Mobile usage among young donors grows as online revenue rises
Melanie May | 27 April 2016 | News
Online revenue for nonprofits is growing as charities and supporters increasingly interact via online and mobile channels, according to M+R’s latest Benchmark X study.
The results show that nonprofits are investing heavily in digital advertising: those in the study spent an average of $0.04 for every dollar raised online in 2015. Online revenue was up 19% in 2015, while email revenue saw a 25% increase with email giving accounting for 29% of all online revenue last year.
Nonprofits are also communicating increasingly with supporters online, sending the average subscriber 49 email messages in 2015, including 19 fundraising appeals, They also posted 1.3 times a day on Facebook, and tweeted 3.8 times a day last year.
For every 1,000 email subscribers, nonprofits have 355 Facebook fans, 132 Twitter followers, and 19 Instagram followers. This represents an average of 29% growth of support on Facebook and a 25% growth of support on Twitter over a 12-month period for the nonprofits in the study.
However, while nonprofits received $44 in donations for every 1,000 fundraising messages sent, email open rates, click-through rates, and response rates all declined. The findings reveal that younger generations are increasing connecting with the causes they are interested in via their mobiles. Overall, 13% of the $481 million in online donations raised by leading organisations in 2015 were made from mobile devices.
The study also looked at churn. By the end of 2015, groups in the study had lost an average of 11.8% of the subscribers they had on January 1, with 6.2% due to unsubscribes, and 5.6% from hard bounces. However, overall, churn is down. For the organisations that tracked list changes in 2014 and 2015, churn rates were down by more than 75% year-over-year.
The study is M+R’s tenth in-depth report with Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) on nonprofit online fundraising, advocacy, and marketing. 105 nonprofits participated, including Planned Parenthood, Oxfam America, GLAD, and U.S. Fund for UNICEF. The study analyses the results of more than 2.8 billion email messages sent to over 69 million list subscribers; more than $481 million of online donations from over 13.1 million online gifts; and 8.2 million advocacy actions.
M+R is offering nonprofits the opportunity to analyse their own results and compare them to the industry figures with its free Benchmarks Yourself tool at www.mrbenchmarks.com.
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.