Posted on June 14, 2004

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Online Giving to Charities Makes Impressive Gains

Online giving to the country's largest charities surged in 2003, with many organizations posting double- and triple-digit percentage gains as combined Internet donations to 157 respondents topped $100 million, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

According to the Chronicle's fifth annual survey of online fundraising, online donations rose by 48 percent at the 146 organizations that provided figures for 2003 and 2002, up from $60.5 million in 2002. Donations doubled at forty-six of the charities that responded to the survey, while thirty-six chalked up gains of more than 50 percent and only eighteen organizations reported a drop in the amount they received. (The comparisons do not include the American Red Cross, which received the unusually large amount of $65.9 million in 2002, in the wake of 9/11, followed by only $1.9 million in 2003.)

Nonprofits around the country have seen an increase in the number of online gifts they receive as donors have become increasingly comfortable making financial transactions online and as charities themselves have become more sophisticated in their use of the Web and e-mail to raise money. "Organizations, especially large organizations, are now putting online fundraising revenue into their budget," said Madeline Stanionis, a fundraising consultant in San Francisco. "Before it was such a small percentage it was gravy, and now it's a line item."

Of the 135 organizations that provided figures for both online contributions and total contributions, only twenty-six raised 1 percent or more of their total revenue online in 2003. However, two charities, Heifer International and the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, reported raising more than 15 percent of their total revenue online. "Our companies expect us to make campaigning convenient for them," said Renee V. Nelson, director of the ePledge Initiative at the Atlanta United Way. "So they said, 'Give us an option or we will look at corporate providers.'"

E-mail remains one of the primary ways charities drive traffic — and donors — to their Web sites. But organizations frequently lack addresses for donors. In the Chronicle survey, the median figure for the percentage of contributor e-mail addresses collected was 18 percent, and of the eighteen organizations that reported having e-mail addresses for 50 percent or more of their donors, ten were colleges and universities. In an effort to improve those results, a growing number of nonprofits are experimenting with buying addresses through e-mail appending, a commercially available service in which the names of an organization's donors are run against master databases of names and e-mail addresses to identify matches.

Wallace, Nicole. “Online Donations Surge.” Chronicle of Philanthropy 6/10/04.

Primary Subject: Philanthropy and Voluntarism

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