WARNING: I’m about to disappoint the gothic gang always ever ready to blast Big Bad Blackbaud.

Clearly, The Agitator has sold out. Lost our critical, Damn-the-Man senses. You bet, especially when it comes to valuable new ideas. Shame on us for embracing the new and helpful.

First, a secret. There’s a terrific ‘cell’ that I’m sure goes mainly unrecognized, but tolerated by Blackbaud’s C-Suite. It’s a trio comprising Melanie Mathos, the company’s chief PR officer, Steve MacLaughlin, once an honest worker in their online space and now the high falutin ‘Director, of the Idea Lab’, and Chuck Longfield, the universally beloved founder of Target Analytics and now Chief Scientist at Blackbaud.

These folks are truly committed to innovation and change and I want to praise the latest output of their conspiracy before the rest of the company catches on.

On Monday Blackbaud released its latest Index of Giving — Overall Giving and Online Giving. I’ll come back to the interesting news in the latest Index in a moment.

Most important:  Two Important Innovations.

First, built into the Index is a feature enabling you and every nonprofit manager to easily enter data and quickly calculate and benchmark your results against thousands of other organizations. Sweet. Just go to the Index click on Get Started and, as our Canadian readers would say, “Bob’s your uncle.”

More formally Chuck Longfield, the inventor of the Index — and my all-time favorite of seriousness-in-pursuit-of-the-truth in this sometimes-silly market of ours — describes the new Calculator’s value:

“Knowing how a nonprofit’s fundraising results compare to its peers by size, mission, techniques, or other share attributes can be invaluable when trying to determine if it was strategy, implementation, economies of scale, or donor behavior that drove results. These new tools will help nonprofits do that.”

Second, the Index itself. The latest version provides the most up-to-date information on current charitable giving that can be viewed by size and sub-sets of the charity world. In short it tracks $10 billion of giving across the sector and measures monthly changes.

But it keeps getting better. Now the latest version of the Index has also zeroed in on ‘healthcare’, and ‘medical research’, splitting the two into specialty indices.

Smart. These new breakdowns recognize the difference between, for example, ‘hospitals’ that as a sector tend to focus on major gifts, while ‘research organizations’ (as in ‘run’, ‘hunt’, ‘find’ or ‘dine’ for the cure) tend to focus on events and direct marketing.

Agitator readers in the Health and Disease fields may want to  take a look at the Blackbaud report released today that features interviews with fundraising  leaders from Dignity Health and American Diabetes Association.

OK. Bottom-line.

When all is said and done, here’s the summary of the findings of the current Blackbaud Giving Index through the end of April.

• In the last 3 months, overall charitable revenue grew by 0.4% as compared to the same period in 2102.
• Meanwhile, online giving in the same period grew by 10.2%. But, as Steve MacLaughlin, Director of Blackbaud’s Idea Lab is the first to note: “Online giving is only 10% of overall giving.”

Your can get the current Index and Calculator here. Even better at the same place you can sign up for FREE monthly updates.

But, please, don’t tell management.

Roger

P.S. To make it easy to find, we’’ll soon put the Blackbaud Benchmark Calculator in the Agitator’s Toolbox. You’ll find the Toobox on our website (www.theagitator.net) along with other valuable applications, not to mention the “Search” function that will help you find the golden nuggets to make life brighter and your organization richer.