Benchmarks 2023

Earlier this year, we published the latest edition of the annual M+R Benchmarks Study. It is a comprehensive look at the metrics underlying nonprofit digital programmes, including fundraising, advocacy, and marketing. From email to social media to digital ads to website traffic, there is a veritable feast of findings, and we encourage you to read the full study for this broad context and some jokes about breakfast cereal.

The follow-up analysis contained here explores the similarities and differences between those cohorts to give UK-based charities a clear look at the most relevant data, positioned within that global context.

It’s like this: there is a difference between chips doused in vinegar and fries dipped in ketchup. We should understand, and celebrate, those differences. But we should also never pass up an opportunity to eat deep-fried potatoes, no matter what name they happen to be going by.

The UK-specific data, insights, and trends we explore in this supplement would not be possible without the generosity and diligence of the participants who shared the results of their social media, email, advertising, and website efforts. Special thanks also go to our partners at Rally who recruited participants, answered our questions, and were their kind and lovely selves each step of the way.

We are M+R, and we are hungry for change.

We believe that the nonprofits we work for are essential to advancing the cause of justice, alleviating suffering, and solving the greatest challenges we face.

We bring experience, talent, and unshakeable dedication to our clients through fundraising and supporter engagement, movement building and issue advocacy, and message and brand development.

We’re always cooking up new resources, advice, and tools for nonprofits. Visit us at www.mrss.com.

Find out more about working at M+R and join our crew at www.mrss.com/careers.

Rally, founded by Paul de Gregorio in 2018, is a new type of partner for progressive organisations. They’re not a conventional agency — more of a hub or collective. They mobilise public support behind world changing organisations and causes fighting for a fairer, healthier, safer, greener, more equal world. Through collaborations they inspire people to take action. To sign up, turn up, donate, amplify or lead others. And they do most of it, though not all of it, online.

You can find out all about them at www.wearerally.co.uk

There’s so much more to a meal than what you see on the plate. The labour 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.

Each year when we produce our Benchmarks Study, the first question that people ask — the first question we ask ourselves — is what was the change in overall revenue. And it makes sense — fundraising is an important part of most programmes, and revenue enables marketing, advocacy, education, and nonprofits’ core mission. It’s a single data point that can act as a proxy for the overall health of a programme, the receptivity of supporters, and the context in which we are doing our work,

So, the question: in 2022, did revenue go up, or did it go down? The answer: yes. Or more accurately: it depends.

For UK nonprofits, total online revenue increased by an average of 5% from 2021 to 2022. For Non-UK nonprofits, total online revenue declined by 6%.

Both Small (annual online revenue in 2022 below £500,000) and Large (annual online revenue greater than £3,000,000) organisations reported higher revenue, while the average Medium nonprofit (annual online revenue between £500,000 and $£3,000,000) reported 6% less revenue in 2022 than in 2021.

These are median numbers, meaning that half of our participants reported a number below this figure, and half reported a number higher than this figure. The “higher than” includes many of the nonprofits in the Disaster/International Aid sector, where the average year-over-year change was a revenue increase of 59%.

Fundraising for groups in this space tends to be quite sensitive to major events, and the invasion of and ongoing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine dominated headlines and public attention for much of 2022. The extraordinary need there — and in places like Pakistan, which suffered extreme flooding — drove higher giving.

The relatively modest change for most sectors, including a 4% decline in revenue for Health nonprofits, in many cases represents a return to normal following a dramatic spike in giving in 2020 driven primarily by the COVID pandemic.

Most nonprofits should not expect year-over-year growth of 40-80%, but the ability of nonprofits to absorb that level of change and then continue to see even small positive change in the following years speaks to the success of retention efforts. It is not unusual for a nonprofit that receives a sudden influx of emergency donors to experience a drop in giving over the medium term, as newly energised supporters fade away. One of the most effective ways to avoid that rebound effect is to emphasise regular giving, which tends to see much higher retention rates than cash giving.

That is precisely the trajectory we saw in 2022. While revenue from cash giving held nearly flat, with just 1% growth on average, revenue from regular giving grew by 14%.

