Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a single recipe for nonprofit success? All the ingredients listed in precise proportions, the techniques and methods laid out just so. Follow the steps, one by one, then set it and forget it and… presto! A growing audience, impactful advocacy, and rising revenue, easy as pie.

Well, the annual M+R Benchmarks Study is… not that. The reality, difficult to swallow though it may be, is that our work and our world are much too complex to allow for such a prescriptive approach.

The methods for cooking up a successful digital program are as individual and varied as the methods to make curry, or pho, or chili. So, no recipe to follow, sorry (unless you want to know how to make some food, that's here). Instead we have a cornucopia of tables and charts, we have toplines and trends, we have insights to tantalize your senses and amuse your bouche. And honestly, it’s all a lot more exciting — and a lot more useful — than any set of simplified instructions.

This year, Benchmarks is informed by the complicated, diverse, sometimes messy experiences of 215 nonprofits. Our wonderful participants shared the details of almost 5.4 billion email and SMS messages, 681 million website visits, 374 thousand social media posts, and so much more.

The findings in this year’s Benchmarks represent the creativity and craft of nonprofit staff who strive every day to reach and expand audiences. They also reflect the core values and changing tastes of millions of supporters who react, click, share, take action, and donate to causes of all types. They reveal the ongoing evolution of digital channels that are increasingly the centerpiece of marketing, advocacy, and fundraising for nonprofits.

There’s a lot here, and if you take the time to taste everything, you are sure to find some delicious new insight and inspiration. We certainly have.

We are grateful, as always, for the generosity of our nonprofit participants. We give thanks to everyone who submitted data, coded messages, and answered questions to help this year’s Benchmarks come together. You are delightful people, we were pleased as punch to work with you this year, and we look forward to welcoming you back again next time.

In addition to the heaping helping of findings in each year’s Benchmarks, we often like to choose a theme. Mostly, this is to make things a bit more fun for us and for you (yes, we know, it’s a tall order to make an in-depth discussion of nonprofit data even more fun, but a tasteful garnish can improve even the most delicious meal). If we have been too subtle so far: our theme this year is food — and we chose it for reasons beyond the ready availability of delectable puns.

Food is more than sustenance. It is culture and community, a way to come together and find connection. Preparing food for others can be a profound expression of care and love. Food is also labor, work that is often hidden from consumers — from farmworkers in the fields to packing plant assembly lines to the bussers, dishwashers, and line cooks in the back of your favorite restaurant.

The collages throughout this year’s Benchmarks are intended to recognize and celebrate the variety of what food means: love, work, and shared experience. We’re also excited to share some favorite recipes from the M+R staff who have contributed to this year’s Benchmarks. We hope you enjoy them.

Now, the table is set, and it’s time to dig in. Bon appétit!

Buffets can be tricky. If you simply move down the line from start to finish, serving yourself a bit of each item that catches your eye, you risk filling your plate before you’re halfway across and missing out on what might have been the tastiest morsels.

A wise buffet-goer will scout ahead first, identifying the most appealing options. Even better: find someone who’s already sampled it all and ask for recommendations. That’s what we’re here for — we’re full to bursting with all sorts of fun facts and eager to share what we’ve learned.

The rest of Benchmarks is piled high with data to suit every taste. Before you start exploring, we’ve prepared a menu of what we think are the most important, telling, useful, and sometimes surprising findings.

Appetizer

Let’s whet our appetites with a couple of key data points that provide a taste of the data feast to come.

The average nonprofit reported a small drop in revenue from 2021 to 2022, a 4% decline year over year.

And listen, we don’t like to start this data smorgasbord with the fundraising equivalent of sad, mushy broccoli. We want to see nonprofits thriving, supporters more engaged, resources going to where they can do the most good. But above anything else, Benchmarks is about two things: transparently sharing the most accurate metrics we can, and digging below top-level findings to better understand the nuance and context.

The nuance and context surrounding the 4% decline in revenue are fascinating.

First, it’s important to note that this decline was not evenly distributed. It’s the median figure for all our participants, so half of all participants reported a higher number. (See the Methodology section for more on how we calculate our metrics.)

