Leftovers get a bad rap sometimes, undeservedly so. Sure, that pizza is not going to perk back up in the microwave, and yesterday’s french fries may be a lost cause. But so much work goes into preparing a meal, it’s often a shame not to get another chance to enjoy it.

And then there are the times when something is just as good and maybe even better the second time around. Jambalaya, for instance, or a rich and hearty maafe. Or — spoiler alert for when we talk about retention in a bit — renewed support from previous donors.

Before we get to that, let’s reheat some of the metrics we looked at in the tasting menu, including the big one: Overall online revenue for the average nonprofit declined by 4% from 2021 to 2022.

As you can see, there were two sectors which experienced an increase in revenue: Disaster/International Aid, and Wildlife/Animal Welfare. The 8% increase for Disaster/International Aid nonprofits is most likely attributable to the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, along with the devastating floods in Pakistan.

The Wildlife/Animal Welfare sector also reported an increase, with 6% higher revenue than in the previous year. It’s possible that these stories are related — many animal welfare nonprofits also engage in emergency response work, and may receive higher levels of support in the wake of conflict or natural disasters.

Now that we’ve warmed up the leftover charts we’ve already seen, let’s season them with some new details.

As with overall revenue, Disaster/International Aid and Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits were the only sector to see an increase in one-time giving. But while one-time giving declined by 12%, monthly giving rose by 11%. And those gains in monthly giving were distributed much more broadly, with nearly every sector reporting a double-digit increase.

The rise in monthly giving paired with lower one-time revenue means that monthly donations made up a larger share of overall revenue. Monthly giving rose from 24% of all online revenue in 2021 to 28% of all online revenue in 2022. For Public Media nonprofits, which have long embraced a sustaining-giving model, more than half of all online revenue last year was sourced to monthly donations.

These are aggregate, program-level metrics. Now let’s take a look at the individual-serving-size numbers.

The average gift for both one-time giving and monthly giving was a tad larger in 2022 than in 2021. For one-time giving, average gift rose from $115 to $121; for monthly giving, average gift rose from $24 to $25. While there were differences in average gift size from sector to sector, the year-over-year changes within sectors tended to be fairly small.

The average non-monthly donor made 1.2 gifts over the course of the year. This roughly captures the success of within-year retention: how effectively nonprofits are motivating one-time donors to make additional gifts within the same calendar year.

Meanwhile, monthly donors made an average of 9.8 gifts over the course of the year. This includes donors who began or ended their monthly contributions at some point in 2022, as well as existing, ongoing sustainers who made 12 monthly gifts. It also includes additional one-time gifts made by monthly donors.

There’s a tension here. The average gift for one-time donations was larger than the average monthly gift. On the other hand, sustaining monthly donors gave more times than donors who needed to take a separate action for each donation.

When we combine all giving from monthly donors, and all giving from donors who only made individual gifts, we can assess their total annual value. The average one-time donor gave $192 over the course of 2022; the average monthly donor contributed $287.

Overall, monthly donors were more valuable — and for some sectors the difference was dramatic. For Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, one-time donors contributed an average of $259, while monthly donors gave $504 in 2022. Public Media was the only sector where the per-donor value was higher for one-time donors than for monthly donors.

With little change in average gift size, frequency of giving is crucial. Inspiring that second gift (or third, or fourth, or dozenth, or baker’s dozenth) is essential to developing an efficient, growing, thriving fundraising program. Over in our Digital Ads section, we report that the cost to generate a single gift through paid advertising ranged from $47 on search to $305 for video ads.

Recruiting new donors eats up a substantial amount of resources and staff time, like lasagna made from scratch. Retention stretches that meal into the future and helps make sure that effort is worthwhile in the long run — all the ingredients for success are already there, and we just need to make the most of them.

Overall retention for 2022 was 29% — that is, 29% of nonprofit donors who made a one-time gift in 2021 made another one-time gift in 2022. This was a slight increase from the previous year, though well below the 38% retention reported for 2020.

