Brigida, Kathryn Engelhardt-Cronk, Caroline Avakian, Debra Askanase, Kivi Leroux Miller, Lori Jacobwith, Casey Golden, Frank Barry, Melanie Mathos, Taylor Corrado, Cassie Bair, Amy Sample Ward, Fara Trompeter, David Krumlauf, Mark Horvath, Sue Anne Reed, Janna Chan, Emilie Valentine, Corinne Rusch-Drutz, Julie Ha Truong, Rebecca Saar, Christina Johns, Kelly Rand, Austen Levihn-Coon, Christine Egger, Annie Lynsen, Jason Vance, Jasmin Cruz, James Rooney, Elisa Willman, Lauren Girardin, Marah Rosenbert, Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Michael Smolens, Julielyn Gibbons, Susan Tenby, Marc A. Pitman, Patrick Duggan. Mark Pothier, Michael Spear, Layla Zaidane, Kara Fujita, Michael Bento, Scot Chisholm, Andrea Roy, Karen Graham, Cary Walski, Amanda Bingham, Johanna Olivas, Rebecca Einstein, Steve and Becca Heye, Jenna Sauber, Allyson Burns, Dave Boyce, Laura Norvig, Jeanette Russell, Maddie Grant, Michael DeLong, Susan Chavez, Shanon Doolittle, Lindsay Bealko ‏and too many others’ names I didn’t have time to jot down.

And here are some of my friends I didn’t spot (and I’m not 100 percent sure they all attended):

Geoff Livingston, Kami Watson Huyse, Nancy Schwartz, Annaliese Hoehling, Gregory Foster, Kami Griffiths, Manny Hernandez, Vince Stehl, Randy Paynter, Claire Kerr, Peter Deitz, Shai Coggins, Allyson Kapin, Rachel Weidinger, Andrea Berry, Laura Quinn, Jereme Bivins, Rob Cottingham.

Mark your calendars: Next year’s NTC will be held March 13-15, 2014, in Washington, DC.

Related

• We love social data, but what do we do with it? (Slideshare presentation)

• Highlights from the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference (Socialbrite)

• Calendar of 2013 nonprofit & social change conferences (Socialbrite)

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