More Nonprofit Benchmarks

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on how organizations can use Convio’s Online Nonprofit Benchmarks Study to determine how well they are doing online compared to others. Recently, M+R Strategic Services — in collaboration with NTEN — released their own report, and also gave a presentation at the Human Rights Campaign on some of the report’s findings.

Their report covers a lot of e-marketing campaign metrics, and attempts to really break down the differences between active subscribers of a campaign vs. users who do not take such an active role in terms of participating (e.g. donating money).

Two organizations who participated in the study, NARAL and AARP, shared their experiences in converting inactive users to active, by sending them emails less often in the hopes of reducing churn (you can also download the presentation slides and recording here). They also pointed to specific testing done on their email campaigns, to determine the best copy to send to their constituents. Their campaigns numbers went up in both instances without much effort, confirming the idea that organizations really should be spending that extra effort when creating their newsletters or action campaigns. As NARAL found, it could mean the difference in an additional 0.63 percent response rate for subscribers donating to your cause, which on an email list of over 100,000 really adds up.

Overall, the report is well done and shows the information in a visually appealing manner (I’ll admit that I took a few extra copies!). The findings mirror many of benchmarks in the Convio report. Some of these were:

• Online fundraising grew in 2009 as compared to 2008 but the average gift size was smaller.
• Organizations with smaller list sizes have better response rates.
• Email fundraising response rates averaged at 0.13 percent and email advocacy rates at 4 percent.

However a math nerd like me would caution about putting too much weight in some of their numbers. As my old statistics professor used to say “I can make statistics show you anything I want." Their use of mean vs. medians seems to give some numbers more validity than perhaps they warrant. Similarly, their report only covers 30 organizations and excludes those above the 75th percentile and below the 25th for the different metrics in order to normalize the numbers. So at times, when they segment the data by organization type (or similar subgroups), you’re seeing trend data for as few as three or four organizations. Which such a small sample, it's not clear that the findings are generalizable to other organizations.

Still, these reports are some of the best measuring sticks we have. As primary author Steve Peretz points out in his synopsis of the study, the trends that matters most to you, should be your OWN trends!