The trouble with answers is that they lead to questions.
Let’s say you tally up all your online revenue for the year, and find that it just about matches what you received the previous year. That’s an answer — a nice, tidy fact (if maybe a bit disappointing). But consider the swarm of questions it allows rushing in.
How does that compare to other organisations? What about my peers in my issue space? What does the long-term trajectory look like? Are donors still responding to email? SMS? Advertising? Speaking of advertising, are we spending the right amount in the right channels? Should we be looking for engagement on Facebook, or moving on to TikTok?
There’s always another question lurking, always more to explore. Which brings us here, to the UK and Ireland edition of the 2024 M+R Benchmarks Study, presented in partnership with Rally.
As with the global study published earlier this year (available at mrbenchmarks.com), our aim is to follow each answer to new questions and gain a better understanding of how nonprofit digital programmes are performing across fundraising, advocacy, and marketing.
The analysis in the global version of the M+R Benchmarks Study depends on data from 225 nonprofit participants, mostly from the English-speaking parts of North America and Western Europe. These wonderful people not only dedicate themselves to making this world a better place in ways large and small — they also very generously contributed data and answered our questions.
If you are one of them, thank you for being an essential part of this study.
There were a total of 46 Benchmarks participants based in the UK and Ireland. This companion report presented by M+R and Rally is our chance to separate out results from those UK and Ireland organisations to help you better understand your own programme relative to your peers’, and to identify any differences between those results and global averages.
We are deeply appreciative of our partners at Rally, who recruited participants and provided important insight into the unique context of nonprofit fundraising and marketing in the UK and Ireland. They were also very nice about correcting us when we tried to use a z to spell organising or mobilising or fundraising.
Thanks also to Ask Direct, who helped identify and recruit many of our participants from Ireland.
Now let’s go find some answers, and see what kind of questions they lead us to, shall we?
Guess Who Made Benchmarks
MEET YOUR GAMEMASTERS: M+R
We are M+R, and we are not playing around.
We believe that the nonprofits we work for are essential to advancing the cause of justice, alleviating suffering, and solving the greatest challenges we face.
We bring experience, talent, and unshakeable dedication to our clients through fundraising and supporter engagement, movement building and issue advocacy, and message and brand development.
We have more resources, advice, tools, and other fun stuff waiting for you at www.mrss.com
Find out more about working at M+R and join our crew at www.mrss.com/careers
MEET YOUR GAMEMASTERS: RALLY
Rally was formed in 2018 by Paul de Gregorio as an alternative to the traditional agency model. They mobilise public support behind world changing organisations and causes fighting for a fairer, healthier, safer, greener, more equal world.
They’re small, but mighty, working with clients to define the problem or question that needs answering and creating ambitious, impactful and effective public mobilisation plans and strategies. They then activate those plans via a network of like minded partners and freelancers to create bespoke project teams that match exactly the external skills that clients need.
You can find out all about them at www.wearerally.co.uk.
HOW TO PLAY
M+R Benchmarks: UK and Ireland Edition is a fun, fast-paced, data-based game experience everyone can enjoy! There are just a few important features and rules to keep in mind before you begin.
Throughout the charts and analysis, we have isolated results from organisations based in the UK and Ireland. The vast majority of participants from outside the UK and Ireland are based in the United States. We will refer to “Other Countries” because we value accuracy and there are a handful of participants in Canada, the Netherlands, and Australia. But if you want to treat this as “UK and Ireland” compared to “US,” we will not be mad and you will be on fairly solid ground.
For the sake of consistent comparisons, we’ve normalised all revenue and expense figures for comparison, but also provide charts in Euros where that applies. For the study, we used the conversion rates on 1 January 2024: £1 to $1.27, and £1 to €1.15.
Wherever possible, we have broken out the findings by sector. Each of our participants self-identified the appropriate sector (or, in some cases, fell outside of our defined sectors and selected “Other”). If you are not sure which sector represents your peer group, review the full list of participants to find where you belong.
