Comments on: Convio’s Online Fundraising Report

By: P. Shelly

P. Shelly — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:02:31 +0000

In your rolling list of agitators I think you spelled Pocono Health Foundation wrong (as Ponoco)

PRS Surfrider Foundation volunteer

By: Quinn Donovan

Quinn Donovan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 21:34:05 +0000

Jim makes an excellent point on the distinction between charitable “giving” versus “receiving”. One of the things we pay special attention to each year when writing the annual Convio Benchmark Study is to ensure that our results represent changes in how the typical nonprofit is performing (receiving) and not the change in the number of nonprofits in the study (giving). To accomplish this, the for-profit world uses a concept called “same store sales. Simply put, same store sales means only comparing sales from stores open during the same time period in an effort to reduce the impact that data from rapidly growing newer stores, or stores open less than a full year, might have on the overall results. In order to reflect this concept of “same store sales” in the nonprofit world, we only include in the Convio Benchmark Study results from nonprofits who have been on the Convio platform during the entire previous 24 month period. Sure this excludes the rapid growth often experienced by nonprofits that are new to online marketing that some other reports choose to include in their studies, but we believe this our methodology is more in the spirit of true “charitable receiving” as Jim defines it.

Thanks Tom for sharing the information with your readers.

By: Jim Mueller

Jim Mueller — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:36:51 +0000

Thanks for alerting so many professionals in the field about all of these great resources. One thought on vocabularly, though. I thinking we need to begin to descriminate between charitable giving and charitable receiving. Charitable giving research is research regarding the actual donor giving or the econometric models like Giving USA and Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. Many other models are charitable receiving. Counting or estimating $ received by a pool of nonprofits. With the growth in nonprofits outstripping the growth in philanthropy in the last several years (growth in 1023 nonprofits has grown 16.4% in the last 3 years) the terms now have quite divergent meaning. As you have noted mission competition is a reality. Even if giving has generally grown, $ per nonprofit has shrunk. Nonprofit managers need to understand both.