Online giving has continued to rise in the US but the 2011 growth rate has slowed significantly from 35 per cent to 0.3 per cent.

The Blackbaud Online Giving Report suggests that the growth reduction is partially due to a drop in donations to large international affairs organisations. In 2010 the US donated large amounts in response to the Haiti earthquake whereas the report states that the Japanese earthquake in 2011 had no significant effect on online giving trends. If large international organisations are removed from the equation 2011 online giving growth is 13 per cent.

International affairs was the only sector not to experience positive online giving growth in 2011, down 55 per cent. Even with these figures factored out large organisations (with annual total fundraising greater than $10m) had the lowest growth rate of 8.6 per cent compared to medium-sized organisations ($1m to $10m) at13.1 per cent and small organisations (less than $1m) at 12.8 per cent.

The overall percentage of total fundraising in the US that comes from online giving is 6.3 per cent. End-of-year giving continues to account for a large proportion of online donations with 34.8 per cent of the total being given between October and December, although the report’s co-author Steve MacLaughlin believes charities should not rely on this. He said:

“It is possible to build an online giving programme that avoids the make-or-break end-of-year fundraising crunch. This is evidenced by the education and healthcare sectors that have benefited from concerted online fundraising efforts during other parts of the year.”

Education sector organisations had the biggest year-on-year growth rate, at 26.3 per cent.

The Report is compiled from 24 months of online giving data from 1,895 non-profit organisations, online major-giving data from 2,397 non-profits and both online and offline data representing $5.1 bn in total fundraising from 1,560 non-profits.