Regular giving made up 41% of all online giving for UK nonprofits in 2022, up from 37% in the previous year. (And significantly outpacing the 27% of all online revenue for Non-UK nonprofits.) For Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits, regular giving contributed 64% of all revenue.

For both regular and cash giving, average gift size was about twice as high for Non-UK nonprofits as for UK nonprofits. For regular giving, the average gift was £11 in the UK, and £25 outside the UK. Both of these averages were relatively unchanged from the previous year, another reflection of the consistency of regular giving.

For cash giving, average gift size was a bit more volatile, with notable increases from 2021. The average cash gift went up from £56 in 2021 to £64 in 2022. For Non-UK nonprofits, average one-time gift size increased from £111 to £122.

Of course, one of the most important advantages of regular giving compared to cash giving is a higher retention rate — it’s much easier for a donor to passively continue an established monthly donation than to make repeated active decisions to make a new cash gift. In addition to generating more reliable support, regular donors also contribute notably higher annualised revenue than for those who only made cash gifts.

While we don’t have sufficient data to break out these totals specifically for UK nonprofits, for our global data set we found that the average cash-only donor contributed $192 over the course of 2022 (or £159), compared to $287 (or £237) for regular donors.

When a major surge in giving occurs — most often, in response to an emergency — a concerted effort to convert cash donors to monthly giving can help transform a burst of generosity into long-term growth.

While many organisations have long pursued this sort of regular giving recruitment through telephone and other channels, it’s clear that digital channels including email and advertising should be a part of this donor journey. As the increase in regular giving continues to outpace growth in cash giving, nonprofits are building a more reliable, stable base of support in their online programmes.

If we’ve learned anything from watching The Great British Bake Off, it’s that making slight tweaks to any single ingredient can have drastic impacts on your bake. The difference between overproofed or a lovely rise is a matter of seconds. Mix in too many wet elements, and you’ll get a soggy bottom. But perfect the balance, and you’re headed for a Hollywood handshake.

In the world of outbound messaging channels, there are three ingredients that dictate results:

1. The size of the audience you can reach

2. The number of times you reach them

3. The effectiveness of the messaging you reach them with

We’ll take each one of those in turn for email, then turn our attention to mobile messaging.

Email list sizes grew significantly faster for UK nonprofits than for Non-UK nonprofits over the past few years. In the UK, 17% growth in 2022 followed 26% and 25% increases in list size over the previous two years. For Non-UK nonprofits, the same period saw 2%, 7%, and 4% growth.

We report list size as a net number — this is the balance of all the subscribers added to the list, and all of those who left the list through bounces or unsubscribes (or nonprofits removing inactive subscribers in order to protect deliverability).

On average, UK nonprofits lost 6% of subscribers to bounces, and another 7% to unsubscribes. The Non-UK churn was just a touch higher, indicating that the primary advantage UK nonprofits had was higher rates of new subscriber acquisition.

We know that nonprofits were able to reach more people in 2022. Next, let’s look at how many times they sent messages to that growing list of subscribers.

Overall, UK nonprofits sent 27 messages per subscriber over the course of 2022. The volume of messages was more than twice as high for Non-UK nonprofits, which sent 61 messages per subscriber.

The difference is especially striking when we look specifically at fundraising messaging. On average, UK nonprofits sent 6 fundraising appeals in 2022. It is not unusual for a nonprofit outside the UK to send that many fundraising messages in just the last week of the year. In fact, the average Non-UK nonprofit sent 29 fundraising emails in 2022 — more than the total messaging of all types for nonprofits in the UK.

That’s a substantial gap, but it narrowed a bit in 2022. Total email volume for UK nonprofits increased by 49% in 2022, with a 30% increase in the average number of fundraising messages. In the US, messaging volume grew by just 8%, and with a 14% increase in fundraising message volume.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the effectiveness of all that email.

Most metrics for most types of messages were lower in 2022 than in 2021 — which is not unusual when both audience sizes and message frequency increase.

The average click-through rate for advocacy messages — the percentage of message recipients who clicked on a link or button to take action — was 1.9% for UK nonprofits in 2022, 37% below the 2021 rate. Response rate — the percentage of recipients who signed a petition or otherwise completed an advocacy action — was 1.35%.

