2013 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study is Here!

The annual eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, authored by M+R Strategic Services and NTEN, was released today and has some really interesting findings. We’re still digging into the details, but wanted to share some top-level findings from the report.

• Online revenues have increased, email lists are growing, and social media is reaching ever more supporters.

• BUT, email fundraising response rates are down over the previous year by 21%. Could be many reasons for this (the election, fewer legislative battles, lack of international/humanitarian crises), but it also could be driven by organizations sending fundraising messages to unresponsive email addresses over long periods of time, which drag down results. Advocacy response rates are down 8%.

• Click-through rates are also down for fundraising emails, which points to the need for nonprofits to focus on engagement within fundraising and advocacy messaging.

• Message volumes and open rates remained flat over the previous year.

• 33% of online revenue is coming from emails with the remainder coming from other sources like web giving, peer referrals and social media.

• The number of Twitter followers of study participants increased by 264% and for every 1,000 email subscribers, groups in the study have 149 Facebook fans and 53 Twitter followers.

• Text messaging lists grew 32% on average with an 8% list churn and an average of nine texts sent per subscriber. With 76% of mobile subscribers coming from web form sign ups, there’s likely a lot of overlap between organizations’ mobile and email lists. 

Download a copy of the full report and the infographic summarizing all the information here.