E-Fundraising:
Fire or Fizzle?
by Dirk Rinker
Four
years ago, Campbell Rinker reported on the hype surrounding
the advent of e-fundraising and
Internet research for nonprofits. Given the fact
that the world we now occupy has changed dramatically,
it seems appropriate to reassess our surroundings.
Researchers
predicted that email advertising would grow from
393 billion messages in 1999 to nearly
two trillion messages in 2003. The actual increase
has been slower. Total e-mail volume in the United
States was at 1.5 trillion messages in 2003 and
is now projected to increase to 2.7 trillion in 2007.
That, friends, represents about forty messages
per
day for every e-mail address in America, as near
as we can figure.
In 2001,
a Wirthlin Report survey found 33 percent of American
households had home Internet access, with an average
of two users per home. By February 2004, that figure
had increased to 75 percent of all US households
with a phone line (203 million), according to a Nielsen/NetRatings
survey. Internet trends researcher eMarketer estimates
that 147 million people across the country now use
e-mail almost every day. In the US alone, 88 percent
of Internet users over age 18 have personal e-mail
accounts, and 46 percent of US workers have e-mail
access at work.
One
1997 study indicated that donors were half again
more likely than the general population
to own a home
computer. Though hard figures are hard to find, we
expect that the gap between donors and the general
population has narrowed; in our view, it is very
likely that more than 85 percent of donor households
are wired.
Reading
or sending E-mail is the most popular use of the
Internet, reaching an all-time high
of 91
percent among Internet users between the ages
of 18 and 64 according to a Pew Internet & American
Life Project survey. Internet searching is
the next most-used function of the Internet
among users.
But
whether donors actually prefer email to other means
of communication
typically
depends
on the
donor. Most donors we’ve surveyed
still prefer postal mail. To be sure, they
see e-mail as cheaper and
more immediate than postal mail, and think
it more responsible for that reason. Yet
a declining percentage
of donors prefer the medium as the novelty
wears off and as spam continues to clog
their inboxes.
Recent studies that we’ve conducted
show that one in seven donors is open to
receiving e-mail solicitations
from organizations, down from one in five
a few years ago.
We have
also heard anecdotal evidence that response to e-mail
solicitations is about
one-tenth that
of postal mail solicitations; if you
typically get a
three percent response in the mail, you
might see three-tenths percent response
via e-mail.
But factor
in the effects of a typically higher
e-mail average gift (about $100) and a lower production
cost
(pennies per message), and you have yourself
a highly efficient
revenue stream.
More about
donors receiving e-mail: We have found that as donors
become more
invested in the work
of an organization, their openness
to receiving email
from the specific people at an organization
increases. In personal interviews we
conducted with major
donors to one organization, several
commented that an e-mail
relationship with the CEO or President
of
the organization was (or would be)
special to them.
However, organizations
should bear in mind that this e-mail
contact is much more personal than
the typical
broadcast newsletter.
We have
also seen growth in the number of donor e-mail addresses
at
organizations.
In 2001,
it was rare
for an organization to have more
than a few
e-mail addresses for every 1,000
donors. These days,
it is not uncommon for an organization
to have 20%-50%
incidence of e-mail addresses. The
higher end of this range is at the
level where
an organization
might realistically accept results
from a random sample as being without
bias,
and
suitable
for findings like donor satisfaction
surveys, communications
audits
and informal constituent polls.
Just as
the quantity of e-mail and the number of households
with Internet
access
has increased,
the availability of quality sample
names signed up for
online research panels have also
increased dramatically. About 20% of the surveys
Campbell Rinker now
conducts
are online, and a good number of
these rely on sample lists
of millions of names
that are engineered to look, act
and participate just like a random sample
of phone numbers.
We have
also seen a tremendous level of success with donor
and member
groups using
a technique
we call
mail-to-Internet, or M2I. In this
model, we take a random sample
of constituent
addresses and
mail a letter or card inviting
them to participate in
an online research study. Response
rates have
varied from 10%-25% depending on
the incentive we offer.
These response rates compare very
favorably to traditional mail and
phone surveys,
and they
afford the benefit
of lower costs as well.
Furthermore,
there are some new research tools out there that
lend
themselves
exceptionally well to
the Internet – such as
ways to test program benefits,
evaluate
production concepts, and delve
into the heart-felt perceptions
of a group of donors without
concern for where they might
be physically.
Look for articles exploring these
techniques in future
issues.
Four years
ago, we predicted that the wired community would
have
matured enough by
now to enable representative
findings and comparability between
Internet, mail and phone surveying
techniques.
There are still
a few pockets of population,
such as
older adults, that remain undeserved.
Yet any
reservations we once held about
survey research on the Internet
have
largely disappeared.
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