5 points from the M+R Benchmarks 2023 UK study

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…for marketing and data nerds.

The annual M+R Benchmarks Study for UK nonprofits is now live. 🎉

If you are working in the charity sector, then I highly recommend you spend some time on it.

There are many interesting insights but here are the five talking points I’m focusing on.

Are UK charities afraid to email their donors?

UK nonprofits sent 6 fundraising appeals in 2022.

Meanwhile, this is the number of emails that non-UK nonprofits would send in just the last week of the year. In fact, non-UK nonprofits sent 29 fundraising emails in 2022.

The question is, what makes UK charities afraid to message their donors?

Why is email marketing an underrated channel?

It’s a good idea to experiment with an increased number of emails in your next campaign, provided there is a clear journey and every message is useful for your donors and supporters.

Don’t just send more messages for the sake of it, it probably won’t go well.

Ad spending leans heavily into fundraising

Direct fundraising accounted for 71% of all ad spending. Branding, awareness, and education ads made up 8% of spending, and nonprofits spent 15% of ad budgets on lead generation.

On one hand, this makes sense. You want to maximize your budget in your most important fundraising campaigns.

However, it’s still important to have a better balance in your funnel and how your supporter can turn into a donor. Not investing enough in branding and awareness means that there is a risk of losing new potential donors.

Meta ad dependency for small charities 

Large nonprofits spend 40% of their budgets on Meta advertising. Medium nonprofits spent 72% of ad budgets on Meta, and Small nonprofits 97%.

This means that small nonprofits used almost all of their budget in Meta ads but the return on ad spend (ROAS) is not necessarily justifying this tactic.

Search advertising had a return on ad spend of £3.19 while Meta had a ROAS of £0.44. This could be a big opportunity for small nonprofits to explore search advertising for their next fundraising campaign and make the most of their limited budget.

Don’t underestimate your organic traffic

We don’t talk enough about organic traffic and how useful it can be for your organisation.

Did you know that organic traffic comprised 36% of website visits for UK nonprofits in 2022? This is a significant percentage of the total traffic so it’s important to learn more about their habits, what they are searching for, and how you can optimize your page to ensure they are finding what they are looking for. 

Are we on the right social channels?

Almost all participating charities seem to be active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Only 30% of nonprofits are on TikTok.

The question is, are you active on a channel simply because ‘everyone is on it’ or have you confirmed that this is where your audience is?

Twitter was the most active platform on a daily basis with 1.6 posts (though it was mostly before Twitter turned into an extremely unpredictable -and controversial- channel)

It should be interesting to see how the numbers change in the next study.

Subscribe

Interested in more similar content? Sign up for my monthly newsletter.