Convio, an online software provider has released its Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Study that finds online donations have increased with an average growth rate of 27 percent. The data is based on the analysis of online donations, email addresses, Web traffic and Web site registrations for 30 Convio clients from July 1,2005 to June 30, 2006.
“By comparing its performance against similar groups, a nonprofit organization can more easily identify what aspects of their online marketing programs are performing strongly versus areas that may need improvement,” said Vinay Bhagat, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Convio, Inc. “Our benchmarking study provides nonprofit professionals with a framework to help refine their Internet tactics, allocate resources more efficiently and improve overall effectiveness of their online marketing initiatives.”
For the study, nonprofit organizations were put into three size categories, which covered, small, medium and large. Email file size was calculated by the total number of email records in the Convio database as of June 30, 2006. Email addresses proved to be particularly valuable.
Nonprofits with more than 100,000 email addresses received between two to three times more online donations than those with a lesser amount of addresses. The average rate of growth in email addresses was 47 percent from 2005 to 2006. Organizations with less than 50,000 email addresses grew the fastest with close to double the rate of the total index.
Organizations with the largest amount of email addresses also saw the most amount of unique monthly traffic to their sites. For the year studied the average number of unique visitors to nonprofits per month were 26,481, which was a 30 percent increase over the previous year.
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