4% of large charities' income raised online
Howard Lake | 26 August 2007 | Blogs
Back in June 2006 I posted a blog about a piece of research I was helping CAF with into charities’ new media results: www.fundraising.co.uk/blogs/sarahhughes/2006/06/21/desperately-seeking-hard-facts-a-new-survey/
Well it’s been a long wait but CAF have finally published a headline figure in Charity Trends 2007 stating that the UK’s top 100 fundraising charities (listed in Charity Trends 2006) generate around 4% of their annual voluntary income via new media fundraising methods.
It seems it was a difficult piece of research to successfully recruit charities into (and my call to action post made no difference, ha!) and more difficult still to conduct. Most charities admitted they find it difficult to isolate online income from everything else. This is certainly still my finding when working with charities on developing their online plans and strategies. But it’s something I always try to concentrate some time on (without getting hung up on the problems). How do you know where you are heading if you don’t know where you have come from?
CAF call the figure indicative, and only 21 charities participated, but say that they plan to be able to produce trend data in Charity Trends 2008. They have told me their aim is to publish the research directly in the coming weeks so I will watch out for that and report back. At the time of discussing the research with CAF I did emphasise how useful it would be to have comparisons between online income and other channels, as well as historic comparisons – for example, what was payroll contributing after its first 10 years in play?
In the past‚ I have predicted that most large charities would be raising between 3 and 5% of their overall income online, so it’s a little gratifying to see that validated. But I have also said that the more effective new media communicators would (should) be raising twice that and more, and that smaller charities could have suprises to show us with much stronger yields (less political, less offline marketing baggage, less constipated with bureacracy?).
I’ll try in future weeks to draw this new data together with other information from the charity sector – for example, Virtual Promise – as well as from business, to keep up a current view of new media trends and realities.
Meanwhile, do please comment, and better still, be brave and bold and share details of your own online fundraising results. Go on.
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.