M+R Strategic Services has released a Nonprofit Social Media Benchmarks Study. The study analyzed growth and social engagement metrics on Facebook and Twitter for nonprofit organizations, including online communities of Oxfam, Human Rights Campaign and Charity:Water. The key findings for Facebook are, among others:
- Only a small fraction of the 180,000 organizations on Facebook have raised more than $1,000 through the Causes application.
- The overall fan churn rate is 24% per year, which is higher than the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study email churn rate of 19% per year.
- 2.5% of an organization’s Facebook fans took some sort of an action weekly, such as contributing wall posts, “likes,” or comments.
- Organizations posted to their Facebook Pages on average six times per week.
Turning to Twitter, the study shows that:
- The more nonprofits tweeted, the more their followers retweeted their messages, resulting in more followers.
- Twitter followers grew by 9% monthly, much higher than average monthly growth on both Facebook fan pages at 3.75% and nonprofit email lists at 1.4%.
In addition to the social media study, there’s also a nonprofit email benchmarking report and a mobile activism analysis (forthcoming this month) available on the M&R website.
