Are Twitter and Facebook Playing Tug-O-War?

A few days ago, I reported some of the juicy details from the 2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study that was just released showing data from 2012. There were 55 of the country’s leading nonprofits surveyed for this study, including the American Red Cross, Oceana, American Heart Association, AARP, and Human Rights Watch.

In my last blog post, I talked about the decline of email and fundraising response rates. Today I'm digging into the the social media and mobile portions of the study.

As social media continues to grow and develop, nonprofit organizations continue to attract more Fans and Followers—Twitter Followers in particular have increased at a remarkable rate, with a whopping 264% growth over the past year. 

Despite this growth, email lists continue to dominate in size (no real surprise here), and Facebook remains the larger social media presence for most groups. For every 1,000 email subscribers, groups in the Benchmarks Study have 149 Facebook Fans, 53 Twitter Followers, and 29 Mobile Subscribers.

Facebook:

• You may be wondering, how often do other organizations post on Facebook? On average they're posting about once per day, though large groups posted twice as frequently.
• Users were more than twice as likely to like, share, or comment on a Photo post than any other content.  

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Are Email and Fundraising Response Rates in a State of Decline?

The 2012 eNonprofit Behnchmarks Study was just released and it's packed with all sorts of juicy email, advocacy, and fundraising data from 55 nonprofits ranging from environmental organizations to human rights organizations.

Check out the data I pulled from the report that I think it worth comparing to your own organizations benchmarks.

The good news is that online revenue is up and monthly giving programs have grown 43%. Email list sizes are continuing to grow at about 15%. Overall, nonprofits are reaching new supporters more than ever across online channels.

Now the bad news. Email response rates are down, particularly around fundraising messaging. Are nonprofits falling into the trap of treating their supporters like ATM machines? Are they not focusing on nurturing relationships with supporters and engaging them in meaningful ways? You would not believe what my email inbox looks like these days from nonprofit organizations. “Give me money” – seems to be the central theme. This is problematic because it causes list burn out and people begin to tune out and not respond to emails when you really need them.

Online Fundraising

• Increased by 21% in 2012.

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11 Outstanding Nonprofit Reports You Should Read

There are a ton of smart people writing about nonprofit technology and communications to help nonprofit communicators keep up on the latest online trends and developments. When you need to take a really deep dive into critical topics, but don’t want to rely on your own trial and error it helps to look beyond blogs and social media. Thankfully, you can take advantage of great in-depth research and findings published in nonprofit reports.

Here 11 nonprofit reports that are worth a look when you want to brush up on everything from nonprofit social media adoption, staffing, fundraising, and online engagement best practices.

1) The Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook – Sometimes “don’t be stupid” is good enough as an informal policy to guide an organization’s social media engagement. However, many organizations look to create an official policy to satisfy legal concerns, make senior leadership more comfortable, and to provide more in depth guidelines to staff who engage supporters and the public on social channels. This great workbook from Idealware and Darim Online provides insightful questions, exercises, and a sample policy template that community managers can use as a starting point in creating an organization’s official social media policy. Debra Askanase has a great review of the workbook that I’d recommend you check out as well. The Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide, also from Idealware, is a good complimentary resource.

2) 2011 Nonprofit Technology Staffing & Investments Survey Report – If you are planning guidelines for your organization’s use of social media you will also want to take a close look at your organization’s technology staffing and capacity. This report from NTEN by Annaliese Hoehling, shares the findings of a staffing survey that received nearly a thousand responses from nonprofit professionals. Organizations have an average 3.5 technology staff and the average ratio of tech staff to organizational staff is 1 tech staff to about 60 organizational staff. Check out the full report to see how your staffing stacks up with that of other organizations of similar size and tech adoption level.

3) A Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management Systems – If you are still managing your donor database with Excel spreadsheets it’s time for a better solution. Idealware’s report explores the essential features of nonprofit CRMs and donor management systems and makes recommendations based on specific needs. The guide includes a comparison of 29 different systems and offers detailed reviews of 10 of the most popular. Here’s your first stop if your starting from square one to select a nonprofit CRM.

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New Study: Donations Decline for Nonprofits

Many of Frogloop's readers are professional nonprofit fundraisers who watch trends like a hawk -- at least when those trends affect fundraising results across sectors and channels.

Of the different trend-spotting resources, few are as important and authoritative as the "donorCentrics Index of National Fundraising Performance" published quarterly by Target Analytics, a division of Blackbaud.

Yesterday in Washington, DC, Target's senior fundraising analyst Paige Grainger gave a terrific "state of the nonprofit industry" talk, which summarized key findings from Target's latest, 2011 Index. The full report is here.  Paige spoke at a luncheon that Care2 sponsored of the Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW).

Target's data this year was drawn from 80 different nonprofit organizations, 38 million donors, 79 million gifts and $2.5 billion worth of donations revenue (although it excluded any donations worth $10,000 or more). Channels covered included online, direct mail, telemarketing and canvassing.

So what was the big picture "headline?"  A sobering one, overall. But with a few very bright spots.

"The Increase in Revenue Per Donor Is Still Not Compensating for the Declining Quantity of Donors," Paige told us is the headline from the survey.

More key findings...

• Overall revenue from nonprofits in Target's index declined again in 2011. The median drop was 2.1 percent. There were many exceptions, though. In fact, 39 percent of nonprofits in the index actually had year-over-year revenue INCREASES last year.

• Human Services and "Social Benefit" nonprofits performed the best -- including in acquisition of new donors (Note, the "Social Benefit" category included Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, Public Citizen and other nonprofits that engage in lots of advocacy.) While just about all the other surveyed nonprofits saw drops in new donors acquired, Social Benefit nonprofits were experiencing increases in new donors acquired.