Across nonprofits of every type, there is a clear and sharp distinction between retention rates for new online donors, and those for previously retained donors. Only 16% of donors who made their first online gift in 2021 returned to make another donation to that nonprofit in 2022. But prior donors — those who gave at least once from 2018 to 2020, and again in 2021? They had an average retention rate of 49%, with the lowest sector average at 46%.

Let’s rehash the data we just went over:

• Monthly giving was up across the board, while one-time giving decreased for nonprofits in most issue areas.

• Monthly giving made up more than a quarter of all online revenue in 2022.

• Average gift rose slightly, but seemed resistant to major swings within sectors.

• The average monthly donor contributed more over the course of the year than the average one-time donor.

• Donors who have a history of repeated giving were much more likely to keep donating than first-time donors.

None of this means that new donor acquisition is not a crucial priority for nonprofits — without it, growth is impossible. It does suggest that there is significant value in emphasizing long-term relationships, growing the monthly donor base, and optimizing retention efforts.

Leftovers are good. Spread the word.

MEMBERSHIP METRICS

While many nonprofit programs divide their small-dollar programs into the one-time/monthly donor binary explored in this section, there’s a third category of giving that is especially important in the Public Media and Cultural sectors.

Membership programs include some of the qualities of both one-time giving (high initial average gifts) and monthly giving (a strong expectation of renewal, inclusion in a specialized group of donors) — like a half-sandwich-and-cup-of-soup combo meal. Membership often comes with a tote bag, year-long admission to a museum, or other tangible benefits. (For our purposes here, we included only the Public Media and Cultural sectors — partly to filter out nonprofits with purely symbolic membership programs, which may include a member card but no other benefits.)

For Public Media nonprofits, “membership” and “individual giving” are essentially interchangeable. These participants reported 100% of online revenue as membership giving, with a 5% decline from 2021. Membership accounted for 64% of online revenue for Cultural nonprofits, with membership revenue growing by 9% in 2022, following 33% growth in 2021. That 33% increase was fueled at least in part by the re-opening of museums and other spaces after pandemic-driven shutdowns in 2020.

For nonprofits with email programs that include both membership and non-membership fundraising, there were sharp differences in performance.

Membership messaging accrued a much higher average click-through rate and page completion rate, leading to a response rate six times larger than the response rate for non-membership fundraising (0.19%, compared to 0.03%). The offer of tangible benefits and membership status could have an impact here, but it’s also worth remembering that nonprofits may be sending membership offers to a subset of their audiences that is more likely to give.

A young apple tree might take six years or more before it begins bearing fruit. In that time it needs water, sunshine, and a bounty of nutrients. It must be tended and pruned and protected from pests. Skilled laborers care for the tree, harvest and pack and ship the fruit.

It is an enormous amount of work, largely unseen, but a healthy tree can stay productive for many, many years.

Your email and SMS program is an orchard, and it will not blossom without care. Success requires patience, attention, and a commitment to cultivating long-term relationships with supporters. Carelessness leads to decay and blight: bottom-of-the-barrel deliverability, crashing response rates, unsustainable churn.

Email list sizes decreased slightly in 2022 — nonprofits ended the year with 2% fewer subscribers than they began. This dip followed 8% growth in 2021, and 9% growth in 2020.

The net change in list size can give a rough sense of a program’s health, but it’s important to understand both where subscribers are being lost and how nonprofits are bringing in new email supporters.

These numbers can be a tad upsetting. After all, you worked hard to acquire those names, and you want the biggest base of support possible! But unengaged, uninterested, inactive subscribers are a drain on an email program. They can increase costs, harm deliverability, and make it hard to discern the true outcome of testing. So think of churn as an exercise in pruning, cutting back to promote future growth.

That growth depends on bringing in fresh subscribers through acquisition. This can take many forms — advocacy campaigns, interactive engagements like surveys and quizzes, offline-to-online recruitment, and countless other tactics. For some nonprofits, one source of new subscribers stood out as especially important: lead generation through paid digital advertising.

