In general, the research work we do starts out with general trends and moves into more specific trends. As you might imagine, we get asked all the time for macro trends and also stats specific to certain areas of the nonprofit sector.

Blackbaud found that total online revenue grew 46% in 2009 compared to 2008. That is a basic trend comparison between the totals for both years. Not unlike reports from groups like Giving USA which publish trend information for a particular year compared to previous years. And just like with reports like Giving USA, the total number of nonprofits in the sample are changing. It helps to answer one simple question – did total online giving grow or shrink in a given year and by how much.

Another analysis we did was a strict year-over-year comparison between the same 1,703 nonprofits in 2008 and 2009 where we had complete transactional and verified data for both years. These nonprofits had a 21% year-over-year median growth rate in online revenue. The YOY trends, in particular by online revenue bands, are more appropriate for benchmarking purposes.

My perspective is that the YOY trend is a much more valuable and important piece of information. But as you might imagine, lots of people just want to know how much the entire fundraising channel is growing. The longitudinal data for total online giving is one way of showing this.

Do you have a theory about this? My own is that the 2009 online donation total Blackbaud used the calculate the overall 2009 growth rate included many more individual charities (~ 2,300) than the 2008 number they worked from (they say it was ~1,700). If that’s the case, there is a very misleading (if not downright erroneous) skew. Even groups doing very well online are now finding their “below benchmark” results unnecessarily discouraging. And that’s unfortunate.