Benchmarking your numbers against the sector, not against a tech company
A campaign manager at a mid-size food bank told her board that her 2% email click-through rateclick-through rateClick-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click a link, ad, or call to action out of those who viewed it.View full definition → was "terrible". She had read it on a SaaS marketing blog quoting 5% as the standard. The board came close to cutting the email programme. Nobody checked the nonprofit figure for that quarter, which was closer to 1.5%. She was beating her own market and nearly lost the budget for it.
That failure is not carelessness. Numbers travel well and context does not. A figure lifted from a commercial dashboard reads as neutral, and a board whose members spent their careers in retail or software will treat it as the default until someone in the room refuses it. This lesson is about that refusal: how to pick a peer set you can defend, and how to spot the comparison that makes ordinary public sector performance look broken.
Why cross-sector benchmarks mislead
Amazon recovers acquisition spend from repeat purchases inside a predictable window, bids on keywords typed by people with commercial intent, and can measure the whole thing to the order line. Apple sells to buyers who already want the product and can complete in one session. Neither is doing what you are doing. Your converted unit involves trust, mission alignment and often no personal benefit at all to the person who acts, the decision cycle is longer, and paid budgets sit at a fraction of a consumer brand's.
Comparing your donor acquisition costacquisition costCustomer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers gained in a period. It measures how efficiently you grow.View full definition → to Amazon's customer acquisition cost tells you nothing. Comparing it to organisations in your cause category and your budget tier tells you almost everything you need.
What you are actually comparing
Three things have to match before a comparison means anything: the definition, the denominator and the situation.
Definition first. Your cost per acquisitioncost per acquisitionCost Per Acquisition: the total cost to generate one customer or conversion, computed by dividing total spend by the number of acquisitions.View full definition → prices the converted unit the cost-side lesson in this module sets out, which may be a registration or a disclosure rather than a first cash gift, and the report you are quoting may be counting something narrower. Same problem with lifetime valuelifetime valueLifetime Value: the total revenue (or profit) a customer generates throughout their entire relationship with your business.View full definition →: a model built the way the value lesson describes, carrying volunteer hours and avoided public cost, will not sit honestly beside a fundraising report's average-gift-times-lifespan number. Two organisations can both publish "CPA" and be measuring different events.
Denominator second. Does the published figure include staff salaries, agency retainers and production, or only media spend? Most sector benchmarks are media-only. If yours is fully loaded, you will look substantially worse than a peer doing identical work, and the entire gap is an accounting choice. Publish which one you are using, every time, on the same slide.
Situation third. A defensible peer set matches on:
- cause category (urgency-driven causes convert differently from arts and heritage)
- budget tier and list size, not just sector
- channel mix, because a direct-mail-led file and a paid-social-led file produce different numbers from the same programme quality
- country and regulatory regime, since consent rules and suppression regimes change what a list can even be asked to do
Scale mismatch cuts both ways, and the upward version is the one boards like. Cancer Research UK raises hundreds of millions of pounds a year, runs a national shop estate, mass participation events such as Race for Life, and a large legacy programme that took decades to build. For a £2m hospice, benchmarking against Cancer Research UK is the same analytical error as benchmarking against Amazon: the comparison is flattering to nobody and actionable for nobody. Its cost per new donor reflects a brand that most of the UK can already name unprompted.
Worked example: is your CPA actually good?
Your organisation spent $40,000 on a digital acquisition campaign and gained 800 new monthly donors.
$$CPA = \$40,000 / 800 = \$50\ \text{per donor}$$
According to the M+R Benchmarks report, a widely cited annual nonprofit digital study (2024 edition, based on data from over 200 nonprofits), online CPA for new donor acquisition typically falls in the $40 to $150 range depending on cause area (treat as an estimate; methodology and sample shift yearly). Disaster relief and international aid often sit at the lower end on urgency-driven giving; arts and cultural organisations run higher.
At $50 you are mid-pack to strong. Channel changes the reading entirely: a direct mail CPA of $50 would be exceptional, since new-donor mail acquisition commonly runs $100 to $150 per industry sources such as the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, while a $50 digital CPA is solid and unremarkable.
