Will social media savvy non-profits grow their online fundraising 10x faster than the industry average?

Photo by Philipp Roth.

Social media engagement and social fundraising for non-profits are so new that it is hard to know exactly how big its impact will be on the bottom line. Time will tell, but many leading non-profits believe that social media will be transformative: that it will change the way they connect with and empower its supporters and ultimately, how and from whom they raise money.

One of our interns at Fundly interviewed 13 non-profits on the topic of social media fundraising. All organizations interviewed were early adopters of social media. We asked about their expectations for growth in online fundraising supported by social fundraising tools.

All of these organizations look to social media to engage more frequently and more deeply with volunteers and supporters, without adding additional burden to an overworked staff.  Several of these organizations are turning to social media to form the backbone of massive capital campaigns to the tune of $50 million or more.  For the purpose of our thought experiment, we excluded these “XXL non-profits” from the below calculations, leaving us with fundraising predictions from nine non-profits. While the data collected from these nine is of course not statistically significant, the results do raise interesting questions for further research. So we decided to share the results with you here regardless.

On average, these nine non-profit organizations interviewed raised $302,800 online in 2010.  The median online raise in 2010 was $216,000.

The nine non-profits all predicted dramatic growth for their online fundraising efforts in 2011: an increase between 94% and 156% in 2011 as compared to 2010.

The industry average increase in online fundraising is 16% to 56% per year, as reported in the 2010 Online Giving Report.  This means that the social-media-savvy group could be growing its online fundraising efforts between two and ten times faster than the industry average.

Of course this is only anecdotal evidence at best and a broader sample and survey are required to draw any conclusions, but I am left to wonder: will social media savvy organizations indeed outperform their peers in 2011?

We are interested in your thoughts! Please share them with us here or e-mail me at dboyce at fundly dot com.

In the meantime, sign up for your free trial of Fundly’s social media engagement tools here.
Dave Boyce, CEO Fundly