Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, November 6, 2000

Internet Fundraising 2000: The State of the Art

Chronicle of Philanthropy survey:
252 of the 400 charities that raised the most money from private sources (Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 15, 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 (Strategis Group)

BONUS: Visit the web sites of the Chronicle of Philanthropy's top 25 charities, ranked by private contributions for 1999.