Benchmarks for Group Fundraising

To arrive at benchmark figures for group fundraising, representatives from five leading platforms were asked to contribute private statistics about the activity on their Web sites. Survey questions included:

• How much money did your Web site generate in donations last month and to date?
• How many group fundraising campaigns were created last month and to date?
• What is the average amount raised by a group fundraising campaign at your site?
• What is the average number of contributors per campaign?
• What is the average size of a donation?

The five platforms were also asked to provide a subset of statistics on "successful" campaigns, meaning those that met their fundraising goals; those that raised more than $1,000; and those that stood out for their effectiveness in drawing many contributors.

This article includes data from ChipIn, Firstgiving, GiveMeaning, SixDegrees, and JustGive.org. Although these sites' platforms differ in many respects, the five groups share two points in common:

1. They permit anyone with an Internet connection to set up a group fundraising campaign on behalf of any 501(c)3 organization. GiveMeaning also permits individuals to raise money for registered charities based in Canada. ChipIn allows users to create group fundraising campaigns on behalf of any person or organization with a PayPal account.
2. They help individuals spread the word about a campaign through social networking tools. All five platforms offer a feature that allows you to email your friends, family, and colleagues to solicit donations. Many of the platforms also give users the option to set fundraising goals, create fundraising widgets, and upload videos and images. (For more information about fundraising widgets, read TechSoup's article Charity Badges: Turn Your Supporters into Fundraisers.)

   For more details on how the five platforms differ, please refer to About Micro-Philanthropy’s comparison chart.

Note that group fundraising services Change.org and Fundable also share the aforementioned points in common. Both platforms were invited to contribute their aggregated data to this article but either declined to do so or did not respond to TechSoup's invitation.

Other group fundraising platforms such as GlobalGiving, DonorsChoose, Kiva, Justgiving, and MyCause.com serve niche communities and have therefore been not been included. Still others — including Bring Light, Changing the Present, Facebook’s Causes, LinkedIn for Good — are too new to have statistically significant aggregated data.

The five group fundraising services agreed to share their private information on the condition that the platform-specific responses would remain anonymous. The data has been aggregated in order to produce cross-platform insights into the field of group fundraising as a whole. The benchmark figures for all campaigns can be contrasted with the cross-platform data on successful campaigns. Please note that these figures are not intended to be used as definitive statistics for all group fundraising services, nor do they reflect the performance of any one Web site or company.