“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.

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.” Source: Harvard Family Research Project