The ratio of ad-acquired leads to email list size at the start of the year was 0.09. In other words, a nonprofit that began 2022 with an email list of 100,000 addresses acquired 9,000 new leads via ads over the course of the year. See here for more on the symbiotic relationship between email and digital ads.

Nonprofits sent an average of 60 email messages per subscriber in 2022, a 15% increase in volume from the previous year. Overall, about half of these messages were fundraising appeals — but both total volume and the balance of message type varied widely between sectors.

Public Media nonprofits, for example, sent an especially high number of newsletter messages — an average of 28 per subscriber. A subscriber signed up to a Rights nonprofit’s email program could expect to receive 24 advocacy messages over the course of the year, more than double the overall average.

Disaster/International Aid nonprofits sent the highest number of messages — an average of 98 messages, with 57 of them being fundraising appeals. Fundraising in this sector tends to be driven by high-profile humanitarian crises, which in 2022 included flooding in Pakistan and millions of people in Ukraine displaced by Russia’s invasion.

It’s worth noting that Disaster/International Aid organizations sent the highest volume not only of fundraising email, but also engagement messaging. This kind of messaging includes surveys, educational resources, and other content meant to strengthen the relationship between a nonprofit and its supporters. When the scale of catastrophe demands a high-volume fundraising response that might overwhelm supporters, engagement content helps ensure the list remains fertile ground for fundraising.

Email revenue overall declined by 4% from the previous year — the same decline reported in total online revenue. But for Disaster/International Aid nonprofits, the average change was a 24% increase over 2021 email revenue. The high-profile humanitarian need, especially in response to the conflict in Ukraine, was likely a key driver here.

For every 1,000 fundraising emails sent, nonprofits reported average revenue of $90. In other words, a single fundraising message landing in a single inbox generated 9 cents. Average revenue per 1,000 fundraising emails declined by 15%, with a double-digit decline for every sector except Disaster/International Aid.

User behavior sits between the messages sent by nonprofits and the return they see (whether in dollars, signature petitions, shares, or other metrics). We saw declines in just about every trackable email metric, including page completion rates, and response rates.

Overall, the fundraising email response rate — the percentage of email recipients who completed a gift — was 0.09% in 2022. That’s an 18% drop from 2021, and every sector saw a decline. For advocacy messages, the email response rate is 1.3% this year, an 8% decline.

Taken all together, 2022 saw nonprofits sending more email, but those email messages reached slightly smaller audiences and raised less per recipient than in the previous year. And yet, despite these challenges, email still accounted for 14% of all online revenue.

As nonprofits work to maintain and build email programs, many are also expanding efforts in other channels, including mobile messaging (a.k.a. text messaging or SMS/MMS). The scale of these mobile messaging programs is typically not as large as email programs, which have had more time to grow for most nonprofits. For every 1,000 email subscribers, nonprofits had 236 mobile messaging subscribers. But while email list size declined in 2022, the average number of mobile subscribers increased by 11%.

The frequency of messaging was also lower for mobile messaging programs. Nonprofits with mobile programs sent an average of 21 messages per subscriber in 2022. At the 75th percentile, nonprofits sent 37 messages per subscriber.

(Note that while our data set includes electoral messaging, none of our participants are themselves candidates or official political party entities. So if it felt like you personally got WAY MORE than this messaging volume blowing up your cell phone last year, especially at the height of election season — it was probably not coming from the nonprofits sending an average of 3.6 electoral messages per year.)

Just as different crops have ideal planting seasons, the volume of mobile messaging changes with the times. Mobile messaging spiked in November and December, which are also busy months for email programs as nonprofits look to leverage Giving Tuesday and end-of-year giving deadlines.

Similarly, an election year is bound to generate more electoral messaging than an off-cycle year, and that’s exactly what we saw in 2022. Electoral messaging increased by 127% from the previous year, while overall mobile messaging volume increased by 28%.