The context of the moment matters — that’s one reason that nonprofits in the Disaster/International Aid sector reported an 8% increase in revenue. With the conflict in Ukraine generating intense media attention and an outpouring of compassion and solidarity, nonprofits providing direct support saw an influx of donors. But if we are assessing change over time, we need to look at 2022 and what came before.

In the chart above, Hunger/Poverty nonprofits show the steepest decline in revenue, with a 14% drop from 2021. If we look further back in time, these same nonprofits reported an even larger decrease in revenue from 2020 to 2021 — a 35% drop!

Two consecutive years of declining revenue might be alarming for any individual nonprofit, let alone for the cohort of nonprofits dedicated to ensuring that our neighbors have a safe and stable place to live and enough nutritious food to put on the table. Let’s pull back even further in time and see what we find.

Here we capture the initial response to the COVID pandemic, and it includes a 390% year-over-year increase in online revenue for Hunger/Poverty nonprofits. Not to get too in the weeds on the math here, but that’s almost a 400% increase! In one year! Starting from that baseline, we can better understand the context of the 14% decline in revenue for this sector last year. The challenge for these nonprofits may be primarily one of retention, rather than donor acquisition (see the Fundraising section to explore retention metrics).

It’s helpful to understand that broad, long-term story — but focusing in on a couple of bite-sized data chunks can be just as instructive.

For many nonprofits, the critical end-of-year fundraising season kicks off right after Thanksgiving. While normal people are shopping for discounted air fryers and crafting increasingly improbable sandwiches out of leftovers, fundraisers are putting out a high-intensity push for donations that reaches a boiling point on Giving Tuesday.

In 2022, donations on Giving Tuesday alone accounted for 3% of the total online revenue for the year. That makes Giving Tuesday one of the most important days on the fundraising calendar, and makes the data point you are about to read especially notable. Giving Tuesday revenue declined by 13% from 2021, and email revenue on Giving Tuesday declined by 18%.

As Giving Tuesday strategies have evolved over the last few years, many nonprofits have begun adding early-bird appeals in the days leading up to Giving Tuesday, or extending matching gift or premium offers past the midnight deadline. It’s possible that some Giving Tuesday revenue has simply shifted to the surrounding days.

But this was not the only high-profile moment with a drop in year-over-year revenue. In fact, the biggest, most wonderful, most terrifying (wonderfying? terriful?) day of the year showed strikingly similar results.

We’re talking about the day that online fundraisers consider the big enchilada. We’re talking about the one day to make or break your annual budget numbers, pull out all the stops, post your 2X 3X 5X matching gift offers, send your LAST FINAL ULTIMATE CHANCE FOR REALS THIS TIME deadline appeals, and obsessively hit the refresh button on your CRM’s reporting page all the way up until midnight.

We’re talking about December 31, and it’s a huge forking deal. Nonprofits received 5% of all 2022 revenue on the last day of the year — what happens on that day has an outsized impact on annual performance. And December 31, 2022 looked very different from December 31, 2021.

Overall revenue was down 13% from the same day the previous year, and December 31 email revenue dropped by 22%. This is a situation where our data can tell us what happened, but not why. It’s an answer that spawns questions.

Did worries about inflation or a possible recession affect donor attitudes? Did a more crowded, competitive messaging environment make it harder for nonprofits to stand out? Is this partly a return to “normal” after COVID-driven fundraising in previous years, as we saw with Hunger/Poverty nonprofits? How much of this decline was simply due to the fact that December 31 fell on a Saturday, and supporters were less likely to pay attention to those last-chance fundraising appeals?

If the last of these possible explanations holds water, there’s some good news: we won’t see another Saturday, December 31 until the year 2033. On the other hand, the last day of this year falls on a Sunday, which may be subject to some of the same effects.

Giving Tuesday and December 31 are essential, bread-and-butter components of the fundraising calendar. If nonprofits struggle to maintain performance on these days, it will have far-reaching impacts on digital fundraising programs.

Main Course

Some things are just meant to go together. Peanut butter and jelly. Fish and chips. Cheese and literally anything else. Email and digital advertising.

There’s a well-known holistic truth here. In general, it’s a good idea to adopt a multi-channel approach that carries a consistent narrative across different messaging streams — including email and advertising, along with direct mail, social media, telemarketing, and so on. Branding is reinforced, supporters receive a coherent story, and a nonprofit develops a recognizable voice.

