Benchmarks 2025

And every act, not one too small,
      That leaps from out the heart’s pure glow,
Like ray of gold sends forth a light,
      While moments into seasons flow.

—“Iris of Life,” Zitkála-Šá

They say that history doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes. This is one of those times. 

Throughout this year’s Benchmarks Study, we found continuations of long-term trends and connections to cycles we’ve lived through before. 

Overall online revenue once again showed modest growth (up 2%), led by growth in monthly giving. As nonprofits and their supporters once again grappled with the fallout of an election that threatens their values and their future, we saw some indications of a surge in support (though we’ll need to wait a while longer before we can see the true shape of things). 

But so much of what is happening in this moment is new and without precedent. Social media audiences are moving, tech changes from cookie deprecation to AI search are upending advertising models, and nonprofits are finding new ways to reach and move audiences. 

Monthly giving led an increase in online revenue.

Nonprofits reported an average increase in annual online revenue of 2%, the kind of small-single-digit change that has become familiar in recent years. 

This increase in revenue was supported by an even longer-term trend: the change in monthly giving outpaced the change in one-time giving. The precise numbers change each year — in 2024, revenue from monthly gifts increased by 5%, while revenue from one-time gifts held flat. But the underlying reality remains the same: year by year, monthly giving rises faster than one-time giving.

In order to gain new perspective on this ongoing shift, we asked Benchmarks participants to tell us how they prioritize different giving types on their main donation pages. 

Most nonprofits offered a monthly giving option — that was the case for 90% of Benchmarks participants. Annual recurring gifts were less common, but still included on the main donation page by 15% of nonprofits. 

One-time giving was the pre-selected option on the main donation page for 64% of nonprofits, compared to 35% which pre-selected monthly giving. Just 1% of participants pre-selected an annual recurring gift option.

Pre-selecting monthly giving is just one way to encourage recurring giving. We also asked Benchmarks participants whether they used either of these common tactics:

Do you have language or a feature on your main donation form that encourages users to make a recurring gift? 

78% of participants said YES. This includes nonprofits that pre-select monthly giving, as well as many that pre-select one-time giving but encourage users to switch to a recurring gift.

On your main donation form, if someone makes a one-time gift, do you have a recurring “upsell lightbox”? 

41% of participants said YES — creating an additional opportunity to shift donors from one-time giving to sustaining support.

In 2024, 31% of online revenue came from monthly giving, and if long-term trends continue, that percentage will only increase. The choices that nonprofits make are only part of the story. Supporters, too, make choices — what they want and what they choose to pay attention to have a major impact on performance. 

The presidential election boosted political nonprofits

There comes a time in a person’s life, usually around the third week of October, when the unceasing barrage of television attack ads, social media noise, large-format mailers folded into your mailbox, and unsolicited texts from long-shot congressional candidates in a state you have never visited makes you want to hurl your phone into the nearest volcano and then walk peacefully into the sea to live among the crustaceans. 

You also have to wonder: how is anyone supposed to break through with content that’s not about the election? 

We asked Benchmarks participants to note whether or not they were politically active during the 2024 U.S. election and compared results between the two cohorts.

Overall, we found that political nonprofits did not have consistently better results in 2024 across the main metrics we might consider. Response rates, average gift sizes, return on ad spend — none of these strongly correlated with political activity. 

Considering that both political and nonpolitical organizations contain so much diversity, this wasn’t particularly surprising. There are so many differences in nonprofit size, audience, approach, issue area, not to mention strategy, that electoral relevance did not determine results. 

But when we compared year-over-year change, some interesting differences emerged. 

From 2022 to 2023, online revenue for nonprofits in our study declined by an average of 1%. That 1% decline was the average for nonprofits that self-identified as political, as well as for the nonpolitical cohort. Outside a presidential election year, year-over-year revenue looked the same regardless of political involvement. 

As we’ve seen, the average change in revenue from 2023 to 2024 was a 2% increase. For nonpolitical groups, there was an average increase of 1%, in line with the growth they experienced the previous year. 

Nonprofits that self-identified as political saw a 10% increase in annual revenue. Over email specifically, nonpolitical groups saw a 13% decline in revenue, while political groups saw an 8% increase.

