Don Akchin

T.S. Elliott said April was the cruellest month, and this is especially true for trees. April seems to be launch month for a flotilla of surveys, reports and data dumps on the state of all things online. This year we had the 2012 Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index(TM) Study, the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report,  the Sage Nonprofit Solutions Email Marketing Report, and possibly some also-rans.  Feel free to read them. Or just away these highlights: If your nonprofit does not have a Facebook page, you qualify as a Conscientious Objector; 93% of nonprofits are on Facebook, with an average community size of 8,317 fans. 73% of nonprofits staff their social networking with the equivalent of one  half-time employee. 43% have a social networking budget of zero ($00.00). Online fundraising is growing at a healthy clip. The median growth rate was 15.8%, versus 20% in 2010 – a

Want to get free advice from highly paid experts? Last month I interviewed three consultants who advise nonprofits on fundraising and marketing. The interviews appeared on the Nonprofit Marketing 360 blog. Here are links, along with a taste of each interview:   Toby Bloomberg writes the Diva Marketing Blog and hosts Blog Talk Radio. She talks about how social media can help nonprofits perfect “corner grocery store” relationships with donors and constituents.   Michael Stein, a senior executive at Donordigital, co-wrote a groundbreaking book about online fundraising. He discusses the intersection of direct mail and social media.  “People can organize revolutions on Facebook and Twitter, so why not fundraising?”   Mike Kujawski, who blogs at Public Sector Marketing 2.0, talks about building engagement strategies within the risk-averse cultures of government and nonprofit organizations.  “By the end of 2012, over 50% of world Internet access is going to occur via mobile device. Yet today, less than

Charity:Water has had one of the nation’s most successful online fundraising efforts. On Beth’s Blog, social media guru Beth Kanter features an interview with the group’s director of digital, who reveals some of the techniques they have used with good results. Here’s one shrewd piece of advice: “Do it wrong quickly.”

For several months it has been my privilege to conduct interviews with many talented experts who advise nonprofits on fundraising and marketing. The interviews appear weekly on the Nonprofit Marketing 360 blog. Below are links to the interviews that have appeared so far, and a salient excerpt from each interviewee. Sarah Durham - author of Brandraising and founder of BigDuck agency. “For better or for worse, an organization can’t get away with having a really lousy website or ignoring social media.” Jason Dick - owner of A Small Change blog, a major gifts officer. “Nonprofits will have to find a way to build community on their websites and use that as their way to sustain their donor base.” Zach Hochstadt - co-founder of Mission Minded, a branding agency. ”Your brand is not just your logo or your visual identity but a much more holistic concept, in some ways a synonym for reputation.” Sandy Rees - fundraising consultant, author, and owner of Get Fully

“Multi-channel marketing” is the latest buzzword to proliferate and pollute all the multiple channels of communication. (See item below for a good example of why.) Convio has published a survey (produced by Edge Research, of Washington and Baltimore) that looks at how well nonprofits are doing and at what seem to be the  success factors. Blogger Joanne Fritz offers a succinct summary of the findings. One essential element for multi-channel success, the survey suggests, is the technology to synchronize online and direct mail databases. To get you started, blogger John Haydon has six good suggestions for integrating your email list with social media.

Talk about your multi-channel marketing.  Check out this case study: a health nonprofit supplements its end-of-year direct mail appeal with a series of four targeted emails, with outstanding results.

A heap of useful books are being published online and offered for free. Here are this month’s best: Short and Sweet: The Why’s and How’s of Twitter from Fenton Communications, authors of a number of excellent tomes on communications. You can read a preview on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing from Hubspot professes to cover all the basics from keyword strategies and optimization to blogs, mobile and the all-important conversion of traffic into leads. The 7 Habits of Effective Personal Fundraisers from CauseVox distills the success factors that many fundraising professionals exhibit in common. Each download requires a registration, which will put you on a company mailing list, but the material is probably worth that price.

More nonprofits are trying to raise funds using mobile technology, according to research from Kaptivate and the Associaton of Fundraising Professionals (AFP). (It’s still only 9% of nonprofits, but that’s doubled from a year ago.) But what seems to be most promising is not the text-to-give campaigns, which worked brilliantly for disaster relief, but the mobile web, and for several purposes besides fundraising. In an interview with Jocelyn Harmon, study author and Kaptivate CEO Ron Vassallo explains the advantages and drawbacks of text and web, and the start-up costs for each. Then there’s the contrarian view: Consultant Ted Fickes makes the case that “the quickest and most cost-effective place to focus your mobile strategy is your email.”  

Target Analytics (a Blackbaud company) released its 2011 donorCentrics Internet and Multichannel Giving Benchmarking Report on May 31st. Using data from 28 national nonprofits and more than 15 million donors, the report made these findings: Most gifts are received through direct mail. Increasingly, new donors are making their first gift online – and subsequent gifts through other channels (usually direct mail). New donors acquired online are significantly younger and tend to have higher household incomes than donors acquired by direct mail. Online donors tend to give much larger gifts than donors acquired by mail. Although only 7.6% of revenue is given online, 69% of donors of all ages prefer electronic over print communications from nonprofits. So what to make of these facts? There are at least two explanations. 1.  Online may be getting better at acquiring donors, but it doesn’t work well for retention, where direct mail excels. 2. Online

Photo by Ana Pinta The Monitor Institute has issued a report – well, not a report but a deck of 25 slides – on how membership-based advocacy organizations are coping with the dynamic media environment in their fundraising. The short answer: not very successfully. Most are using the old reliables that always worked before – direct mail, e-mail and website – but yields are falling and no replacement strategy is in place. They are also trying social media, but the integration is iffy.

