San Diego tops list of most charitable cities

• Published date: 01 August 2017
• Date: 01 August 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nba.30348

AUGUST 2017

7

NONPROFIT BUSINESS ADVISOR

© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company • All rights reserved

DOI: 10.1002/nba

(See SAN DIEGO on page 8)

Nonprot Research

San Diego tops list of most charitable cities

The latest research from Charity Navigator shows

that San Diego’s philanthropic community leads the

nation, ousting last year’s top performer, Houston,

to take the top spot. In its study, Charity Naviga-

tor compared the median performance and size of

the largest nonprots in the 30 largest metropolitan

markets. Those markets account for 62 percent of the

8,219 charities evaluated by Charity Navigator, the

group said.

In terms of their overall nancial health and com-

mitment to accountability and transparency, the

study’s highest-rated charitable communities are:

• San Diego.

• Houston.

• St. Louis.

• Tampa/St. Petersburg.

• Dallas.

The number of nonprots’ emails being diverted

into spam folders instead of the inboxes of their

addressees jumped substantially in 2016, new re-

search shows, leading to thousands of dollars in lost

donations. According to the 2017 Nonprot Email

Deliverability Study from Washington, D.C.–based

donor engagement rm EveryAction, data from 55

national nonprots showed that an average of 18.21

percent of email was delivered to spam folders each

month during 2016—up from 7 percent in 2015 and

12.5 percent the year before that. Spam rates peaked

during the holiday season, at 30.25 percent in Decem-

ber 2016, and saw their lowest rates during January,

the study showed, at 8.56 percent.

While nonprots often evaluate their email cam-

paigns based on metrics like list size, open rates, click

rates, page views and money raised, the signicance

of deliverability is generally overlooked, EveryAction

says—and thousands of dollars are being left on the

table as a result.

Based on the company’s data crunching, a non-

prot with an email list of 100,000 recipients will

miss out on $1,348.85 for every percentage point of

email going to spam. Multiply that by 2016’s 18.21

percent average and you get roughly $24,562 in lost

revenue for the year.

According to EveryAction, there’s several reasons

why your emails get sent to the spam folder, including:

• Making unsubscribing difcult. When the process

to unsubscribe from emails is difcult, exasperated

users tend to simply mark messages as spam instead,

which is far more harmful to email deliverability than

unsubscribing. Single-click unsubscribe links should

be included in every email you send, the company

said.

• Using an out-of-date email list. Email addresses

change fairly regularly, and sending to lists that are

bloated with abandoned or out-of-date addresses is

a surere way to worsen deliverability rates. If your

messages to an email address have not been opened

or engaged with in the past six months, it’s likely

outdated and should be removed from your regular

send list, the company said. Once your IP address has

been agged by an Internet Service Provider as a bad

sender, it can take months or even years to recover.

• Sending irrelevant email. Poor list segmentation

(or none at all) can result in very different audiences

all receiving the same messaging and, to many sub-

scribers, the information will be irrelevant. According

to EveryAction, this results in lower opens and clicks

and higher spam rates. Dynamic content, thought-

ful list segmentation and personalization can help

mitigate this, the company said.

• High complaints. As EveryAction explains it,

an email program is a “two-way conversation” that

involves permission and expectations. Sending email

that’s not relevant, with the wrong messaging and

at a frequency or volume that the receiver nds too

aggressive can all result in high complaints or people

tuning you out.

For more information about the study, visit http://

bit.ly/2sKP6SK. ■

Nonprot email spam rates jumped in 2016, study shows