It’s a busy, crowded world out there, with lots of other organizations jostling for the attention of your supporters online and in their email inboxes. We hope this report can help arm you with the information you need to benchmark your performance and guide your fundraising strategies this year and beyond.
As in prior years, to be included in the reported data, organizations must have used the Blackbaud Luminate® platform consistently for a minimum of three years through June 2018. Data from other Blackbaud online fundraising tools was not included in this analysis. Using the housefile and transaction data from 937 nonprofit organizations using the Blackbaud Luminate Online platform allows us to avoid two major sources of research bias common in many studies. The first, called referral bias, occurs when groups that volunteer to participate in a study often perform differently than non-volunteers. The second, called measurement bias, occurs from comparing organizations’ results from different sources and measuring them in different ways. This is commonly seen when different organizations selectively include or exclude various sources of online fundraising data, such as e-commerce, ticket sales, event registration fees, and donation form giving when defining their online revenue. Making valid comparisons is difficult when the data is volunteered or when sources are self-selected or normalized to look better. As much as we would have liked to include every Blackbaud customer in this year’s study, our objective is to provide nonprofits the best and most accurate insight into how the industry fared in fiscal year 2017–2018. As such, we excluded organizations that did not have at least 36 months of data on the Blackbaud Luminate Online platform, as organizations migrating to a new platform tend to perform differently than those with an established program. Because of this exclusion, the number and composition of organizations in our study will always vary slightly depending on when they join Blackbaud and when they deploy additional modules.
Organizations with at least 36 complete months of data on the Blackbaud Luminate platform were combined into groups that we believed to be similar based on a common organizational mission or vertical within the nonprofit sector. In the NTEE verticals, similar cohorts are combined with other organizations that are believed to perform similarly. In other cases, the mission was so narrow that the resulting sample was too small to be statistically significant. Verticals that did not have at least 10 similar organizations with a common mission were excluded from this study.
We do not include all verticals in all metrics. A vertical would be excluded if a very small sample size of customers in that vertical met the criteria. For example, advocacy is a metric that is not as relevant for a public broadcasting station or hospital as it might be for an environmental organization. As a result, none of the advocacy-related metrics in this study includes results for public broadcasting stations or hospitals.
Talk data with us! Our team of experts can work with you to create your own personalized benchmark review that provides a more in-depth analysis of your program’s performance. Contact your customer success manager or email us at solutions@blackbaud.com.
This report is for informational purposes only. Blackbaud makes no warranties, expressed or implied, in this summary. The information contained within represents the current views of the authors on the topics discussed as of the date of this publication; it is the intellectual property of Blackbaud, Inc. and may not be reproduced without permission. All Blackbaud product names appearing herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blackbaud, Inc. The names of companies or products not owned by Blackbaud may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, foundations, companies, education institutions, healthcare organizations and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through cloud software, services, expertise, and data intelligence. The Blackbaud portfolio is tailored to the unique needs of vertical markets, with solutions for fundraising and relationship management, marketing and engagement, financial management, grant and award management, organizational and program management, social responsibility, payment services, and analytics. Serving the industry for more than three decades, Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, and has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit www.blackbaud.com.