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2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study Highlights Online Advocacy, Fundraising, and Social Media Metrics

The 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study was just released and is packed with insightful data on advocacy and fundraising response rates across the nonprofit sector. In particular we were excited to see advocacy response rates increased 28% between 2010 and 2011. The study also has some great data on how nonprofits are expanding their use of social media and mobile. For example, the median growth rate for nonprofit fan pages was an impressive 70%.

Email Open Rates:

• Advocacy messages had the highest open rates, click-through rates and response rates – as well as the lowest unsubscribe rates.
• Overall, email open rates held steady between 2010 and 2011. This is an important trend to note because over the past few years, the open rates were declining. Considering that list size has increased, and that older names will often grow stale, a year-over-year rate that remains steady is quite positive.
• In 2011, the median email open rate was 14%.

Enewsletters:

Newsletter received on average a 13% open rate, a 1.6% click-thru rate, and a 0.17% unsubscribe rate.

Email Click-Thru Rates:

Click-through rates averaged 2.1% for all message types and across all verticals in the nonprofit community. The median click-through rate for an advocacy email was 4.2%; the median rate for a fundraising email was 0.47%.

Online Fundraising:

Despite the struggling economy, the nonprofit community did quite well in 2011 with their online fundraising.

• On average, nonprofits increased their dollars raised online by 19% from 2010 to 2011.
• The number of gifts rose by 20%.
• Email-driven donation forms had a median completion rate of 17%.
• The International sector experienced a 25% drop in fundraising response rates for the international sector. This is not surprising since 2010 was a watershed year for many international nonprofits due to the 163% spike in fundraising around relief following the Haiti earthquake and flooding in Pakistan.
• On average, online monthly giving accounted for 8% of total online revenue in 2011, up from 5% in 2010.

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Are Nonprofits Raising Money Via Social Networks?

The 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report provides some incredible data on how 11K+ nonprofits are using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. The study also answers the biggest question on everyone's mind. Are nonprofits raising any money on social networks?

Big Picture Data

• Facebook is the most popular commercial social network for nonprofits.
• Nine out of 10 nonprofits have a presence on Facebook .
• Facebook usage levels are at 89% with nonprofits versus only 57% usage of Twitter.
• LinkedIn is used by 1 in 3 nonprofits.
• MySpace hit an all-time low with only 7% of nonprofits utilizing this platform.

Though it's assumed that Social Networks, besides MySpace, just keep growing, it's the amount of growth that may surprise you. Facebook has increased its community by 161% in 2011, and while Twitter is not used as often by nonprofits, the Twitter community only grew 2% in 2011 - not a drop in the bucket to its 535% growth from 2009. While the usage isn't static across the board, the majority of nonprofits (4 out of 5) agree that their social networking efforts are valuable to their growth and community engagement.

For the first time this year, quite a few newbies were added to the list of Social Network platforms: FourSquare, Jumo, Vimeo, Yelp, Picassa, Ning, Delicious, CrowdRise, FirstGiving, Razoo and Causes. FourSquare had the most substantive presence among the newcomers with 4% of nonprofits utilizing the platform.

Are Nonprofits Raising Money Via Social Networks?

While the number of organizations raising between $1 to $10K annually has risen each year from 38% in 2009 to 46% in 2011, the number of nonprofits raising $100,000 or more per year on social networks doubled this year to 0.4%, a very thin slice of the sector.

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eNonprofit Benchmarks Study Reveals Latest Metrics for Advocacy, Fundraising and Social Media

Do you know the average click-through and open rates on action alerts and fundraising appeals across the nonprofit sector? Are enewsletters still worth your organization’s time? Are nonprofits experimenting with mobile more? Check out the 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study from M+R Strategic Services and NTEN which surveyed 40 nonprofit organizations and analyzed all of this data and more.

Key Benchmarks: How Did Your Nonprofit Measure Up?

Online Fundraising

Online fundraising grew 14% from 2009 to 2010. However, it’s important to note that the 2010 fundraising response rate was actually 0.08% and fell 19% on average from 2009 to 2010. So how’s it possible that online fundraising actually grew 14%? The study said that the International sector drove this growth, which experienced a 163% increase in donations  spurred by disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti and the flooding in Pakistan. Many nonprofits also saw an increase in the number of donations, a sign that that more people feel that economy is recovering.

Out of all sectors in the nonprofit community, International groups had the highest average gift size ($117) for a one-time gift and monthly donations ($33 monthly gifts). This is likely due to their on-the-ground work in critical disaster areas and where donors feel that their donations are making a big difference.  The average one time donation across sectors was $60 and $20 for monthly giving.

Across all sectors, one-time donations made up 90% or more of all online revenue. Nonprofits need to pay special attention to this stat. On average, only 10% of your online members are making more than one donation. Why is that? Are you online fundraising appeals compelling enough? Are you doing a good job telling your story and not getting caught in organizational red tape? Are you donation pages optimized for the user? Or is the donation flow clunky and confusing? Are you treating your donors like an ATM machine or do you have a well thought-out strategy for cultivating them and moving them up the ladder.

Online Advocacy and Email

Advocacy emails had the highest open, click-through, and response rates of any type of email, as well as the lowest unsubscribe rate. Fundraising emails had the lowest click-through rate. These stats are not surprising and show how many more people on nonprofit’s list are willing to take some sort of action on behalf of your organization, but they require a much deeper level of nurturing and engagement to turn them into donors.

The 2010 advocacy response rate was 3.3%. From 2009 to 2010, advocacy response rates declined 7% on average.

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