All true, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. It’s not just in the messaging that email and ads are intertwined. It’s in the mechanics — how we identify potential supporters, how we reach them, how we build relationships, how we convert them to activists, volunteers, and donors.

We’ll start on the ads side (see the Digital Ads section for a full exploration). Branding, awareness, or education advertising accounted for 26% of all ad spending — this is the kind of advertising that typically supports visibility and broad narrative efforts. The remainder of ad spending was oriented toward direct response: fundraising (56% of spending) and lead generation ads that leverage a petition, online action, or other engagement to capture email, mobile, or other contact information (15%).

The cost to generate a single donation via direct fundraising advertising varied widely depending on platform and nonprofit type. For example, Public Media nonprofits spent $16 on search to generate a single gift — and $469 per donation on Meta platforms (i.e. Facebook and Instagram). For Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits, cost per donation was $40 for search, $70 for Meta, and $152 for display advertising.

The cost per donation correlates strongly with return on ad spend (ROAS) — the more it costs to generate a gift, the smaller the net revenue. Overall, search had the strongest ROAS at $2.75 in revenue per dollar spent on ads. Display and Social advertising (including Meta, Twitter, and a relative handful of tentative TikTok investments) all had ROAS below $1.00.

So we have a situation where it can be costly to acquire donors directly from advertising, and in many cases the costs outweigh the immediate return. That means that in order to see positive net revenue from these new donors, we should be looking beyond that first interaction and seeking ways to motivate additional gifts (including recurring giving). That’s where email comes in — the welcome series, the follow-up appeals, the cultivation and engagement messaging, the ongoing work of building and feeding relationships.

Making the most of your advertising program depends on having an effective email program.

But also:

Making the most of your email program depends on having an effective advertising program.

Turning back to that 15% of advertising budgets dedicated to lead generation, we measure efficiency by the cost per digital advertising lead. On average, nonprofits spent $3.41 to acquire one new lead, though again we see a wide divergence between nonprofits of different types. Small nonprofits (those with annual online revenue under $500,000) spent significantly more per lead than their larger peers — perhaps due to having lower baseline brand recognition, or the challenges of optimizing ads on a smaller budget.

Still, even at the highest end ($7.85, the cost per lead for Hunger/Poverty nonprofits), this would be considered money well spent if it leads to a larger, more active supporter base. These new leads become email and text messaging subscribers, and breathe new life into those programs.

Email lists lost subscribers in 2022, with an average decrease of 2%. It’s a small net decline, driven by a combination of bounces, unsubscribes, and nonprofits removing inactive users from their lists. Those losses were mostly balanced by new subscribers being added at nearly the same rate. Want to guess where a large portion of those new listmembers came from?

One of the new metrics we tracked for this year’s Benchmarks is “ratio of ad-acquired leads to start of year email list size

Ratio of new email leads acquired through digital advertising divided email size at the start of the year.

The average ratio of ad-acquired leads to email list size at the start of the year was 0.09. What this means is that if a nonprofit came into 2022 with an email list of 100,000 subscribers, over the course of the year they would add 9,000 new subscribers through advertising lead generation. For Rights nonprofits, the average ratio is 0.28 — so a 100,000-subscriber list would add 28,000 ads-acquired subscribers in 2022.

That’s a lot — and that’s just the median. The colored bars in the chart above represent what we think of as the “normal” range — down to the 25th percentile on the left, and up to the 75th percentile on the right.

For nonprofits overall, that 75th percentile ratio is over 0.3, and even higher for some sectors. Small nonprofits in that upper range added nearly as many subscribers through paid advertising as they had on their entire list at the start of the year!

Considering the steady drain of churn, and how important new subscribers are to a thriving email program, the idea of email programs without support from ads is distinctly unappetizing.

The fundamental metrics underpinning email and ads programs show how much each depends on the other. If you aren’t already, it’s time to start treating them like milk and cookies, like bangers and mash, like cacio e pepe.