Given the longer-term trends, nonpolitical fundraising may not have been diminished due to the election year — but it does appear that political nonprofits benefited. 

It remains to be seen whether the post-election bump for political nonprofits will continue, or if they will rejoin the trajectory of their nonpolitical peers outside the context of an electoral campaign. Don’t worry, Benchmarks 2026 will be here with those answers before you know it.

Market research guided messaging for half of nonprofits

It’s hard to believe it took us this long, but this is the first time we have sent Benchmarks participants a survey about surveys so we could research their research. 

“Research” can mean many things for nonprofit digital programs: surveys, opinion polls, focus groups, interviews, third-party data, pre-market testing, and on and on. Each approach requires a different investment in time and resources, and they’re not all equally useful for shaping strategy and messaging.

We began by asking participants to tell us how they learn about their audiences. Audience research is one of the most effective ways to move beyond surface-level polling data. While polls capture what people think at a given moment, audience research helps uncover why they think it. It digs into motivations, values, behaviors, and communication preferences, offering insights into who your supporters are, how they make decisions, and what might move them to action.

In 2024, 52% of Benchmarks participants reported using at least one form of audience research. The most common audience research method was comprehensive surveys — 38% of nonprofits sent surveys to learn about their audiences. Qualitative research like focus groups and interviews were employed by 24% of participants, and 22% used third-party data sources. 

Understanding where your audience stands in their support journey then provides the foundation for developing messaging that resonates. That’s where message research comes in.

Most Benchmarks participants conducted A/B testing at some point in 2024, with 80% using it to evaluate email and ad messaging. This is often the simplest way within existing platforms to identify differences in creative performance, and a starting place for many nonprofits.  

The downside, as in so many things, is the linear nature of time. The only way to A/B test an email, ad, or campaign concept is to put it out into the world; the results come after, which can mean wasted time and missed opportunities. 

Pre-market testing offers a more strategic approach. By testing messages before launching, nonprofits can identify what’s most compelling, or just as importantly, what might backfire. In 2024, 26% of Benchmark participants invested in pre-market testing, ensuring their messaging was optimized before reaching their audiences.

In case we have somehow not made it clear so far, we are big believers in the power of data and creative working together. Our internal focus groups are very enthusiastic about more nonprofits doing more research to guide better strategy. 

Many nonprofits are using Generative AI for marketing, fundraising, and/or advocacy — most without policies or guidelines.

Generative AI went mainstream 2024, as both tech giants and nonprofit-focused tools raced to incorporate it into their core products — and nonprofits have responded in a variety of ways, according to the Benchmarks participants we surveyed.

In 2024, 78% of organizations used generative AI in their marketing, fundraising, and/or advocacy programs. 

Among nonprofits that reported using generative AI in at least one aspect of their work, the most common use is workplace productivity (scheduling, product management, notetaking, etc.) at 56%. 

In terms of content creation, 53% are using it for written content, with much lower adoption for graphics (19%) or video (5%). 

Just over one in four groups (28%) use generative AI for data work such as reporting, segmentation, analysis, and data manipulation. Only 15% use it for marketing automation.

Yet, even as generative AI seeps into more aspects of nonprofit work, most groups don’t have official guardrails or guidelines in place. Of the organizations in our survey, only 42% reported having policies, procedures, or guidelines in place around the use of AI. 

How nonprofits defined active email subscribers

When we report on email list churn, we typically stick to two important ways that subscribers leave a list: unsubscribes and bounces. This misses one huge factor: nonprofits actively removing email addresses due to inactivity. 

Removing inactive subscribers is critical to maintaining list hygiene and protecting deliverability. Most nonprofits remove inactive subscribers, but the particular criteria they use to differentiate between active and inactive varies. An “active” user might include anyone who clicked on an email in the last six months or took an online action within the past year. We asked Benchmarks participants where they drew those lines.

The most common method of identifying active users was email opens. If an email subscriber opened an email within the previous month, 88% of participants considered that user active. For 80% of nonprofits, subscribers who opened an email within 6 months were considered active, and 52% counted any user who opened at least one email within the past year as active.

But wait. Aren’t opens fake and useless now? Let’s take a quick digression.

