Introduction

Nonprofits were flying blind in the early years of email fundraising and advocacy. Without industry-wide data, they could neither measure their performance against other groups nor set accurate goals for their programs and campaigns. In an effort to fill that data void, M+R and several partner organizations published the first eNonprofit Benchmarks Study in 2006 (the most recent eNonprofit Benchmarks study is available at: http://www.e-benchmarksstudy.com/).

Today, when it comes to social media, nonprofits once again find themselves making it up as they go along. We wrote this benchmarks paper in the hope of shedding some light on the exciting, rapidly evolving (and often confusing) world of online social media. Our goal is to help organizations – no matter their size – develop meaningful metrics for their social network outreach.

We've focused on Facebook and Twitter because they've emerged as the favorites among most nonprofits for building relationships with supporters. Five major national nonprofit organizations took part in our Facebook research; data from ten organizations was used for our Twitter analysis.