3rd Annual Fundraising Growth Analysis

It’s that time of the year again. Rankings are everywhere. Today we’re looking at a growth ranking of the 224 largest Dutch fundraising non-profits. The data (2007-2012) are provided with the courtesy of the Central Bureau of Fundraising, who will publish their annual report this week.

Like last year, I’ve focused my analysis on fundraising income excluding income from legacies. Why? Because income from legacies can confuse our thinking around growth and goals reached. We need to separate, less predictable, large one-off gifts from this growth trend. That doesn’t mean we should not investigate it though… (read my post: Legacy Income in The Netherlands 2003-2012)

I’ve segmented the ranking in three income value segments to create a sort of apple and apple comparison:

•  The first segment includes 28 non-profits who raise more than EUR 10 million, excluding income from legacies, in 2012.
•  The next segment looks at 72 organisations raising between EUR 2.5 million – 10 million.
• And this year I’ve also added the segment EUR 0.5 million – 2.5 million, which includes 124 organisations.

So, three categories. In total 224 non-profits. The total income from ‘own fundraising’ (the CBF definition) from these organisations is EUR 1.37 billion, which represents 96% of the income raised reported to the CBF.

The growth criteria are slightly different from last year:

• Short term: year-over-year growth rate; from 2011 to 2012, 1 year.
• Medium term: compound annual growth rate (CAGR): from 2010 to 2012, 2 years.
• Long term: median growth rate: from 2008 to 2012, 5 years.

I’ve ranked all non-profits within their value segment on all three, more or less equally important, growth indicators. The sum of these rankings decided their overall ranking.

Before you are going to ask the question: No, I don’t exactly know what the best performers are doing to get these results. I think I have a fair idea of what they are probably doing, but to get their secret ingredients you really need to start tracking their communications and get in contact with your counterparts within these organisations…

A few more notes:

• Not every organization is included in the overall ranking due to missing data in one of the years taken into account…
• In contrast to last year I’ll not only show you the non-profits performing better than the average, but this year I’ll show you the complete list. Positive growth rates AND negative growth rates…
• Just as with the positive growth rates, we need to do more homework before we draw any conclusions on the reasons for the performance of the organisations with negative growth rates…

So here we go, let’s take a dive into the numbers!

~~~ 10 million+ ~~~

In the highest income segment the strongest growth performance is still from ‘KWF Kankerbestrijding‘ (Cancer Society)! Like last year, KiKa, Compassion and War Child are again ranked high, but we see some new kids on the block: Liliane Fonds, Dorcas Hulp, Salvation Army and Oxfam Novib.

~~~ 2.5 million – 10 million ~~~

In the second segment the strongest performer is ‘Vrienden UMC Utrecht’ (Friends of University Medical Center Utrecht)! Also very strong performance from AMREF Flying Doctors, Concertgebouw Fonds, VUmc Fonds and VSO Nederland.

~~~ 0.5 million – 2.5 million ~~~

In this segment growth rates are obviously more extreme, because the absolute numbers are lower. But also in this segment the three-way growth view shows a number of organisations surfacing as strong performers, with Trees for All as the strongest!

~~~ 10 exceptional non-profits ~~~

Can we also do a mesh-up ranking of the three separate segments, to get the overall strongest performer? Sure we can! The holiday season is upon us and excel is our playground. Let’s have a final look at the overall top 10 of the 224 non-profits based on their ranking within their own segment.

If you have questions or comments about any of this, let me know!

Happy holidays!