Blackbaud Index for March 2013

The Blackbaud Index provides the most up-to-date information on charitable giving today. Tracking approximately $10 billion in US-based charitable giving, the Index is updated on the first of each month and is based on year-over-year percent changes. Featuring overall and online giving, the Index can be viewed by size and subsets of the nonprofit industry.

The March 2013 update to The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving is significant because it now covers more than $10 billion in overall charitable giving. The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving now covers more than $2 billion online donations. For nearly three years now, Blackbaud has continued to expand the number of organizations and giving represented in the analysis.

Overall Fundraising Trends

The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving is a broad-based fundraising index that reports total revenue trends of 3,200 nonprofit organizations representing over $10 billion in yearly revenue on a monthly basis, both offline and online. The Index is based on actual revenue statistics from nonprofit organizations of all sizes representing arts, culture, and humanities; education; environment and animals; healthcare; human services; international affairs; public and society benefit; and religion sectors.

The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving reports that overall revenue decreased by 1.1% for the 3 months ending March 2013 as compared to the same period in 2012. This is the first negative trend in 6 months. A 2% decline by large nonprofits and a slight decline by medium-sized nonprofit contributed to the overall negative trend.

Public and Society Benefit organizations were down 8.6% on a YOY basis and that is the third straight month of decline by this sector. Many other sectors include Healthcare, Human Services, and International Afairs are also trending negative.

Online Fundraising Trends

The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving is a broad-based fundraising index that reports online revenue trends of more than 2,500 nonprofit organizations representing over $2 billion in yearly revenue on a monthly basis. The Index is based on actual revenue statistics from nonprofit organizations of all sizes representing arts, culture, and humanities; education; environment and animals; healthcare; human services; international affairs; and public and society benefit sectors.

The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving reports that online revenue increased by 7.8% for the 3 months ending March 2013 as compared to the same period in 2012. It is worth noting that this is the first time in well over a year that the growth rate dropped below double digits.

Small organizations continue to have strong growth with a YOY increase of just over 9%. Sharp declines by International Affairs and Healthcare organizations pull down The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving. There is still very strong growth among Environment and Animal Welfare, Human Services, and Arts and Cultural organizations.

Please visit The Blackbaud Index for more information and interactive charts.

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.