Voltaire said that we must cultivate our garden, and while he was mostly not talking about digital messaging channels, it’s good advice. The care and maintenance of a nonprofit messaging program is an ongoing and complicated endeavor. It takes resources to acquire new subscribers, and even more to nurture those relationships through engaging, relevant messaging. Successful direct response programs will be responsive to changes in the world around us and attentive to what matters most to supporters.

Mobile messaging data was provided by our friends at Upland Mobile Messaging (thanks Upland!)

Television ads for kids’ cereals used to end with an extraordinary claim: these Sugar-Crusted Double Marshmallow Chocoroos™ are part of a balanced breakfast! And they’d show a bowl of wondrously dyed cereal next to a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, four slices of buttered toast, fruit salad, three eggs over medium, a short stack of pancakes, and another glass of orange juice, somehow?

The obvious takeaway is that you should probably not take nutritional advice from the makers of Gooey Frooty Gobsmacks™. But the harder truth is that it’s extremely difficult for people to agree on what actually constitutes balanced nutrition. Different tastes, restrictions, priorities, allergies, nutritional needs, cultural expectations, and more lead to infinite variation on what we mean when we say “balanced.”

That same holds true when we’re deciding how to allocate resources, investments, and objectives in a digital ads campaign. The challenge isn’t so much that a given platform or audience is good or bad, any more than High Fructose Happy Flakes® are healthy or unhealthy on their own. It’s about building that balanced diet that moves your program forward. Now let’s get cereal serious and take a look at how nonprofits struck that balance in 2022.

The first decision a nonprofit needs to make is the size of the digital ads budget (“zero” is an option, but not a good one — we’ll see in a moment how important advertising is to a thriving digital program). Last year, nonprofits reinvested $0.11 in digital ads for every dollar raised online. That means that a nonprofit that raised $1,000,000 through online channels in 2022 would have spent $110,000 on digital ad placements.

This spending represents an increase of 28% over 2021 digital ads investments, and we see significant variation in both the level of investment and the year-over-year change between sectors.

Cultural nonprofits were the only sector that reported a decline from 2021 digital ads spending. Meanwhile, Disaster/International Aid increased digital ad spending by a whopping 89% over the previous year, with emergency response efforts in Ukraine likely the driving force.

It’s worth noting that despite the increased investment in advertising for Disaster/International Aid nonprofits, the ratio of spending to revenue was $0.10 per dollar — just about the overall average for all nonprofits. That suggests that the growth in ad spending kept pace with an increase in revenue, and that despite the increased investment there may still have been room for effective additional advertising efforts for Disaster/International Aid nonprofits.

Now that we have a sense of the scale of ads spending by nonprofits, let’s dig into how they distributed that investment.

The largest portion of ad budgets was devoted to direct fundraising. Overall, 56% of ad spending went to direct fundraising, and the range by nonprofit size was relatively small.

Large nonprofits (those with annual online revenue over $3MM) spent 56% of ad budgets on fundraising; Medium nonprofits (with annual online revenue between $500k and $3MM) had the largest portion of digital fundraising, at 58%; and Small nonprofits (with annual online revenue under $500k) reported spending 54% of ad budgets on fundraising.

Looking beyond fundraising, nonprofits of different sizes expressed different priorities through spending. Large nonprofits spent just 13% of budgets on lead generation, and instead emphasized fundraising and branding, awareness, or education ads (29% of all spending). Acquiring new subscribers ate up a greater share of spending for Small (22%) and Medium (23%) nonprofits.

Those differences in spending reflect variation in strategy, goals, and opportunities. Now let’s take a closer look at how nonprofits distributed ad budgets by channel, specifically for fundraising advertising.

Nonprofits of all sizes spent about a third of fundraising ad budgets on search. It appears that there is broad agreement that search is an important part of a balanced fundraising ad diet no matter who you are, with essential vitamins and minerals. We’ll see some of the reasons for that when we review return on ad spend.

