The Agitator

Back in June, I asked Gene Austin at Convio whether he would go out on a limb and predict a half-billion year in online fundraising revenue for Convio’s clients. He bravely took up the challenge, offering me a bet that they would … wise man (coward) that I am, I declined the bet.

Last week, Gene shared Convio’s 2008 numbers in a Comment he posted to the original June article. But I wanted everyone to see — and be heartened by — what he reported. So here’s his Comment.

Tom – I wanted to follow-up on the June discussion. While the identity of “don’t tell” remains safe (for now) our clients crushed the $550 million in online revenue in 2008 hitting $777 million. We’d still love to see you at Summit 2009 too. Here’s some overall data from the Convio system in 2008:

Our clients used Convio to:

• Process $777 million in online donations
• power more than 3,500 web domains
• deliver more than 3.1 billion email communications, with greater than 95% deliverabilty rate
• enable 44 million advocacy calls to action

Nice year for our clients.

Gene

I’ll say! Gene, you deserve a raise.

I have no idea what Convio’s "market share" is in the nonprofit online fundraising universe. But I’ll wager that if Convio’s clients raised $777 million online, then perhaps all nonprofits topped $2 billion.

What would you say to that, Gene?

Tom Belford