Trends in What’s Trending

What’s trending? How often do we hear that on daily basis? Even before the term was hijacked by social media, trends were important. And yet, it is amazing how little attention nonprofit staff and board members pay attention to them.

One of our consultants just mentioned that he had recently attended his local professional conference. For the past five years, he said, attendance has been dwindling. Is anyone talking about this? Has staff tried to understand the source of this trend? Has the board discussed what should be done? Should the organization continue the conference? radically reinvent it? Has anyone talked to members? prior year conference attendees? I know lots of people who are members and/or regular attendees and no one I know has been approached.

We watch trends so we can respond ahead of the curve and not after the fact. We watch trends so we can be proactive, stop problems before they escalate benchmark ourselves against others. Trends are often missed by boards because of the way boards receive information.

When boards sit, meeting after board meeting, receiving snapshots of what has happened since the last meeting, trends aren’t visible. This is just one reason why meeting agendas built on report after report are bad. First, it doesn’t engage board members and second, it doesn’t give them any useful data—the very data they need to do the true work of a board. It doesn’t do a board any good to know that attendance at this year’s conference was 231. That’s a number without context. In terms of board thinking, that becomes a number that gets factored into the determination of did we at least cover our costs or, better yet, make a profit. But it does not put that number in the context of its being a 3% drop from last year, which was a 5% drop over the year before and a total of a 15% drop over the last five years. There’s the meat of the matter and what both board and staff should be strategically addressing.

Truthfully, I am more than a little amazed at how little nonprofits look at trend data. And even more amazed that boards don’t insist on it. It is hard to understand your own operations without it, and even harder to benchmark yourself against the trends of the larger environment.

The opening sentence of the 2014 Benchmark Study, an annual study done collaboratively by M+R and NTEN that to see trends in electronic fundraising and advocacy, is good advice for nonprofits to follow: “…we don’t obsess about online metrics once a year, for Benchmarks. We obsess about the numbers constantly—day by day, email by email, dollar by dollar.” Okay, day by day may be a bit much, but you ignore them completely at your own peril. Given the recency of this study, it is a good place to start with understanding national trends so you can benchmark your own outcomes and learn a thing or two.

The identified trends come from 53 American nonprofits that shared the following 2013 data: 2+ billion email messages that went to 41+million subscribers; $324+million donated by 5.6+ million on-line donors; and 7.5 million advocacy emails. The sheer numbers of emails sent might explain the declining response rate to email fundraising appeals, which dropped by 11%, and to advocacy appeals, which dropped by 25%. What is interesting though, and does it say something about passion for giving vs. advocacy, people’s wallets, all of the above or none of the above, while the open rate for both types of emails was virtually the same (12% of fundraising appeals, 13% for advocacy emails), both the click through rate (.45% and 2.9%, respectively) and the response rate (.07% for fundraising, 2.0% for advocacy) were considerably greater for advocacy emails than fundraising ones. And, despite this difference, email contributes almost 1/3 of dollars raised online. Not bad for a .07% response rate! So, those unsure about the value of on-line giving, this trend data might be just what you need to push you over the keyboard.

From 2012 to 2013, online giving increased by 14%; regular, monthly giving contributed a good portion of that increase, as it grew by 25% and made up 16% of all on-line giving. But proof of the message that every marketing and fundraiser spouts these days that no nonprofit can afford to put all of its eggs in one form of reaching out to (potential) donors is the finding that web traffic grew by 16%. What is of importance here is that more website visitors (.69%) made a gift than email recipients clicked through (.45%) or gave (.07%). And when website visitors found a site’s online donation page, the conversion rate was 15%! Adding to the argument that you have to do it all is the fact that Facebook fans grew by 37% and Twitter followers by 46%. Keep in mind that despite the size of the growth, Facebook fans and Twitter followers are still a small band of supporters compared to those who connect with an organization via its website.

While this study is jam-packed with datapoints by which you could benchmark your own operations, I’ll rattle off only a few more.
• You can keep on sending all those electronic solicitations in December, but why? Yes, the month of December had the highest number of emails (7) than any other month, with October being the second highest with a “mere” 2.4. But, December’s click through rate was actually slightly lower than the annual average response rate (.06% versus .07%, respectively). The authors of the report see this as a positive—more opportunities mean a greater chance of responding; I’d think about that carefully, if I were you.
• The study found no difference in the day of the week a message was sent and its response rate. So, if you think Tuesdays are the best day to send emails, keep on doing it, as it really doesn’t seem to matter.

For now, I’ll stop throwing data at you. If you care to understand the value of your electronic fundraising efforts (and your electronic advocacy efforts, perhaps a future topic), then do your own perusing of this report. Make it personal to your organization (there’s data by size and by sector) and benchmark it. And for smart’s sake, look at your trends!