Beyond search, we see a greater divergence by group size. Large nonprofits invested more in Meta, while Small nonprofits prioritized display. As privacy changes by Apple and the deprecation of cookies continue to affect the digital ads landscape, Meta has been challenging for everyone. It may be that Small nonprofits felt these challenges more strongly than Large nonprofits, and scaled back accordingly.

While Twitter and TikTok were not significant channels for fundraising advertising, Large nonprofits did spend $5 of every $100 on video. Larger budgets can open up possibilities in emerging channels, or those with uncertain return or high costs of entry. As nonprofits continue to seek new audiences, we may see greater investments in these other channels in the coming years.

We’ve examined the balance of ad spending by goal and by channel. We can also think about ads budgets as a binary split between prospecting (acquiring new supporters) and retargeting (reaching existing ones). Overall, nonprofits devoted a greater share of budgets to reaching prospects than existing supporters. For every dollar spent on retargeting, they spent $1.19 on prospecting.

Now that we have a better understanding of the choices nonprofits made, we can explore performance, starting with return on ad spend (ROAS) for fundraising advertising.

Remember how nonprofits of every size devoted a third of all spending to search? Well, nonprofits of every size and across all sectors also saw the highest ROAS of any channel with search advertising. This makes sense: search spend tends to be focused on the brand, and you can bet that the people Googling ‘donate to [nonprofit]’ are some of the best people you can spend money to reach!

An immediate question arises: if search has such a high ROAS compared to other channels, why didn’t nonprofits devote even more resources to this channel? Why isn’t the whole program just search? Why can’t you have pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, and pizza at suppertime?

The problem is, of course, that the search audience is finite. Once a nonprofit has hit a spend level high enough to reach most or all users with relevant queries, they’ll need to look elsewhere to continue to expand their audience.

Meta had the next-highest ROAS overall, but we saw huge variance between sectors. For Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, the Meta return was $1.07 for every dollar spent. For Rights nonprofits, the ROAS was just $0.17. The wide range we see may be due to the overall uncertainty in targeting on Meta due to new privacy settings for Apple and Google. As cookies are deprecated and users become more difficult to track, nonprofits will need to experiment more in their tactics and targeting, and we can expect less consistent results.

While search advertising was a relatively level playing field, Large nonprofits appeared to have a distinct advantage in other channels. For display advertising, Large nonprofits reported a ROAS of $0.65, compared to $0.28 for Medium and $0.21 for Small nonprofits.

This makes sense if we think about display performance as being primarily driven by establishing and aggressively reinforcing a nonprofit’s brand. The bigger or more prominent your brand is to begin with, the more effective display will tend to be. This doesn’t mean that Small nonprofits shouldn’t invest in display — quite the opposite! — it just means that they have more of an uphill battle.

The changes in online privacy protections are affecting more than ad performance; they are also making it more challenging for nonprofits to assess their programs. We found that view-through revenue accounted for 26% of the total ads return — but this number should be taken with a grain of salt, and likely undercounts the impact of advertising.

View-through revenue is tracked in a variety of ways, but most methods require third-party cookies, which are blocked (or partially blocked) on some browsers already and will be fully blocked on the largest browser (Chrome) starting in 2024. Successful display and video advertising in particular depends on view-through revenue, so these changes will make it more difficult to measure the full value of these channels.

For the next couple years, nonprofits should expect continuing challenges in measuring and optimizing display and video (not to mention emerging channels like podcasts and connected TV, which we group under “other” in this study). As is often the case, there will probably be an advantage for nonprofits that are able to make early investments in testing.

All of the above findings are based on paid placements, but many nonprofits include Google Grants as part of their digital advertising mix. These campaigns are run with ad credits; we’re presenting them in terms of “dollars spent” for consistency’s sake, but just remember that those dollars are not actually coming from nonprofit budgets.