For fundraising messages, the 0.8% click-through rate represented a 17% decline from the previous year. The page completion rate — the percentage of users who landed on the donation page and actually completed the gift — was 32%. And the response rate was 0.20% — which is to say, one in every 500 subscribers who received a fundraising email responded by making a donation.

It is fair to feel a bit let down by those numbers. One in five hundred recipients made a gift! And that’s 20% lower than the previous year! And we worked hard on those emails! But compare that to the 0.08% fundraising email response rate for Non-UK nonprofits, and it doesn’t seem quite so dire.

The response rate for fundraising emails tells us how likely a subscriber is to give, but it doesn’t quite capture the value of a fundraising email — it does not account for the amount being donated. For every 1,000 fundraising emails sent, nonprofits raised £66.

This metric varied widely between sectors. At the low end, Rights nonprofits reported an average revenue per 1,000 fundraising emails of £29. Disaster/International Aid nonprofits raised £162 for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent.

The £66 overall average in this metric was 19% lower than in 2021, closely aligned with the decline in response rate for fundraising messages.

Of our three primary variables for fundraising emails, two (audience size and message volume) were higher in 2022, and one (supporter response) was lower. In other words, UK organisations sent more fundraising emails to more people, but each message sent generated less revenue on average.

The decline in this last metric outweighed the increases in list size and message volume — email revenue declined by 9% for UK nonprofits. (For Non-UK nonprofits, there was a 4% drop in revenue.)

This is not to say that every organisation suffered lower revenue. Once again, Disaster/International Aid nonprofits reported an increase in donor support, with 13% higher email revenue. For Large nonprofits, average email revenue was 160% higher in 2022 than in 2021!

With email revenue lower, and overall online revenue higher, the share of revenue from email fell. In 2021, UK nonprofits generated 4% of all online revenue through email; in 2022, that share dropped to 2%.

Our data for mobile messaging is not quite as comprehensive — for one thing, we are not able to report on mobile metrics like response rate — so the story is not as straightforward.

Mobile audience sizes continued to grow at a healthy rate last year. Mobile lists grew by 16%, following 26% and 18% increases in the previous two years.

Overall revenue from mobile messaging increased by 2%, after a 7% decline in the previous year. This increase in revenue was due to higher cash giving, which grew by 15%. Regular giving revenue via mobile messaging was relatively flat, with a 2% decline.

As with overall online revenue, the change in mobile revenue was still heavily influenced by the COVID pandemic. If we use 2018 as a baseline, we see a massive increase in mobile giving in 2020, coinciding with the first year of the pandemic. Mobile cash giving was twice as high as it had been in 2018, but that increase proved to be short-lived. When the initial pandemic response faded, so did mobile cash giving — in 2022, revenue from mobile cash giving was 14% higher than it had been in 2018.

Regular giving via mobile saw a less dramatic spike during the first year of the pandemic — though at 53% higher than our 2018 baseline, the increase was quite impressive. It was also, unsurprisingly, more durable than the surge in cash giving. In 2022, mobile regular giving revenue was 22% higher than in 2018.

While mobile revenue increased, it continued to make up a small share of overall online revenue. Revenue from mobile messaging declined from 2% of all online revenue to just 1% (to reiterate: mobile revenue increased, but fell as a share of the total as other giving channels grew at a faster rate).

In many ways, email and mobile programmes are like your local pub — patrons are loyal and care deeply about your establishment. Success is dependent on quality offerings, community, and a sense of belonging. That loyalty matters a great deal, but the reality is that on any given day you’re only going to be able to reach so many people.

Digital ads, on the other hand, are more like a Greggs or Nandos. You can’t help but spot one on your way to work or school or the shops. They are everywhere, and their ability to convert passersby depends more on budgetary, strategic, and creative choices.

We’ll start with budget. 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 programme). Last year, UK nonprofits reinvested 19% of online revenue in digital ads. To be clear, this is not a measure of return on investment — it’s about the relative scale of spending. A nonprofit that raised £1,000,000 through online channels in 2022 would have spent £190,000 on digital ad placements.

Nonprofits increased their spending by 35% in 2022, though there was a wide range between sectors. Spending was about twice as high as the previous year for the Disaster/International Aid and Wildlife/Animal Welfare sectors, which could be a response to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, on the other hand, reported spending 19% less than in 2021.

