Online Giving Trends

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Online Giving Trends
Tech News Staff Writer

As online fundraising tools have matured, they have become more user friendly and no longer require training or technical experience. This allows small organizations to communicate more effectively with prospective donors through online marketing efforts to increase contributions. NY Charities is one provider in this arena that provides free services to charities. Its mission is to level the playing field for small charities.

The desire to quickly launch cost-effective fundraising strategies can be summed up by the fact that of the 60,000 NY State charitable organizations displayed through the NY Charities giving portal, 70% have annual budgets under five million.

Christine Cronin, President of NY Charities, recently spoke with Tech News regarding industry trends. "What has happened has been a shift towards specialized fundraising campaigns such as special events. Any charity, no matter how small, can use this feature. Coming up with interesting ways to successfully market charities on the web is a great space to be in. Very exciting!"

With five full time development staff, plus consultants and volunteers working on online development and graphic design, Cronin indicated that development efforts at NY Charities sought to expand customizable templates to e-cards and e-newsletters. The tools would be user friendly and designed for customization with little or no HTML experience.

Supported by a grant from the New York Community Trust, NY Charities conducted twenty educational workshops throughout New York City this past year. They designed the sessions to show nonprofit organizations that raising funds online was not as daunting as they may have believed.

Program, development and executive staff from nonprofits attended the events and due to the strong response, NY Charities expect the workshops to continue throughout 2007 and expand to all five boroughs.

Online Giving Portals
Most giving portals have branched out to include resources for all types of giving including volunteer time.

JustGive.org
Network For Good
NY Charities

Partying for a Purpose
Charities are increasingly rolling out programs that encourage party hosts to hit up their guests for donations. ? Wall Street Journal

The Young and The Generous
A Network For Good study of $100 Million in online giving to 20,000 charities. - PDF Report

Charitable givers discouraged by junk mail
USA Today reports on why many Donors wish to remain anonymous.

Publications
The ePhilanthropy Foundation provides an extensive list of books related to the topic of online fundraising.

"Many users dive in to use special events functionality like e-ticketing and the new and exciting industry trend is to extend customizable templates for e-cards and e-newsletters."
-Christine Cronin
President, NY Charities

Pictured below is a recent NY Roadrunners E-Card campaign. NY Charities and other industry providers are developing automated tools for users to build custom campaigns through template driven solutions.

National Perspective
Network For Good, the largest national portal for online giving recently surpassed one hundred million in online donation processing. A report distributed this fall provides a collection of insight into giving trends and analysis.

Highlights of the report include:

New Yorkers ranked first nationally in terms of total giving and by the size of the average donation.

The cost savings of online marketing verses traditional methods was sighted with sources indicating that it could cost $1.25 to raise a dollar from a new donor through direct mail while the costs per dollar raised online could be as little as five cents.

A small number of organizations draw much of the donations. 50% of online donations processed by Network For Good over the past five years were directed at 1% of registered organizations.

The median age of donors at Network for Good is 38, with the average between 39 and 40. This is significantly younger than offline donors, who tend to be 60+.

Total online giving grew from 192 Million in 1999 to 4.5 Billion in 2005.

While interesting, cumulate data can distract you from your online fundraising efforts. Experts recommend that the most successful approach to online fundraising is to build and cultivate your email lists for targeted and creative campaigns. The dominant industry trend is promising for small organizations who will continue to benefit from free and low cost tools for online giving which continue to mature in the marketplace.

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