Takeaways from Blackbaud’s Charitable Giving Report

Blackbaud’s just-published 2013 Charitable Giving Report shows that small nonprofits, with annual total fundraising of less than $1 million, grew their fundraising by 7.3 percent compared to 2011.

These small guys blew away the large nonprofits who only grew 0.3 percent!

Five key observations from the 2012 Charitable Giving Report:

1. Overall giving grew less than 2 percent. A down economy continues to challenge fundraising efforts for all size organizations.
2. Online giving grew 11 percent in 2012, particularly in the area of disaster recovery. Hurricane Sandy was one of the biggest.
3. Online fundraising accounted for 7 percent of all donations in 2012, which was up from 2011. Online fundraising is still a small slice of the pie for most nonprofits.
4. Small nonprofits grew the most for overall giving (7.3 percent), but medium organizations grew the most for online giving.
5. Giving was flat throughout 2012, but spiked around Hurricane Sandy.

Key observations by sector

• Giving to religious organizations grew by 6.1 percent and this helped to lift overall giving as this sector receives the largest share of charitable dollars in the United States.
• Education institutions also had a positive year with 1.9 percent growth in fundraising compared to 2011. These two sectors combine for 45 percent of charitable giving in the US.
• Arts and culture, as well as environment and animal welfare organizations, were the only other sectors to experience fundraising growth in 2012.

Best sectors in online fundraising

Education and public/society organizations grew their online fundraising the most in 2012 with an increase of more than 17 percent – the largest growth rate for the second consecutive year.

Three focus areas for 2013

If the trends over the past four years continue in 2013, charitable giving won’t grow significantly. This means focusing on donor retention and finding innovative ways to acquire new donors without wasting money is key.

Here’s a three-step action plan for success in 2013:

1. Share accountability for fundraising results throughout the organization. Come up with creative ideas that give everyone an opportunity to take ownership for retaining donors in a way that feels natural, empowered, and uses each person’s unique talents.
2. Leverage new fundraising technology. If your website sucks, start there. Then move on to developing smarter email marketing. Only then should you start thinking about that cool Facebook app.
3. Create colossal content. Never forget that your “competition” is engaging your donors every day with emotionally compelling messages. At the same time, your donors are getting better at tuning out messages that are boring. This means you have to get better at grabbing and keeping your donor’s attention in innovative and remarkable ways.

What will you do in 2013 to retain more donors?

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During the holiday break, Socialbrite is updating and republishing some of our most popular posts. We noticed that Jolkona is prominently featured in Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s new book, “Giving 2.0.” Our regular publication schedule resumes Monday.

Imet Adnan Mahmud, co-founder and CEO of Jolkona, during Beth Kanter’s book signing party for “The Networked Nonprofit” at TechSoup Global — and was immediately impressed by his seriousness and dedication to helping great causes through one-to-one philanthropy.

Jolkona is at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon, which will become an increasingly important part of charitable giving in the years ahead, as young people in particular want transparency, interaction and accountability when supporting a cause.

Adnan says Jolkona is the first nonprofit “to give tangible feedback on your donation.” Kiva, which pioneered the technique, provides entrepreneurs with loans. And while nonprofits like charity:water and Global Giving often give updates on projects, Jolkona is positioning itself as a technology platform that enables one-to-one philanthropy for nonprofits of any size.

Watch, download or embed our interview on Vimeo

The year-old Jolkona — which means “drop of water” in Bengali (Adnan is a native of Bangladesh) — currently showcases 75 projects in 35 countries, including the United States.

Jolkona’s premise is simple but powerful: Support a library in Tibet that needs $50 to buy books, and you’ll get the list of the books purchased through your donation. Help people in Bangladesh and Myanmar get an artificial limb for $200 — $200! — and you’ll receive a before and after photo. In Iraq, you can save a girl from an honor killing for $120: You get the story of the girl you saved, though for security reasons they can’t supply a name or photo. And in the U.S., you can provide field trips to a classroom of disadvantaged children in Seattle.

Says Adnan: “If you ask any nonprofit, Do you want to tell your supporters how their money was used, they’ll all tell you, Yes I do. But they don’t because they’re strapped for resources. Jolkona decided to come in and provide that technical infrastructure.

“Our focus is on youth philanthropy,” he adds. “We’re focused on galvanizing this next generation of givers. We’ve seen the frustration of this generation — that they don’t know where their money is going to. … We want people to feel that their [donation] can make a difference.”

It does, and the Jolkona team has gone out of its way to provide transparency and dispel worries that surfaced after it was revealed that Kiva wasn’t being forthright about its donations process.

Jolkona is now accepting nonprofit partners, though there’s a waiting queue. “If you are doing great work and are committed to showing impact, we are your best partners” as a platform solution, Adnan says.

The post Jolkona: Now we can all be philanthropists appeared first on Socialbrite.

It only works when it’s connected to the real world

At the National Conference on Volunteering and Service — which some folks call “the Super Bowl of nonprofit conferences” — George Weiner and I teamed up on one of the most successful Social Media for Social Good Bootcamps that Socialbrite has put on to date. (Socialbrite has put on camps in New York, San Francisco, Miami, London and elsewhere.)

For those of us who live and breathe tech and social media — me in Silicon Valley and George, CTO of DoSomething.org, in New York and Washington, DC — it’s always a good reality check to come to gatherings like this and see how the non-early adopters are faring.

The three-hour session we led yesterday offered a range of tips on how to use social media strategically for campaigns, for collaboration, for building community, and I invite you to browse through the presentation above, since the attendees found it useful: “AMAZING session” (thanks, Volunteer Centre) … “awesome, fantastic session” (thanks, NCVS) … “Great session!” (thanks, Groupon).

But there were more beginners in the crowd than I expected. For instance, only about five out of 50 particpants were using Google Analytics (the free tool every website and blog ought to have). None had heard of the Grassrootsmapping.org effort to document the Gulf oil spill, even though we’re right here in New Orleans. And only one out of 80 people (not counting me) at today’s session on data had ever used Tumblr, an easy way to post blog entries and photos.

These are good, smart, motivated people — we need to break through the barriers and connect the tools and strategies with the organizations and causes that need them, starting with the basics.

So let’s take a deep breath and remember: We still have a lot of work before us, and there’s a lot of education yet to be done.

The post A reality check on social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Alex Wilhelm
The Next Web

Philanthroper, a Chicago startup that is focusing on improving the world of charity, is a wonderful mixture of Groupon, Woot, and the spirit of giving.

Every day Philanthroper works with one charity, and spurs as many people as it can to give a single dollar to that group. However, to avoid losing all of that money in transaction expenses, the company has teamed up with a second Chicago company, called mPayy, to handle their payments.

mPayy takes one penny per dollar donated, and Philanthroper takes none, meaning that 99% of donated money reaches the charity directly. PayPal and other solutions at the $1 dollar level would extract 30 cents or more. Philanthroper hopes to sell ads on their site to cover their expenses.

I signed up for Philanthroper and mPayy, and found the system to be simple, if a bit step-intensive. Still, I cannot recall a place where I can give small amounts of my money to a large number of different groups so simply and quickly.

Related

• Use your online shopping habit to help a charity (Socialbrite)

• Blissmo: A new way to connect with sustainability (Socialbrite)

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