The latest M+R Benchmarks Study was released yesterday, providing a valuable look at trends in the digital fundraising arena.

The study is based on an impressive range of 105 participating organizations in eight sectors — mostly large nonprofits like Oxfam America, Planned Parenthood Federation and Humane Society of the US, but including smaller regional/local groups like Westchester Children’s Assn and JVS Boston as well.

M+R slices and dices email fundraising and messaging performance of this sample in every which way … a treasure of data on list growth and churn; volume of messaging (fundraising and advocacy); open, click-through and response rates (all down, yet email revenue grew by 25% in 2015); gift size; online revenue growth (up 19% in 2015); digital advertising spends … you name it.

Most of this data is available by fundraising sector … ready for you to compare your online fundraising performance with M+R’s benchmarking tool.

But it’s not all about email fundraising, there’s plenty of data on landing page and website visits/conversion, and social media.

You can download the study here.

Top 25

One interesting piece of analysis looked at the top 25 online fundraising performers over the year studied. These top 25 increased their email revenue by 37% over 2014; the other groups averaged 18%. What was their ‘secret sauce’?

Interestingly, the top 25 actually didn’t execute better (e.g., winning impressively higher response rates), they worked harder — they sent out more appeals (average of 27 appeals/subscriber/year versus 16 for other groups) and they spent more money on advertising to build lists ($0.12 in digital advertising for every dollar raised versus $0.02 by other groups).

Says M+R:

“The truth is, top nonprofits are not the X-Men, they don’t have superpowers. They aren’t defying gravity to achieve dramatically higher email response rates; they are diligently sending more fundraising appeals. They aren’t reaching new audiences telepathically; they are investing more in paid advertising.

There are no shortcuts here.

These leaders are for the most part doing just a little bit better in a lot of different places. They’re pushing harder on the same sorts of tactics you are probably already using.”

Best news

What I found most encouraging is the growth in online monthly giving — now accounting for 17% of all online revenue. In 2015, monthly revenue grew by 24% across all sectors (with some understandable sector variances), compared to 18% growth in one-time revenue.

Another good sign — list churn rates were down more than 75% year-over-year. M+R’s analysis is simply that online fundraisers are getting more sophisticated and careful about how they use their lists … especially the average 24% of the file that’s considered active. And you know how The Agitator feels about retention!

All in all, a rosy picture for online fundraising, now accounting for about 12% of all charitable giving.

Well done, again, M+R.

Tom

P.S. And again, here’s the study.