Google Grant ads are not nearly as effective as paid advertising. The ROAS for these campaigns is just $0.07 overall. In comparison, the average ROAS for paid search was $2.75, a whopping 39 times higher. Even though Google Grant placements are free, the net return is still significantly lower than paid search.

There are a few reasons why paid search outperforms Google Grant ads by such a wide margin, but mostly they boil down to the fact that Google wants it that way.

Google imposes restrictions on Grant ads, including a spend cap of $10k per month (below what many nonprofits need to capture all searches for their brand terms) and a cost-per-click cap of $2 (well below our average search CPC of $3.63). These restrictions limit nonprofits’ ability to capture the high-value traffic that drives up ROAS in paid campaigns, and may create a self-fulfilling prophecy: nonprofits know that Grant lacks the flexibility of paid accounts, so they choose to move their most important campaigns into a paid account.

Perhaps most notable, Google displays Grant ads below paid ads. If two nonprofits are bidding on the same term, ads from a paid account will always appear above the one bidding from a Grant. Users tend to engage with the first search results they are served, which makes paid ads much more likely to capture the click and eventual donation.

None of this is to say that Google Grants are not worth including as part of the overall advertising mix for nonprofits. For example, nonprofits saw 431 site visits for every $1k in Grant spend. If an nonprofit were to spend their full $10k budget every month, that would be the equivalent of 51,720 additional site visits in a year. Those visits can generate email signups, petition signatures, and volunteer recruitment, or help meet any number of important goals.

As we’ve seen, a balanced ads diet includes lead generation in addition to direct fundraising — and Small nonprofits in particular tended to prioritize lead generation in their budgets. While these ads aren’t intended to generate an immediate return, they are critical to building a growing base of support.

We’re taking a fresh approach to measuring the impact of lead generation advertising this year by measuring the ratio of ads-acquired leads email list size at the start of the year.

Here’s what that means: if the median nonprofit had 100,000 email subscribers at the beginning of the year, they acquired 9,000 new leads via ads over the course of 2022. When we understand how important a growing list is to a healthy email program, and how difficult list growth is (overall, email list size declined slightly last year), that is an enormously consequential result.

We explore what this all means in more detail in our Tasting Menu section, but the takeaway is clear. Ads and email programs are deeply intertwined, and ignoring one can severely damage the other.

Cost per lead varied widely by nonprofit sector, and even more so by platform.

Meta generated leads at the lowest cost, with an average cost per lead of $4.39. While Large nonprofits reported more favorable results across many of our ads metrics, that did not hold true here. Medium ($3.34 CPL) and Small ($4.71 CPL) both had lower costs than Large nonprofits ($4.89 CPL).

Adoption of other channels for lead acquisition is not nearly as widespread as for Meta, and costs per lead were generally higher. Part of this may reflect the relative immaturity of the platforms, and the challenges of optimizing content. Nonprofits that are able to experiment with TikTok and YouTube may gain an edge in optimization, and may be willing to pay a premium for leads that represent younger, more diverse, or otherwise distinct supporter audiences.

Not every nonprofit will be able to make these investments. Some will choose to prioritize direct fundraising, while others invest in raising their brand profile. Nonprofits will need to think holistically about their digital programs, and how email, ads, and other channels can be mutually reinforcing. The distribution of time and resources will change as channels emerge, mature, and decline.

It’s complicated, of course it is. But it’s all part of a balanced breakfast.

Anyone who has ever attended a rambunctious Thanksgiving gathering, debated whether a hot dog is a sandwich, or spent five minutes on M+R’s internal #feelingsonfood Slack channel knows: nothing simultaneously brings people together and sparks furious argument quite like food. Well, maybe one thing: social media.

Each platform is a potluck that hosts a different-but-often-overalapping audience, and employs a fickle algorithm that elevates some content while squashing other posts. Nonprofits choose which of these dinner parties to join, and try their best to earn a seat at the table.

