2010 Online Giving Trends

Blackbaud released its 2010 Online Giving Report today. The 2010 Online Giving Report combines findings from The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving with additional multi-year giving data to provide the most comprehensive analysis of online giving trends in the nonprofit sector.

The Report includes 24 months of online giving data from 1,812 nonprofit organizations from The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving, online major giving data from 2,190 nonprofits, and both online and offline data representing $5.1 billion in total fundraising from 1,438 nonprofits.

Here are some key findings from the 2010 Online Giving Report:

Online Giving Keeps Growing

Year-over-year online fundraising grew 34.5% in 2010. This was led by 55.6% growth by large organizations. Smaller nonprofits grew by 22% and medium organizations grew by 15.9% compared to the same time period in 2009.

Online giving is 7.6% of total fundraising

Blackbaud used data over the past year to examine percentage of total fundraising that came from online giving. Large organizations now lead the way with 7.7%, followed by medium sized nonprofits with 7.6%, and smaller organizations with 7.5%. The International Affairs and Health Care sectors now have more than 10% of their total fundraising from online giving.

Haiti-related giving shaped 2010 trends

January 2010 had the largest percentage of online giving for the entire year. 18.4% of online giving took place in January compared to 18.3% in December 2010. This change can almost single handedly be attributed to giving to Haiti relief efforts. International Affairs organizations had their online giving grow 130.8% compared to 2009.

Year-end online giving is still significant

October, November, and December of 2010 represented 31.3% of total online giving during the year. All sectors in the analysis, with the exception of International Affairs, had their largest online giving month of the year in December.

Donors continue to make significant gifts online

In 2010, 88% of organizations had at least one online gift of $1,000 or more. The median online gift of $1,000 or more was $1,250 and the largest amount given online in the analysis was $100,000. 41% of these significant gifts were exactly $1,000 and 6% were $5,000 gifts.

How to use the report

We’ve included some helpful recommendations for ways that nonprofits can use the information in the report. With some basic information an organization can start benchmarking their own performance against their peers in the analysis.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be going through some of the findings and trends in the report. There is a tremendous amount of valuable information about organizations of different sizes and sectors.

You can get a copy of the 2010 Online Giving Report on Blackbaud.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve MacLaughlin

Steve MacLaughlin is the Vice President of Data & Analytics at Blackbaud and bestselling author of Data Driven Nonprofits.

MacLaughlin has been featured as a fundraising and nonprofit expert in many mainstream publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, USA Today, The NonProfit Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bloomberg, and has appeared on NPR.

He is a frequent speaker at events including the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP), American Marketing Association (AMA), Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association (DMFA), Giving Institute Summer Symposium, National Association of Independent School (NAIS), Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC), Institute of Fundraising National Convention (United Kingdom), Civil Society Conference (Netherlands), International Fundraising Congress (Netherlands), Ask Direct Fundraising Summer School (Ireland), and a keynote speaker at several conferences across the social good sector.

Steve previously served on the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) Board of Directors and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University.

He is a frequent blogger, published author of a chapter in the book People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities, and is a co-editor of the book Internet Management for Nonprofits: Strategies, Tools & Trade Secrets. His latest book, Data Driven Nonprofits, became a bestseller in 2016.

Steve earned both his undergraduate degree and a Master of Science degree in Interactive Media from Indiana University.