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

The biggest piece of the ad budget pie for nonprofits of every size went to direct fundraising efforts — overall, 71% of ad spending was dedicated to direct fundraising. Lead generation accounted for 15% of all spending, with another 8% dedicated to branding, awareness, or education advertising.

We can further break down the fundraising budget by channel — and when we do, we see major differences between nonprofits of different sizes.

Search consumed 46% of fundraising ad budgets for Large nonprofits, the largest single category. Medium nonprofits spent 23% of fundraising ad budgets on search — significantly less, but still a sizeable portion of the budget. Small nonprofits, on the other hand, spend just 2% of fundraising ad budgets on search.

Instead, fully 97% of fundraising ad budgets for Small nonprofits went to Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram). While Meta has long been an inviting platform for Small nonprofits due to relatively low cost and barriers to entry, privacy changes by Apple and the deprecation of cookies may make it more difficult for nonprofits to reach their goals. It should not be surprising if we see Small nonprofits reallocate resources to search, display, or other channels in the future.

In 2022, Meta did produce donations at a lower cost than Twitter and display advertising. Nonprofits spent £100 on average to generate a single donation on Meta, while Twitter and display came in at £155 per donation and £247, respectively. Search advertising had by far the lowest cost per donation, at £23.

Along with average gift size, cost per donation is an important factor in determining the return on ad spend (ROAS). And so it is no surprise that nonprofits of every size generated far and away the highest ROAS of any channel with search advertising.

For every pound spent on fundraising search advertising, nonprofits raised £2.63. For Small nonprofits, the ROAS for search was £3.19 — a strong indication that they would do well to shift resources toward this channel.

Of course, 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.

Return on ad spend for Meta was £0.44, and considerably lower for display, Twitter, and video advertising. As nonprofits look to expand their reach and find new audiences through these channels, earning a positive return will depend on securing additional revenue through repeated giving.

As we’ve noted, lead generation accounted for 15% of advertising budgets in 2022. The average cost per lead was £3.17. There was little variation by sector, though Hunger/Poverty nonprofits reported a particularly high cost per lead at £5.37.

However, the cost to recruit a new subscriber via Meta (£2.70) was less than half than on TikTok (£5.75), which itself was less than half the cost per new subscriber for YouTube (£13.06). Nonprofits will need to continue to experiment to find the best balance as they look to diversify their spending and grow audiences through paid advertising.

That growth of audiences through advertising had a significant impact in 2022. 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. The average figure for UK nonprofits in 2022 was 0.24.

Here’s what that means: if the median nonprofit had 100,000 email subscribers at the beginning of the year, they acquired 24,000 new subscribers via ads over the course of 2022. When we understand how important a growing list is to a healthy email programme, and how difficult list growth is, that is a seriously consequential result.

It will never be possible to reach all the people we would like to, each person who cares enough about our cause to do their part. But when we look to the tools we have available to grow our audiences, digital advertising carries enormous potential. We hope to see continued experimentation and optimisation in this space — both to produce direct results, and to expand the reach of email, mobile, and other channels.

Someone, somewhere, right now, is looking for you. Maybe not you personally, but very probably your organisation, and almost certainly your cause. They have the appetite to learn more, or they want to find help, or they want to do something kind or generous or useful in service of something they care about.

When they find you — if they find you amidst the enormous menu of the Internet’s offerings — it’s a good bet they will end up either on your organisation’s home page or one of your several social media accounts. Let’s take those in turn.

The average UK nonprofit website saw 36% of its visitors arrive via organic search results. Not like cage-free, grass-fed organic. In this context, “organic” means the user entered a search term and clicked on a result that was not a paid ad.

At the low end, Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits could expect about one in five of their website visitors to arrive via organic search. At the other extreme, 70% of Hunger/Poverty website visitors began their journey by searching for a relevant keyword.

This data point tells us a visitor’s origins, but not their purpose. We can’t know, for example, how many of those Hunger/Poverty site visitors were struggling to make ends meet and looking for local resources. And we can’t know how many of them were inspired to seek out an organisation to entrust with a donation.

