Blackbaud Index for April 2011
The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving and The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving provide fundraisers with up-to-date data on fundraising trends and to couple that information with valuable analysis by leaders in the sector.
Blackbaud updates these indices each month and they are based on a three-month moving average of year- over-year percent changes in revenue. This makes them less sensitive to small timing issues or large fluctuations over a short period of time. The latest Index data covers the 3 months ending April 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010.
Overall Fundraising Trends
The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving is a broad-based fundraising index that reports total revenue trends of 1,442 nonprofit organizations representing $2.21 billion in yearly revenue on a monthly basis, both offline and online. The Index is based on actual revenue statistics from nonprofit organizations of all sizes representing arts, culture, and humanities; education; environment and animals; healthcare; human services; international affairs; public and society benefit; and religion sectors.
The Blackbaud Index of Charitable Giving reports that overall revenue increased by 0.4% for the 3 months ending April 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010. Small and medium organizations had positive year-over-year growth, but large sized nonprofits showed a negative trend.
Online Fundraising Trends
The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving is a broad-based fundraising index that reports online revenue trends of more than 1,815 nonprofit organizations representing $442 million in yearly revenue on a monthly basis. The Index is based on actual revenue statistics from nonprofit organizations of all sizes representing arts, culture, and humanities; education; environment and animals; healthcare; human services; international affairs; and public and society benefit sectors.
The Blackbaud Index of Online Giving reports that online revenue increased by 5.2% for the 3 months ending April 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010. Small nonprofits were up 15.4%, medium sized organizations were up 3.2%, and large organizations were up 3.4%.
This decrease continues a trend from January and is attributable to the large amount of Haiti relief giving in 2010. If we exclude online giving to international relief organizations, which were substantially impacted by Haiti giving, the online index shows an increase of 2.6% for the three months ending February 2011, as compared to the same period last year.
The swing back to positive online fundraising growth can be attributed to moving beyond the impact of Haiti giving from 2010. The online giving from that disaster was concentrated during the first few months of 2010. It should also be noted that online giving towards the Japanese earthquake and tsunami was substantially less than fundraising for Haiti.
