Online fundraising benchmarking study - how well is your email activity performing?

The US Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) adds a sanguine take on the report's findings that nonprofits' email open, click-through and response rates fell during during 2006-2007.

In Don't Make Email Open Rates Your Canary in the Coal Mine the organisation commented that email tracking is still not wholly reliable. "The NTEN study found that in some cases 25 percent of recorded clicks and actions in response to an email did not register as an 'open' due to spam or image blockers in recipient email programs."

So don't panic if your overall email open and click-through rates are not as good as they were. One expert is quoted as saying: "organisations need to make sure to segment their results and separately tabulate open rates of specific groups within the full email list. An overall drop in opens, for example, may be concealing a surge in activity by more committed donors".

Michael Gilbert at Nonprofit Online News offers a succinct summary of the findings of the 2008 eNonprofits Benchmarks Study.

"(1) Email open rates, click-through rates and response rates have fallen from 2006 to 2007. (2) The average nonprofit in the study sent an average of just over 4 emails per subscriber per month. (3) The annual churn rate dropped from 21 percent to 19 percent. (4) The total amount raised online increased by 19 percent. (5) The average advocacy email response rate was 7.5 percent. (6) The average fundraising email response rate was .13 percent".

He added that online donation totals were still being skewed a little by larger donations: online donations of $1,000 represented just 1% of donations by number yet made up 20% of total online donations.

Similarly, only 5% of email list subscribers took six or more actions online in a year but they accounted for 42% of organisations' total actions.