Where do mail recipients go for info on charity?

Mark Hrywna reported yesterday that 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 1,000 people: "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?"

Here are the results:

Yup. I guess you can call that a dramatic shift. It seems just as soon as everyone was just beginning to understand that their website is their authoritative online voice...

Those rules have changed.

More than four out of ten people look up their information on an independant rating agency, an online discussion group, or a blog. That's quite a change from just 36 months ago.

We don't know what it is, but we don't like it

The Association of Fundraising Professionals recently asked Ellison Research to conduct a survey on American attitudes toward nonprofit overhead expenses. Here are some excerpts from an article in Fundraising Success Magazine on the study.

Sixty-two percent of Americans believe the typical nonprofit organization spends more than what is reasonable on overhead expenses such as administration and fundraising, according to a new survey.

When respondents were asked what is a reasonable level of overhead costs for nonprofits, the average figure was 22.4 cents for every dollar collected. However, when asked what they thought the typical nonprofit actually spends on overhead costs, the figure was 36.3 cents per dollar.

The findings, gleaned from a survey developed and conducted by Ellison Research involving more than 1,000 American adults, found that while respondents were fairly consistent in their thinking about how much charities should spend, their thoughts on how much charities actually spend were more diverse.

Go here to read the rest of the article - there are some interesting differences in attitude by age and race.