May 2023: M+R Benchmarks Key Takeaways
Happy May! 'Tis my birth month, all the flowers and trees are popping here in New England, and there are sunny days ahead. Ahhhh.
So many nonprofit marketing and fundraising reports have dropped in the last couple of months, my Chrome tabs are out of control. The finest of them all IMO, the M+R Benchmarks report, is extra juicy this year. I’ve included my key takeaways from the report below.
Before you dive in, if you work for a nonprofit, please do me a favor and answer a few questions about your approach to year-end campaigns! I’ve got something stewing with a dream team of fellow consultants (Katelyn Baughan and Brynne Krispin) and we want to make sure it’s maximally helpful.
Ok, on to my favorite M+R learnings!
Key insights from the 2023 M+R Benchmarks Report
This year’s M+R Benchmarks assessed 215 nonprofits that shared almost 5.4 billion email and SMS messages, 681 million website visits, 374 thousand social media posts, and so much more of their 2022 data.
You can access the report here. Here are my top 10 takeaways:
1. A 2022 drop in one-time donations was replaced with monthly gifts. Revenue from one-time online giving decreased by 12% in 2022 while revenue from monthly giving increased by 11%. Monthly giving now accounts for a whopping 28% of all online revenue.
2. Most nonprofits are paying for email list growth. Participating nonprofits used paid ads to grow their email lists by 9% on average last year, with some of the smaller organizations doubling their email lists using ads. (I did this for one of my clients in 2022!) The average email unsubscribe rate was 9% with an additional 8% of emails bouncing, so this list growth was necessary to prevent audience shrinkage.
3. Donors are still browsing on mobile and paying on desktop. Mobile devices now account for 57% of nonprofit web traffic but only 25% of revenue. I suspect this is because Boomers are still donating the most and living more on desktops while younger people are donating less and living on their phones. Poor mobile donation experiences are also a likely culprit. Optimizing your mobile donation form is critical.
4. Major giving days may be losing steam. In 2022, Giving Tuesday and December 31st revenue both declined by 13% from 2021. This is a huge drop for the two most lucrative days of the year. It’s possible that some of this money came in on surrounding days, but this is still pretty shocking.
5. Digital advertising budgets are growing—and aren’t divided equally. Nonprofits’ investment in digital ads increased by 28% last year! Small and mid-sized organizations spent very little on education and brand awareness ads (7% and 15% respectively) compared with large nonprofits allocating 29% of their ad budgets there. To make up for the difference, small and mid-sized orgs spent a higher percentage of their budgets on lead gen.
6. Nonprofits of all sizes are spreading their budgets across ad platforms. Surprisingly, small nonprofits focused the most on display ads last year, while larger nonprofits invested more in search and Meta. Search ads are where everyone saw the best return on ad spend by far (this excludes the Google Ad Grant) with Meta, Twitter, and display all trailing behind.
7. Paid Google Ads are far more lucrative than the Google Ad Grant. Return on ad spend for the Google Grant was only $0.07 (AKA a huge loss) compared with $2.75 for regular Google Ads (a huge win). This is because paid ads get priority over Grant ads and have fewer limitations. This is proof that the Grant is best used for awareness and lead generation in most cases, not fundraising.
8. SMS is now being used (lightly) by the majority of nonprofits. 62% of participating organizations used SMS for digital organizing last year, and nonprofit phone lists are growing. Nonprofits are sending just a handful of mass texts per year to their supporters, compared with 60 emails per year.
9. Influencers are showing up for free. 47% of participating nonprofits worked with a social media influencer last year and of those, only 13% paid them anything.
10. Monthly donors are 50% more valuable than one-time donors. The average value of a one-time donor was $192 compared with $287 for a monthly donor.
Additional quick hits:
New donors: only 16% of them donated again. Womp womp.
People prefer a membership message over a fundraising message.
Nonprofits sent 15% more emails in 2022 but raised 4% less with those emails.
Welcome series emails see a higher click rate than any other type of message.
Meta Ads are the most consistent channel for lead generation. (I agree!)
38% of nonprofit web traffic comes from organic search but only 0.44% of these people make donations.
Donation pages are converting at 19% on average. Let me know if you need help installing Fundraise Up to leave this benchmark in the dust.
Hooray for high-quality nonprofit marketing and fundraising data. Thank you, M+R! I will be using this report to inform the services I offer and my approach to the work, as I always do. If you have thoughts to share on these Benchmarks, join the conversation on LinkedIn!
Hope you enjoy the springtime,
-Caroline
P.S.
If your work for a nonprofit, please take a minute to answer a few questions about your approach to year-end campaigns. Thank you!
Keep an ear out for my Missions to Movements podcast episode with Dana Snyder—all about Google Analytics 4—launching later this month.
Want a ChatGPT writer trained to churn out high-quality content in your organization's voice? My friends at Whole Whale set one up for me and they can do the same for you.