We also sort our participants by size. For our study, “Small” refers to nonprofits with annual online revenue in 2023 below £500,000; “Medium” is those nonprofits with annual online revenue between £500,000 and £3,000,000; and “Large” covers all those with annual online revenue greater than £3,000,000.
The averages displayed in each chart and discussed throughout Benchmarks represent the median figure for a given metric for all participants who reported data. We do this to avoid having one or two outliers with extraordinary results from having too much influence, as might happen with a mean average.
Not all participants were able to provide data for every metric. If a chart does not include data for a certain sector or size, it’s because we were not able to collect enough results to report a reliable average.
In addition to the median figure, some charts display a range showing the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile. Half of all reported values fell within this range, which can be considered “normal” results for participants in our study.
Do not compare this year’s M+R Benchmarks findings to previous editions! Because our participant pool changes each year, these comparisons would be misleading and unreliable.
Wherever we include year-over-year changes, we are including long-term data from this year’s participants, rather than comparing our findings to previous editions of Benchmarks. Those previous editions included a different participant pool, so comparisons would not be reliable.
If you have any more questions, please reach out to @mrcampaigns or email benchmarks@mrss.com.
And remember the most important rule of all: have fun!
Social Media
SCORECARD
There were Eras, once, in social media. The Friendster Era. The Myspace Era. The Facebook Era.
Even then, platforms proliferated and there was a lively ecosystem — but at least there tended to be a single, dominant, identifiable place to be. You were there, your supporters were there, and things hummed right along.
The world is not so simple anymore that a nonprofit can get away with just one social media platform. Some platforms may have larger audiences (Facebook!), while others have more excitement and cultural cachet (TikTok!). New options emerge and fade away with little lasting impression (Hive Social 😬). And Twitter/X is… doing whatever it is Elon Musk thinks he is doing.
There is no single place to be, and nonprofits need to do more to reach supporters where they are, and where they are headed next.
Nearly every organisation in our study had a presence on the Big Three social media platforms — Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook. There was also near-universal adoption of LinkedIn among UK and Ireland nonprofits (94%) and a widespread presence on YouTube (85%). Looking at newer platforms, 54% of nonprofits used TikTok, and 29% had joined Threads.
On average, UK and Ireland nonprofits had 969 Facebook fans for every 1,000 email subscribers — meaning the two audiences were comparable in size. Instagram follower count was roughly half that size, at 579 followers per 1,000 email subscribers. Twitter/X was about one-third of the email list size at 379 per 1,000 email subscribers. LinkedIn was about one-tenth of the email list at 116 per 1,000 email subscribers. TikTok follower numbers were another order of magnitude smaller, 39 per 1,000 email subscribers.
Which is all to say that nonprofits have a long way to go to build the kind of audiences on TikTok that they have developed on more mature platforms.
The number of followers increased by an average of 6% on Facebook and 11% on Instagram. And for the first time since we started tracking social media metrics in M+R Benchmarks, the average follower count for a platform actually decreased — nonprofits in our study saw the number of Twitter/X fans decline by 1%.
TikTok audiences for nonprofits grew much, much faster than any other major social media platform, with 76% growth on average.
Despite this explosive growth, we have already seen that nonprofits had a much smaller audience on TikTok compared to other social platforms. The rate of change for audience size tells us about where people are going but does not necessarily reflect where people already are. Despite the rapid growth in TikTok followers, overall audience size was still much larger for Meta platforms and Twitter/X.
UK and Ireland nonprofits posted most frequently on Facebook, with .65 posts per day. Instagram posts came an average of 0.61 times per day. TikTok trailed far behind, with 0.1 posts per day among nonprofits active on that platform. With the changes to reporting Twitter/X over the course of 2023, we don’t have insight into post frequency on that platform.
We may still see a dominant social media platform emerge from the current tumultuous landscape. But with Meta struggling to balance its properties, potential restrictions on TikTok coming (at least in the US), and Elon Musk being Elon Musk, it’s unlikely things will get simpler any time soon. The best we can do is stay nimble, keep experimenting, and focus on finding supporters wherever they may be (which is, most likely, all over the place).