Nonprofit Online Marketing Benchmarks and Best Practices

“If the content’s relevant, people will go to it. If it’s just, ‘let me take my direct mail and version it and push it out,’ I don’t think that’s going to be particularly engaging," he adds. "And you’re going to continue to see declining and very small response rates."

• Fundraising appeal effectiveness increased in 2010. Clickthrough rates improved to 1.76 percent in 2010 from 1.72 percent in 2009, and response rates were 0.16 percent — up from 0.15 percent in 2009 — helping offset the continuing decline in overall e-mail open rates.

• Haiti relief played a strong role in growing aggregate online fundraising.

Another key, according to Prince, is multichannel integration.

“Interaction with constituents is becoming profoundly multichannel,” he says. “It’s not just direct mail. It’s not just e-mail. It’s not just social media. It’s a combination of all of them. … When we did the year-end study last year, there was some data that showed as people engaged online, they tended to give more across all the channels. So the folks who engaged online would actually write a check to direct mail, donate online, engage via social media. So engaging the constituent through multiple channels is really having an effect in terms of donations as well.”

“To touch on Andy’s point, we oftentimes see that people will get the mail and then go online to fulfill the gift, much the way that we do with catalogs,” McCarthy adds. “In fact, I got a mailing yesterday from Soap.com, where I can order my detergent online and they’ll deliver it to my house. I would have never thought to go to Soap.com if they hadn’t sent me the direct-mail piece. So we’ve entered into an inherently multichannel world, where there are lots of connection points for our relationships with the charities that we care about.”