For those visitors who did manage to make it to a website’s main donation page, 21% completed a gift. (Benchmarks participants self-select which of their donation pages count as the “main donation page” for purposes of this study. Typically it’s the one you land on when you click the giant red DONATE button on the homepage.)

The other most likely destination for a user looking to connect with an organisation is social media. More accurately, that’s destinations, plural — the world is not so simple anymore that we can get away with just one.

Nearly every organisation in our study had a presence on the Big Three social media platforms — Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. 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 slow-motion train wreck on the platform [as opposed to the full-speed wrecks of Musk’s other endeavours] are mostly not captured in our data. It also means that any migration to Threads, or the plethora of other new platforms vying to be the new Twitter will not be reflected here.)

UK nonprofits posted most frequently on Twitter, with 1.6 posts per day. Instagram posts came an average of 1.1 times per day, and Facebook posts just 0.6 times per day. Post frequently on TikTok trailed far behind, with 0.1 posts per day among nonprofits active on that platform.

That low post volume on TikTok doesn’t quite capture the full potential of nonprofits to reach new audiences on the platform — many organisations have begun contracting with paid influencers to help spread their message.

Here, as in so many aspects of life, the US tends to be a bit more aggressive than the UK. For US nonprofits with paid influencer campaigns, the average number of paid influencer partnerships was 6 over the course of 2022, with an average of 10 posts from those influencers. For UK nonprofits, there were 2.5 paid influencers, generating 6.5 posts on average.

While each social media platform has its own idiosyncrasies, limitations, opportunities, audiences, and maddeningly opaque algorithms, Facebook stands alone as a meaningful direct fundraising channel.

Overall, 1.6% of online revenue for UK nonprofits was derived from Facebook, down from 2.5% the previous year (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). The most obvious outlier here was the Health sector, which received 7.4% of all online revenue via Facebook in 2022.

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 increased by 268% the previous year. Once again, the outpouring of public attention and support sparked by the invasion of Ukraine is likely the driving factor here.

It wasn’t only the amount of Facebook revenue that fell in 2022 — it was also the number of Facebook Fundraiser efforts begun by users. The number of Fundraisers was 22% lower than in the previous year.

Those individual decisions to start Fundraiser efforts are the most important factor determining Facebook revenue. Since Facebook first rolled out this feature, we have seen relatively little variance in the amount raised by the average Fundraiser.

In 2022, the average Facebook Fundraiser generated 5 gifts, with little variation between sectors. A user starting their own Fundraiser, whether to honour a loved one, raise visibility of a cause dear to their heart, participate in a virtual challenge, or leverage the extra social media attention on their birthday, was likely to generate just a handful of gifts.

And those gifts tended to be relatively small. The average Facebook Fundraisers gift was £16, and even the Disaster/International Aid sector saw an average Facebook Fundraisers gift of just £21. As reported in our fundraising section, the overall average cash gift across digital channels was substantially larger at £64.

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, mostly small ones. 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.

In that sense, it’s not too different from other channels. We know that people are searching — for a cause to believe in, for a way to make a difference. It’s up to us to make sure they can find us, and find a way to get involved.

Disaster/International Aid

British Red Cross
Christian Aid
Hope and Homes for Children
Islamic Relief UK
MAG (Mines Advisory Group)
Oxfam GB
Save the Children UK
Sightsavers
The Leprosy Mission
UK for UNHCR
Women for Women International UK
World Vision UK

Health

Blood Cancer UK
Children's Hospice South West
Dementia UK
Evelina London Children's Charity
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity
Guy's & St Thomas' Charity
Guy's Cancer Charity
Kidney Research UK
Maggie's
Marie Curie
National Deaf Children's Society
Samaritans
Sands
Sense
Smile Train UK
Teenage Cancer Trust
The Eve Appeal

Hunger/Poverty

Centrepoint
Child Poverty Action Group
Shelter
The Salvation Army

Rights

Amnesty International UK
Children's Society
ClientEarth
Freedom from Torture
Liberty
Refuge
Reprieve

Wildlife/Animal Welfare

Animals Asia UK
Dogs Trust
IFAW UK
The Brooke

Other

Art Fund
Help for Heroes
Walking With The Wounded