Three social media platforms enjoyed near-universal adoption from nonprofits in 2022: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

There was also widespread presence on LinkedIn (82%) and YouTube (74%). The only other social media platform used by a substantial number of Benchmarks participants was TikTok — 30% of nonprofits reported being active on that platform in 2022.

(As a reminder, this edition of Benchmarks covers 2022, which means that Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk, and the fallout from the leeeeeeeeeeengthy series of dubious/strange/unethical/childish/counterproductive/unpalatable/offensive/outlandish choices made since then mostly falls outside of our data set. It also means that any migration to the cornucopia of new platforms vying to be the new Twitter will not be reflected here.)

Nonprofits tended to have more fans on Facebook than followers on other platforms. For every 1,000 email subscribers, nonprofits had 685 Facebook fans, 208 Twitter followers, and 160 Instagram followers. Unsurprisingly for a relatively new platform, nonprofits had the smallest audiences on TikTok — just 4 followers for every 1,000 email subscribers.

Although Instagram audiences were smaller than Facebook or Twitter, they grew at the fastest rate. Nonprofits had 10% more Instagram followers in 2022 than in 2021, while Facebook fans increased by 4%. Twitter audience sizes were flat year-over-year, which really makes you wonder why someone would want to spend $44 billion over there. (ooooh, burn!)

Of course, growing an audience is just the beginning — the real goal is to serve content and drive engagement. Facebook and Twitter posts had much higher reach relative to a nonprofit’s follower count.

Instagram posts had an average reach of 65 for every 1,000 followers a nonprofit had. That means that a nonprofit with 500,000 Instagram fans could expect any given post to be seen by 32,500 users.If they had the same number of fllowers on Facebook, that post would be seen by 26,500 users.

Reach is determined by a variety of factors — the size of a nonprofit’s follower base, the type of content (story content had much lower reach than photos, for example), the ever-inscrutable and ever-changing algorithms of each platform, and user engagement. Think of social media content as tapas or banchan — small plates meant to be shared. The tastier they are, the more people are likely to pass them around.

Nonprofits posted most frequently on Twitter, with 1.6 posts per day. Facebook posts came an average of once per day, and 0.8 posts per day on Instagram. As with many of these metrics, TikTok trails far behind, with 0.1 posts per day among nonprofits active on that platform.

Public Media nonprofits were by far the most frequent posters on Facebook (3.7 posts per day) and Twitter (5.1 posts per day). Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits posted an average of 0.3 TikToks per day — still well below the frequency of other platforms, but we appreciate the cute animal videos and thank them for their service.

Facebook posts from Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits were also more likely to be photo posts — 56% of posts in this sector included photos, more than twice the overall average of 24%. Public Media nonprofits heavily emphasized links, with 90% of all Facebook posts falling into this category.

The social media data we’ve looked at so far measures what nonprofits are doing, and how audiences are responding. Now, let’s examine what supporters themselves are bringing to the table with Facebook Fundraisers.

Overall, 1.1% of online revenue was derived from Facebook (this isn’t exclusively from Facebook Fundraisers, but the overwhelming majority of this giving is through user-generated Facebook Fundraisers, so it’s okay to think of it that way).

Not only did the share of online revenue from Facebook decline from 2021 levels — the absolute amount raised was lower for most nonprofit types. The exception was the Disaster/International Aid sector, where Facebook revenue just about doubled from the previous year.

As with so much of the standout 2022 results for nonprofits in this issue area, the most likely driver here was the conflict in Ukraine. In response to the invasion and escalating violence, people chose to show solidarity in a variety of ways, from yellow-and-blue profile filters to starting Facebook Fundraisers in support of direct relief efforts.

Those individual decisions to start Fundraiser efforts are the most important factor determining Facebook revenue. That revenue decreased because, outside of the Disaster/International Aid sector, users started fewer Facebook Fundraisers than in 2021.

The average performance of Facebook Fundraisers was fairly consistent across sectors, with the median Fundraiser effort generating 4 donations. Some users were able to drive more donations — the colored bars in this chart show the range from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile.

