Promising Practices
The eNonprofit Benchmarks Study: Diving Into Email Metrics
Karen Matheson from M+R Strategic Services describes a recent study that
helps nonprofits measure and interpret their online advocacy and fundraising
success.
In the for-profit dot-com world, the bottom line is easy to measure—it
all comes down to dollars and cents. For nonprofits, success is more difficult
to define. How many people were educated? Informed? Served? Engaged? Activated?
How much money was raised? Did legislative policy change? Did corporate policy
shift? Was public opinion swayed?
The eNonprofit Benchmarks Study is the first of its kind to look at the effectiveness
of major American nonprofits using the Internet to raise money and influence
public policy. Nonprofits can use this study to measure and compare their online
performance to other organizations.
Methodology
The study provides a snapshot of key metrics and benchmarks for nonprofit
online communications, including email fundraising and advocacy. To develop
these metrics, M+R Strategic Services analyzed data from three sources: (a)
nonprofit study partners, 15 key national nonprofits in the environmental,
civil/legal rights-based, and international aid sectors, which had substantial
online communications and marketing programs; (b) aggregate data from Convio,
GetActive Software, and Kintera, major providers of online communications
tools for nonprofits; and (c) an online survey of the broader nonprofit community
with 85 respondents.
Most data came from drilling down into hundreds of email messages sent by
the 15 study partners to their email list members over 2 years—from September
2003 to September 2005. We coded statistics for these messages by nonprofit
type (environmental, rights-based, or international aid) and then sorted them
into message-type categories (including advocacy, fundraising, e-news, and other).
The study has chapters on return on investment, email messaging, email list
growth, email list composition, online advocacy, and online fund-raising. One
of the study's most revealing chapters—with regard to measuring the quality
and effectiveness of announcements to nonprofit organizations' email subscriber
lists—is on email messaging metrics.
Email Messaging Metrics
The table titled “Nonprofit Advocacy and Fundraising Email Metrics”
shows the key email metrics identified for advocacy and fundraising based on
the 15 nonprofit partners in the study. Metrics are listed first for all partners,
and then for the nonprofits in each sector examined. The email metrics and how
they were calculated are described below.
Open rates generally are an indicator of three factors: (a) how engaging
an email's subject line is, (b) the email list's quality, and (c) the strength
of the relationship between the organization and its subscribers. The eNonprofit
Benchmarks study calculated open rates by dividing the number of people who
opened an email message by the total number of recipients. The study found that
open rates for advocacy emails dropped significantly across the board in the
2 years covered by the study. However, there were no corresponding drops in
page completion or response rates.1
Page-completion rates assess the quality of an advocacy or fundraising
online form. This metric was calculated by dividing the number of people who
clicked on the link that sent subscribers to a form by the number of people
who actually completed it.
Click-through rates measure an email's persuasiveness and salience.
Although there are several ways to calculate click-through rates, the study
calculated this metric as the number of people who clicked at least one link
in the email divided by the total number of message recipients. This calculation
is most useful for messages such as online newsletters where the goal is motivating
subscribers to click on one or more article links.
Response rates gauge an email message's overall success. The study calculated
this by dividing the number of people who completed on online form by the total
number of email recipients.
In the email messaging metrics chapter, as in its other revealing chapters,
the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study provides nonprofit organizations with new and
practical ways to define success. To learn more about email messaging metrics
or to read the full report, visit www.e-benchmarksstudy.com.
Nonprofit Advocacy and Fundraising Email Metrics1
|
| |
All Partners
|
Environmental
|
Rights
|
International
Aid
|
| Open Rate |
Advocacy |
26% |
26% |
25% |
26% |
| Fundraising |
23% |
22% |
23% |
23% |
| Page-Completion Rate |
Advocacy |
84% |
91% |
81% |
79% |
| Fundraising |
22% |
32% |
7% |
33% |
| Click-Through Rate |
Advocacy |
9% |
13% |
7% |
8% |
| Fundraising |
1.5% |
0.8% |
2.1% |
1.7% |
| Response Rate |
Advocacy |
10% |
14% |
7% |
7% |
| Fundraising |
0.3% |
0.2% |
0.2% |
0.6% |
| 1
Some click-through rates are higher than response rates. This is because
messages in the click-through pool included all the links (not just those
that lead to an advocacy action or donation form), while the messages in
the response pool included only messages in which the link led to a fill-out
form. |
1 In the fall of
2006, M+R Strategic Services did further research on the decline in open rates.
Research is available at www.mrss.com/news/Why_Open_Rates_Are_
Dropping_M-R_Strategic_Services.pdf.
Karen Matheson
Manager
Quantitative Research and Analysis
M+R Strategic Services
615 Second Avenue, Suite 550
Seattle, WA 98104
Tel: 206-447-9089
Email: kmatheson@mrss.com
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