Kintera reports on clients' success in online fundraising for tsunami appeals
Howard Lake | 11 January 2005 | News
US online fundraising provider Kintera has shared details of how it helped its clients respond to the public’s urge to give in response to the Asian tsunami earthquake disaster.
During the week from 28 December 2004 to 3 January, seven Kintera clients raised over $50.7 million online and processed 281,092 gifts. The average gift size was $180.40. During peak giving time, Kintera was processing 80,000 online transactions per day.
While other non-profits’ websites buckled under the demand from visitors and donors, Kintera says that its infrastucture coped well: independent analysts Keynote Systems measured response rates of websites during the peak giving times, and found that Kintera’s sites performed “without any fluctuations”.
Advertisement
Non-profits who found their sites and systems were unable to cope contacted Kintera who responded quickly. Organisations which benefited included World Vision, OneSrilanka Foundation, and Catholic Relief Services.
The speed and level of giving was remarkable: in one week, Doctors without Borders received online 623% of the sum it had received online throughout 2004.
Kintera gave more detail about one of its clients, the US Fund for UNICEF. In the first week of its tsunami appeal, the non-profit received $16.7 million online, compared to $1.6 million in the year until the disaster. This total included a single $1.1 million Web mail-in donation (in which a donor prints a form from the Web site and posts it in), a gift five times larger than any received in that category, according to Kintera.
The US Fund for UNICEF was also pro-active in its fundraising. It sent email appeals to 73,875 subscribers, resulting in $413,284 of donations ($5.59 per email sent). These emails achieved a 25.8% open rate and 6.9% click through rate. During 2004 up to the disaster, the non-profit had sent 646,322 emails with an average click through rate of 4.2% and an open rate of 21.7%.
Keynote Systems measured response rates websites during the peak giving times, and reported that US Fund For UNICEF also performed without any fluctuations, even though on one day they processed over $30,000 of transactions.
Before the disaster, the average online gift was $113. During the week of the disaster, the average online gift was $148, an increase of 31%.
Kintera partnered with UK agency Whitewater last year to bring its services to Europe.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.