The average gift made to a Facebook Fundraisers campaign was $34, with most sectors clustered closely around that average. The lowest Fundraisers average gift was in the Health sector ($26), and the highest was in the Disaster/International Aid sector ($38).

These results are consistent with what we’ve reported in every Benchmarks that has included Facebook Fundraisers — the results of each individual Fundraiser campaign tend to be fairly modest. A handful of gifts, about thirty bucks each. The biggest difference — the biggest opportunity — lies in the number of people who are inspired to take a moment or two to dedicate themselves to a cause, and ask the people who care about them to join in.

Call it potluck, call it stone soup — when we invite enough people in, it matters less whether each individual contribution is substantial on its own. What’s important is how it all comes together.

Menu design is all about anticipating what a diner might want, and balancing that against what a restaurant wants to serve. At one extreme you have the prix fixe menu, or better yet, omakase — absolving the consumer of making difficult decisions, trusting in the chef to know what’s best. At the other end of the spectrum is the Cheesecake Factory approach: a phone-book sized tome featuring every kind of cuisine imaginable, and some that are better left unimagined.

The menu of options on nonprofit websites typically falls in between — aiming for clear navigation while emphasizing certain choices. You can donate, take action, explore issues, make a gift, buy tickets, DONATE, volunteer, discover resources, search job openings, become a monthly donor, ask a question, donate….

A core challenge is optimizing the webpage so that visitors can easily find what they are hungry for, and so that nonprofits can draw attention to those site elements they most want to prioritize. To do that, it helps to know where visitors are coming from, and how they are experiencing the site.

The average nonprofit website saw 38% of its visitors arrive via organic search results. In this context, “organic” means the user entered a search term and clicked on a result that was not a paid ad.

At the high end, organic traffic accounted for nearly half of all visits to websites for Cultural and Public Media nonprofits. For Cultural nonprofits, this may be due to users who are able to search for specific and relevant terms; if you Google the name of your local science museum, there’s an excellent chance that the top results will lead you right there. Public Media may benefit from this sort of thing as well, for users who search for their local station’s call sign — but they also generate visits through reporting, news updates, interviews, performances, and other content.

This range only scratches the surface of the possible motivations that drive organic traffic, and it shows how variable the relationship between a visitor and nonprofit can be. There’s a big difference between someone searching for their local public media station because they were reminded to donate during the pledge drive on their morning commute, and someone who happened to click on a link to a news article.

On average, just 0.23% of organic visitors make a donation, generating an average of $0.77 per visitor. Of those visitors who make it to a website’s main donation page, 19% complete a gift.

Given the large volume of traffic, and the small percentage of visitors who donate, there is significant potential for nonprofits to increase revenue by improving the conversion rate of site visitors. Some of this work is done by optimizing the site as a whole — how visitors are encouraged to make a gift. And some of it happens on the donation page itself — the images, copy, case for giving, user flow, and other elements.

We asked Benchmarks participants which payment platforms they accept (beyond the standard credit card options, and the non-standard-but-very-cool giant suitcase full of solid gold bars). The most popular alternative was PayPal, with 74% of participants accepting payments through that platform.

Other tools — including Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Venmo — have not been adopted as widely. At least, not yet. Many of these tools are intended to make transactions easier for users on their mobile devices — and that is (or should be) an urgent priority for nonprofits.

In 2022, users on mobile devices (including both phones and tablets) accounted for 57% of nonprofit website traffic. However, these visits generated just 36% of donation transactions and 25% of revenue. Which is to say: mobile users are less likely to give than desktop users, and when they do donate, the average gift size is significantly lower.

We know that the majority of website visitors, regardless of how they arrive on the site or what device they are using, will not make a donation. That doesn’t mean that their engagement is not valuable, either for themselves or the nonprofit.

But for nonprofits who can find ways to increase conversion rates among organic visitors — and especially that portion of visitors using mobile devices — a potential feast awaits.