Social Media and Influencers

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Facebook and Instagram were the most widely-used social media platforms, with nearly all Benchmarks participants active on those platforms.
TikTok had the fastest-growing audiences, with average follower counts increasing by 37% in 2024.
52% of M+R Benchmarks participants reported working with social media influencers in 2024. Of those, 15% relied only on paid partnerships, and an additional 47% used a mix of paid and unpaid influencer work.
Among nonprofits with paid influencer campaigns, 60% used those partnerships for fundraising, 65% for advocacy or volunteer asks, and 77% for narrative or persuasion work.
Twitter/X was the only platform we tracked to see a decline; 31% of organizations still on the platform are planning to leave.
Revenue from Facebook Fundraisers decreased by 42%, and accounted for 0.2% of all online revenue in 2024.

Read every line of our analysis in the PDF. Or peruse all charts below.

Percentage of nonprofits using social media platforms

The future of Twitter X

Emerging social media platforms

Average number of fans followers

Change in number of fans/followers

What tier of influencers did you work with?

What do you use paid influencers for

Influencer platforms

Types of influencers

Change in amount raised on Facebook

Share of online revenue from Facebook