Thursday, February 18, 2016

Online, Mobile Lead Charitable Giving Growth

Mobile giving scored headlines for Blackbaud's latest Charitable Giving Report, turning in a performance that shows nonprofits are "past the mobile tipping point when it comes to digital giving," per the report. Overall, the 2015 study found a 1.6% increase in donations via all channels from the previous year, but online outperformed with 9.2% growth--and mobile giving delivered 14% of those online donations. A NonProfitPro article recently provided a good summary of results from Blackbaud's 2015 survey of 5,000 nonprofits. Breaking out trends by nonprofit size and sector spotlights some key charitable giving ups and downs. For example, 2015's strongest donation growth was recorded by international giving, up 5.1% due to a number of big natural disasters, such as the Nepal earthquake, followed by faith-based appeals (up 3.9%) and health care (up 1.9%). Charitable giving actually slipped for other sectors, with human services donors the least generous last year (donations down 2.8%). Higher education, K-12 education, and public and societal benefit donations were also down slightly from 2014, while medical research appeals stayed flat. Yet almost all sectors showed big growth spurts in online giving, led by 15.2% more online donations for higher education, 12.3% growth for K-12 and an 11.2% online surge for environmental causes. Only medical research was down slightly for online donations. Looking at what Blackbaud calls the "key metric" of digital giving--online as a percentage of total giving--the new nonprofit benchmark for online dollars stepped up slightly to an average 7.1% share. But mobile giving stats, tracked for the first time, provide the eye-opener in this year's report, grabbing 14% of online giving dollars per those surveyed. For more detail, go to http://www.nonprofitpro.com/article/online-mobile-giving-grows-more-from-blackbauds-charitable-giving-report/

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

2016 Marketing Spend Seen Up for Most Channels

Marketers will be boosting spending for almost all marketing channels in 2016, according to the latest Winterberry Group forecast reported by Direct Marketing News magazine. Election-year politics and the Olympics are seen as key marketing drivers this year. Overall, data-driven channels, both direct and digital, are expected to grow by 6.4%, with the biggest bump for digital display (desktop and mobile), which is predicted to rise by 20.1%. Search and e-mail will also increase by 11.4% and 8.7%, respectively, per the Winterberry forecast. Still in the mix, direct mail will hold its own, boosted by electioneering, with an expected 0.4% rise. As a result, data spending to support direct mail, e-mail and display (lists, database management and hygiene, analytics) will see 1.1% growth. The only exceptions to the marketing growth trends are magazine and newspaper ads (forecast down 1.9% and 6 %, respectively), along with flat budgets expected for cinema, insert media and radio. Watch for programmatic ad spending to continue surging, grabbing a larger share of display budgets and driving up data spends, advise analysts. Plus, video, which exploded in 2015, is still on the upswing, per Winterberry. For forecast details, read the full article at http://www.dmnews.com/marketing-strategy/2016-will-be-a-growth-year-in-marketing-spending/article/469545/