Two reports attempt to shed light on what must surely be the Question of the Year. First, as reported by blogger and prophetess Beth Kanter, an informal Idealware study finds nonprofits saying that Facebook is helping drive event attendance and more readers to the website, but fundraising and volunteers? Not so much.  Then to the Battle of the Titans: Does Twitter or Facebookattract more readers to your website?  Two studies give surprising answers – not only the raw numbers, but the monetary impact of the numbers. Sorry, I’m not spoiling the surprise ending for you – see for yourself.    

Suddenly everyone wants to build a social media platform just for nonprofits. In addition to Jumo and Crowdrise, which act as fundraising portals, and Facebook’s nonprofit program, March saw two new entries. Craig Newmark (the Craig in Craigslist) launched Craigconnects as a way to support worthy organizations from the grassroots. Meanwhile, Google for Nonprofits offers nonprofits a one-stop shop for accessing a suite of Google applications, including up to $10,000 a month worth of Google Adwords.  

NTEN and M+R Strategic Services released their 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study in March, and there’s good news and bad news all through it.  The median email list grew 20%; but the annual email list churn is 18% (8% unsubscribes). Online fundraising grew 14% in one year. But international disaster aid drove that, with 163% growth. Open rates on fundraising email fell 19%, to 0.08%; open rates for advocacy fell 7%, to 3.3%. (Hint: try fund appeals to advocacy respondents) 90% of online donations are one-time gifts. The average organization sent 3.6 emails per subscriber per month (6 in December). For every 1,000 email list names, there are an average 110 Facebook fan page users and 19 Twitter followers.  

Research is a beautiful thing. Whenever frustrated marketers begin to wonder just who is really out there to talk to (or at), they can rest easy knowing that somewhere in America, a think tank is already at work on the answer. This month we have a bumper crop of useful (and free) studies: Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reveals the startling finding that internet users are more likely than others to be active a voluntary group or organization, and social media users are even more likely. The report also notes that certain key internet activities – including donating – are being accepted more uniformly across all age groups. There’s also data on what role the internet played in achieving organizational goals. A Harris Interactive poll on Americans’ charitable giving habits and plans found nearly half (48%) make a small contribution of time or money to organizations and causes

We have often discussed the roles corporate philanthropy plays both in supporting environmental, social, educational (etc.) causes and in the arguments that corporations should not be preemptively philanthropic as corporations (though even those who criticize ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’/CSR tend to encourage share-holders to be philanthropic). A recent argument has flared up over Apple’s unwillingness to allow the selling of apps for its mobile devices designed to garner and/or collect donations. Jake Shapiro, the CEO of PRX, and Beth Kanter seem to be leading the charge, as they have complained since this past summer about Apple’s unwillingness to allow nonprofits to create apps meant to encourage donations. Ms. Kanter has even taken steps to end her iPhone/ATT contract to move to a new phone with the Google Android platform. Will Apple take heed of such switchers?

Network for Good and TrueSense Marketing released a report in December based on Network for Good’s experience from 2003-2009 with 3.6 million online gifts totaling $381 million. The complete study is available for a free download. The report has tons of good data, but here are the highlights: Engagement matters. The strength of the relationship between donor and charity has a significant impact on donor loyalty, retention and gift size. Small improvements to the donor’s online experience can have a big impact on donations. Among the online options, the most loyal donors are those who give through a nonprofit’s own website, versus those giving through charity portals or social media. Those donors also give the highest initial gifts and stay at higher gift levels. Recurring giving is a major driver over time and should be encouraged. Giving online peaks at two times: after large-scale disasters and in December. In fact 22%

Catalog Choice and The Overbrook Foundation are sponsoring the Paperless Choice Challenge, a competition for nonprofit organizations raising money strictly through electronic media. This is one of those contests where winners are determined by online voters. While the Aug. 16 deadline is a bit tight, scanning the contestants may inspire some fresh fundraising ideas.

The Social Media 4 Nonprofits blog has compiled 10 Tips to help convert web visitors into online donors.

The annual M+R eBenchmark study of online outreach separated the small nonprofits from the big boys, and the results were interesting. While large organizations saw declines last year in dollars and average gift size, the small groups (list size under 100,000 names) were up  in both categories (with a 6% increase in dollars). Katya Andresen provides interesting commentary on why, and/or you can read the whole report.

The Idealware blog has two detailed case studies of a prep school and a local United Way using email successfully for fundraising.

Blackbaud and Charity Dynamics have released a white paper on how much difference social media tools (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) make in driving attendance at special fundraising events. Short answer: a lot! Here’s the money quote: In all cases, our research demonstrated that participants who use social media tools set higher fundraising goals, raise more money, and reach more donors. We also found, however, that each of the popular social media tools has a slightly different impact on event participants’ fundraising. The entire white paper is available free online.

When a fundraising agency, in a simple test, tried to donate online to 30 charities, one-third of the attempts failed. Not good for revenue, or for making a good impression on would-be donors. Is your site tripping up donors? Test it out.