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Web triggers direct mail response

The NonProfit Times, 7/15/08

Abstract:

Across virtually every demographic -- age, gender, race, income, education and household size -- more people are heading for the Internet before they make a charitable donation. And if you still think seniors are channel surfing for repeats of "Murder, She Wrote" instead of surfing the Web, you'd be wrong.

According to a new The NonProfit Times study, twice as many potential donors are heading online after receiving a fundraising solicitation by mail than they did just three years ago, and among those 65 and older, the increases were even more substantial.

The NonProfit Times engaged the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) in Princeton, N.J., to repeat a study it performed three years ago for The NPT. ORC asked a nationally-representative sample of 1,000 adults 18 and older: "When you receive a mail solicitation from a charity, which of the following places on the Internet do you look at before deciding whether to give money?" The results are projectable to the U.S. population.

Survey participants could choose more than one of the following options: look up organizations on the Internet; go to organization's Web site; go to the sites of independent rating organizations; go to online discussion groups and/or blogs.

The percentage of people who said that they looked up the organization on the Internet jumped from 25 percent when the survey was done three years ago to 44 percent this year. Those who said they went to the organization's Web site just about doubled, from 19 percent to 37 percent of those who responded that they went online.

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