ABSTRACT
No text on fundraising would be complete without a consideration of the opportunities offered by the Internet. Since its introduction in 1991, the use of the Internet has grown faster than any other electronic medium, including, historically, the telegraph. In 1993 when the first web browser became available, only 140 websites existed and only 1 per cent of these were commercial (or ‘. com’) sites. By 1996, almost 75 per cent of the then 610,000 sites were .com in nature. By the turn of the millennium the number of organizations trading online numbered in the millions with many times that number of consumers seeking to do business. At the time of writing, growth rates are still so rapid that quoting more specific statistics is fraught with difficulty. They would almost certainly be out of date by the time the data were published.