Dessert

Here it is, the one and only pie chart in this year’s (or any year’s!) Benchmarks Study:

(We mostly abjure the use of pie charts because it’s hard for people to accurately compare the relative size of pie chart slices — bar charts are easier to grasp at a glance. But sometimes it’s okay to have a little pie chart, as a treat.)

Mobile messaging encompasses a variety of tools and techniques. There are broadcast messages sent from a nonprofit to its subscriber list, and peer-to-peer texting

Unlike a single mass message to a full list, these SMS messages connect volunteers and staff to individuals, enabling one-on-one conversations.

The most common use of peer-to-peer text messaging is fundraising — 62% of participants who engage in peer-to-peer messaging included fundraising in the mix. Nearly half (47%) used P2P messaging to drive advocacy actions. (These numbers don’t add up to 100% because they are not mutually exclusive; many nonprofits leveraged mobile messaging for multiple goals throughout the year. One more example of where you really need to rely on a bar chart to convey information. Pie charts could never.)

In addition to direct response efforts, mobile messaging (and in particular peer-to-peer) is an important aspect of digital organizing

Recruiting, engaging and organizing members, activists, and/or volunteers toward advocacy outcomes.

A cross-channel approach is essential. Those nonprofits that use one digital organizing tool are likely to use several, and 69% of them include peer-to-peer as part of that mix.

Leveraging digital organizing tools to build a base of supporters and volunteers that can then amplify peer-to-peer messaging efforts? That’s what’s called having your cake and eating it, too. (We think. It’s a pretty confusing saying if we’re being honest. Maybe better to stick with pie.)

Digestif

Before we move into the rest of the data, a couple of final morsels that provide some insight into an established marketing practice that is becoming more common for nonprofits: partnering with social media influencers.

We surveyed participants about their influencer strategies and results. Nearly half (47%) of nonprofits who answered our questions about social media influencers reported working with them in 2022 — but just 13% paid those influencers to post.

Among that 13%, the average number of paid influencer partnerships was 6 over the course of 2022, with an average of 10 posts from those influencers. The most common use for influencer partnerships was content creation around narrative, persuasion, and/or culture change — 82% of nonprofits who partnered with paid influencers reported this type of effort.

As nonprofit digital programs continue to evolve, we expect to find deeper connections across platforms, and continued experimentation with new channels and innovative strategies. Hungry for more? Keep eating reading.

There’s so much more to a meal than what you see on the plate. The labor of people who grow, harvest, pack, and prepare the food. The interconnected foodways and traditions that create ever-evolving cuisines. The experiences, training, and perspective of the chef.

Benchmarks is no different. We strive to present the most comprehensive, clear, informative collection of data we can — but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface. Here are a few things you should know to help you better understand our findings and put them to use.

Wherever possible, we have broken out the findings by sector. Each of our participants self-identified the appropriate sector (or, in some cases, fell outside of our defined sectors and selected “Other”). If you are not sure which sector represents your peer group, review the full list of participants⁠ to find where you belong.

We also sort our participants by size. For our study, “Small” refers to nonprofits with annual online revenue in 2022 below $500,000; “Medium” is those nonprofits with annual online revenue between $500,000 and $3,000,000; and “Large” covers all those with annual online revenue greater than $3,000,000.

The averages displayed in each chart and discussed throughout Benchmarks represent the median figure for a given metric for all participants who reported data. Not all participants were able to provide data for every metric. If a chart does not include data for a certain sector or size, it’s because we were not able to collect enough results to report a reliable average.

We use median rather than mean to minimize the risk of a single participant with unusual results having an outsize impact on the overall findings. You will also see some charts that include a range showing the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. Half of all reported values fell within this range, which can be considered “normal” results for participants in our study.

Some of the most useful and interesting data in Benchmarks relies on year-over-year comparisons. Wherever we include this type of finding, we are including long-term data from this year’s participants — an apples-to-apples comparison. We do not compare this year’s findings to what was reported in previous editions of Benchmarks, because the participant pool changes from year to year. That would be more of an apples-to-oranges situation at best. At worst, it would be more like apples-to-pineapples or grapes-to-grapefruits, where a superficial similarity hides a massive underlying difference.

If you have any more questions about how we cooked up Benchmarks this year, please reach out to @mrcampaigns or email benchmarks@mrss.com.