Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmarks

 

Nonprofit digital fundraising benchmarks are a vital yard stick for every organization. While Nonprofit digital fundraising growth is  exploding, it’s often hard to know if your doing well or not.  Wouldn’t it be great to have nonprofit digital fundraising benchmarks that could help you answer:

• How much should I be investing in lead generation?

• What kind of optimization rate should I be having?

• Is my email list engaged? What’s a good open rate? Or click through rate?

• How often should I ask for contributions from my email list?

 

Shrewd Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmarks

Fortunately the good people at M+R conducted at very candid study of nonprofits across North America. The results is an outstanding nonprofit digital fundraising benchmark study from which you can measure your success against your nonprofit peers.

 

Here are some of the nonprofit digital fundraising benchmark Highlights:

 

Revenue Growth: Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmark

• Nonprofit online revenue from all sources increased 19% in 2015
• Single donation revenue increased by 18% while email revenue increased by 25%.
• Monthly giving accounts for 17% of all online revenue.

 

Email: A Key Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmarks

• Email list size grew by an average of 14% despite despite losing almost 12% to churn.

• Nonprofits sent an average of 49 email messages per subscriber in 2015. Almost 40% of those emails included fundraising appeals and a quarter included advocacy massages.

 

• On average nonprofits received $44 in donations for every 1,000 fundraising messages sent out.

 

• half of all nonprofits built a three email welcome program (89% of them included a fundraising ask, 38% included an advocacy message, and 62% included a survey, social share).

 

• Average email open rate is 16%, click-through rate for advocacy is 3%; for fundraising is 0.43% and 1.6% for newsletters. Page completion rate for fundraising is 15% and advocacy is 82%.

 

 

Website: Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmarks

• Website visitors increased by 8% per month.
• 1% of ALL visitors make a donation.
• Average conversion rate for a nonprofit’s dedicated donation page is 15%.

 

Social Media: Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmarks

• For every 1000 email subscribers, non profits have 355 Facebook fans, 132 Twitter followers and 19 Instagram followers.
• Organizations posted to Facebook an average of 1.3 times a day and tweeted an average of 3.8 times a day.
• The share of Facebook fans reached organically per post is 10%.
• Average engagement is 5.4% on Facebook and 1.6% for Twitter (including clicks, comments, shares, retweets, likes and other actions).

 

Three ways Nonprofits became Digital Donation Growth ROCK STARS

Want to grow your nonprofit digital fundraising? The M+R Nonprofit Digital Fundraising Benchmark Study separated out the top 25 with the most online revenue growth in 2015 to find out how they became Rock Stars.

 

Nope. They didn’t have glitzy attention grabbing content or a magical email list of rabidly engaged donors. What was consistent across all 25 of the highest online revenue growth was:

 

1. Email is the Heart of Fundraising Success: 34 percent of online revenue for the top 25 organizations tracks back to emails, versus the 27 percent average for all the other nonprofits that participated in the study.

 

2. More asks: The top 25 organizations sent out an average of 27 fundraising appeals per subscriber last year, much higher than the average of 16 for the other nonprofits.

 

 

3. More advertising: According to the study, the top organizations spent six times more on online advertising last year than the average ($0.12 for every dollar raised online versus the $0.02 average for all the other organizations).