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Using the Internet for Fundraising
A One Day Introductory Tour

College of General Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Room 421, Williams Hall - November 10, 2001, 9:30-4:30

Internet Fundraising 2001: The State of the Art

How will September 11 change online fundraising?

Before September 11: Chronicle of Philanthropy survey:
181 of the 400 charities that raised the most money from private source (Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 2001 | June 2000)

  • Drop in the bucket? Total raised on Internet: $7 million (less than 1% of total raised)
  • Mostly from own web sites - only $150,000 from portals or malls
  • New donors - 31 organizations were able to track the giving history of their wired donors - 20 of them said at least half the money came from new contributors, and 10 said that 90% or more were new donors
  • eBay users - Goodwill is using eBay to auction off some of its donated merchandise ($315,000 in past nine months)
  • Salvation Army success -- $150,000 in four months, doing little but add a donate-now button - including a surprise $10,000 credit card gift (but compare with $1.4 billion overall giving in 1999)
  • Other benefits - more convenient to give online once the "avoidance threshhold" is passed; e-mail instead of direct mail saves printing and postage costs

Size of Internet market: one researcher predicts 91 million wired households in the U.S. by 2004. As of October 2000, 41% of all households had Internet access, up from 26.2% in 1998 (NTIA)

Nature of Internet market: It's still a dial-up world, and complicated sites still load very slowly. [more]

BONUS: Visit the web sites of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's top 25 charities, ranked by private contributions for 2000.

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Send comments to Adam Corson-Finnerty (corsonf@fund-online.com) or Laura Blanchard (lblancha@fund-online.com)