It helps to know if your efforts are producing well or poorly, and it's awfully hard to tell if all you have to look at are your own results. And that can be hard to know for online fundraising.
You can get a lot of useful facts from the 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study from M+R Strategic Services and NTEN (PDF; registration required).
There's a lot in the report that's worth your noting, but I want to point out a couple of them.
About email list churn
Some organizations really freak out over list churn. Yes, email lists are more volatile than traditional lists. This data saw a typical turnover of 16.83% in 2009. Of that, only 6.88% was unsubscribe -- that is, people leaving on purpose. The other 10% was other kinds of churn, most of it people not leaving purpose.
And get this:
... we found a positive correlation between email fundraising response rate and unsubscribe rate. The high unsubscribe rate on your fundraising email may be a sign that people are paying attention.
More response, more unsubscribe. That goes along with the old direct mail correlation of more response, more complaints.
Basic success numbers for email
| Low |
High |
|
| Open rate |
10.32% |
16.42% |
| Click-through rate |
0.29% |
1.48% |
| Response rate |
0.04% |
0.28% |
| Unsubscribe rate |
0.19% |
0.38% |
Go get the full study. Lots of useful numbers there.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. 