It’s true, open rates were never the most reliable of email metrics, due to the imprecision of using downloaded pixels to track opens. Then in late 2021, Apple rolled out a new privacy protection feature that effectively “opens” emails for everyone using an Apple inbox — in other words, everyone with an iPhone. Turns out that’s a large number of people. 

An open used to mean a human person probably at least glanced at your email. But now, it could be Apple’s machines opening that message. Some email tools decided to change how they track opens, and differentiate between machine opens and human opens. Others just let open rates balloon. Suddenly, “open rate” didn’t mean the same thing across systems, so we stopped reporting on it in Benchmarks.

(Quick digression from our digression already in progress. A subset of Benchmarks participants were able to separate machine opens from human opens in their reporting. Among these groups, 64% of all email opens were machine opens.)

But if what we are interested in is maintaining a clean email list of active users, opens are still a pretty terrific indicator of inbox placement. Apple’s robots only open emails that 1) land in the inbox of 2) someone who is actively using their email address. Interestingly enough, humans also only open their email if they log into their email account, and rarely open emails in their spam folder. So open rates can be a key indicator of deliverability.

Okay, back to defining active users. Email clicks and online actions were used in similar ways to email opens: about half of nonprofits considered a user active if they did any of these things within the last 12 months.

Most organizations reported a narrower window for opt-ins, with only 60% reporting they consider someone active as long as they opted in over the past 6 months, dropping to 41% at 12 months. This makes sense, because someone who’s only opted in — never even opened or clicked an email — is more likely to be a dud account.

On the flip side, making a donation was enough to keep a subscriber on the active file for much longer. While only 76% consider someone who donated in the past 6 months active (due in large part to the 20% of participants who don’t use that date in their criteria at all), subscribers who donated within the past 12 months were considered active by 68% of nonprofits, and even with no other activity, 25% of nonprofits kept previous donors in the active file at 24 months. 

Volunteers showed up in a big way for some nonprofits

In this study, we focus a lot on how nonprofits ask supporters to donate. Partly because donation transactions create so many trackable data points, and partly because capitalism. But making a gift is far from the only way that individuals support the causes they care about. For the first time this year, Benchmarks participants shared information on volunteer turnout in 2024.

For nonprofits that reported this volunteer data, we saw noteworthy year-over-year increases. More volunteers showed up in person — 6% more for direct service events, and 11% more for advocacy or election purposes. 

Far more people showed up for virtual events — about twice as many as in 2023. And 27% more volunteers participated in a high-bar virtual action.

Nonprofits reporting their direct service volunteer numbers saw a wide range of volunteers relative to their number of donors. Hunger/Poverty nonprofits reported 1.96 direct service volunteers for every person who made a donation over the course of the year. Most of these groups are local or regional food banks, and they saw almost twice as many people show up to volunteer as donate. 

That volunteer turnout is a remarkable expression of the community spirit that powers the work these nonprofits do. It’s also waaaaaay different than what nonprofits in other sectors reported. 

Outside Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, the numbers look like this: for every donor, nonprofits had just 0.02 volunteers who attended an in-person event for direct service. Instead of the nearly 2:1 ratio of volunteers to donors reported by Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, it was closer to 1:50. 

Other types of volunteer actions were more consistent across sectors. Nonprofits saw about 0.03 volunteers showing up at in-person events for advocacy or election purposes for every donor they had in 2024. That ratio was the same for participating in high-bar virtual advocacy or election actions. And groups had 0.09 attendees at virtual events for every one donor on their file.

A snapshot of nonprofit staff diversity 

We asked M+R Benchmarks participants to share the staff demographic data they submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The data collection methodology used by EEOC is far from perfect — among other shortcomings, it provides a list of race and ethnicity categories that may not match people’s identities. 

That said, this data is collected consistently and regularly across organizations, and can give us a better understanding of the people who do the work of advancing the causes represented in the study. It also helps track whether nonprofits are making progress in building more diverse teams.

Here's what we found in 2024: the portion of nonprofit staff who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) was 27.1% — up from 26.3% in 2023. At the executive and senior management level, BIPOC representation rose from 16.7% to 17.0%.

These shifts were very small. But in an environment where commitments to diversity are increasingly under attack, our hope is that we continue to see trends towards greater BIPOC representation in senior positions in our industry.