We’re happy to bring you the Blackbaud Luminate Online Benchmark Report for the 12th straight year. We do this work to help detect and surface trends within nonprofit fundraising and engagement programs. These email list (housefile), engagement, and fundraising benchmarks can help you evaluate the health of your program and discover potential areas for growth. We include insight into performance metrics from over 900 nonprofits to help organizations gauge how they’re performing relative to their peers. Ultimately the best benchmarks are your own. We hope this information inspires you to benchmark your organization’s year-over-year performance and use this information to grow support for your mission.
AUTHOR/ Kathryn Hall, Senior Product Marketing Manager
CONTRIBUTORS/ Julia Lenz, Senior Product Marketing ManagerRachel Simon, Former Director, Vertical MarketingKatie Walters, Product Marketing Manager
This report includes aggregate data from July 1, 2015–June 30, 2018, from 937 mature Blackbaud Luminate Online customers—all with at least three years of consecutive usage data. Collectively over the last fiscal year, these organizations raised over $1.54 billion, handled almost 23 million online transactions, and sent over 3.6 billion emails.
This large data sample comes directly from our Blackbaud Luminate Online cloud-based platform, giving us a unique view of
online engagement across the nonprofit industry. We base each year-over-year measurement on a consistent set of clients in each metric. Metrics found in this report cannot be compared with the same metrics found in prior reports as the specific organizations included will differ. Although we include some commentary with the statistics, we prefer to primarily cover “what is” rather than “why.” We try to spotlight the trends and where things are moving.
We use self-classified National Taxonomy of Exempt Entity (NTEE) verticals as our categorization guideline. Canadian organizations have been included directly in the mix with their U.S. counterparts. Organizations that raise 90% or more of their reported funds through peer-to-peer events using Blackbaud TeamRaiser® have been excluded from this study. This data will likely appear in the Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Study.
All values in this report are expressed as medians. We use medians instead of averages to provide a more accurate view of the benchmarks. This method helps de-emphasize outliers. Medians represent the middle value between the largest and smallest in a set of numbers, so are less likely to be influenced by extremely high or low results for some organizations.
For some results, we also show quartiles. A quartile is the data point halfway between the bottom and median or median and top. They’re not averages; they’re the metrics that fall on the dividing line between quarters of the list.