Donor retention: the sector's most sobering number
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a research collaborative tracking giving data across thousands of US organisations, has reported for years that overall donor retention hovers around 40 to 45% (recent published quarterly data; it moves a point or three annually). First-time donors who give again sit lower still, often 20 to 30%.
Subscription software discusses "good" retention in the 90s. Hold a nonprofit programme to that bar and you will conclude it is catastrophically broken. It is typical.
UK bodies including the Chartered Institute of Fundraising and the Fundraising Regulator publish loyalty studies generally cited in the 45 to 50% band (estimates, and methodologies differ enough that cross-border comparison should be done carefully).
Why retention is structurally lower here
- Giving is episodic and emotionally triggered by a disaster or a news cycle, not driven by a recurring need like a software licence.
- Stewardship budgets, the post-gift thank you and update cycle, are thin next to acquisition spend in most organisations.
- Many donors are one-time responders to one appeal and were never a retainable audience.
- Attrition is partly demographic: a file built on legacy-age supporters loses people for reasons no campaign can fix.
FunnelFunnelThe customer journey from awareness to purchase, typically Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Action, with prospects narrowing at each stage.View full definition → benchmarks: email and paid
Using M+R and comparable nonprofit-specific studies (commonly cited estimates from recent editions; always check the latest release):
- Email open rate: roughly 25 to 30% sector-wide, above typical commercial marketing email, partly because nonprofit lists are smaller and warmer.
- Email click-through rate: often 1 to 2%, below many commercial benchmarks despite the higher open rate. This is the number that tripped up the food bank manager.
- Landing pageLanding pageA standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.View full definition → to donation: frequently 10 to 20% for warm traffic arriving from email, and often under 2% for cold paid trafficpaid trafficVisitors arriving via paid ads or sponsored placements, where you pay a platform to display your message rather than earning visits organically.View full definition →.
One discontinuity to hold on to: since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection shipped with iOS 15 in September 2021, Apple Mail pre-loads images and registers opens whether or not a human read anything. Any open-rate series spanning that date is not a continuous series, and a board deck comparing 2020 opens with last quarter's is comparing two different measurements. Treat opens as directional at best and lean on the click and completion signals the retention lesson instruments.
Quick funnel snapshot
| Stage | Sector estimate (nonprofit, US) |
|---|---|
| Email open rate | ~25-30% |
| Email click-through | ~1-2% |
| Landing page conversion (warm) | ~10-20% |
| Paid social conversion (cold) | often under 2% |
Always pull the current-year report before quoting these in a board deck.
Knowledge check
1. Why is it misleading for a nonprofit to compare its email click-through rate directly to a SaaS or ecommerce benchmark?
2. A nonprofit campaign manager wants to determine if her donor acquisition cost is reasonable. What is the most appropriate comparison?
3. What was the real underlying problem in the food bank example, beyond the specific numbers involved?
4. Select ALL correct answers about why nonprofit/government marketing funnels differ from typical tech or retail funnels.
Select all the correct answers.
5. Select ALL correct answers about the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and donor retention rate metrics as defined in the lesson.
Select all the correct answers.
Government sector nuance
Public sector campaigns (public health, census outreach, service enrollment) rarely have a CPA benchmark in the donor sense, since nothing is being solicited. Agencies benchmark cost per completed action instead: a vaccination booked, a benefit application submitted. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UK's Government Communication Service both publish campaign evaluation frameworks, though granular cost benchmarks are far less standardised and less public than nonprofit fundraising data.
Where none exists, your own prior campaigns are the comparison. Two cautions on that. Media inflation makes a like-for-like cost comparison across years misleading unless you deflate it, and in the UK the pre-election period restricts government communications, so a year containing a general election has a distorted spend curve that will not repeat.
How to build your own benchmark habit
- Pull your own quarterly numbers and state the denominator on the same page.
- Cross-check against one current published sector report, chosen before you see the result. Picking the report after you know your number is benchmark shopping, and boards eventually notice.
- Segment by channel and cause before comparing. A $50 CPA in disaster relief and a $50 CPA in arts fundraising are different results.
- Watch for gaming. Pruning unengaged contacts lifts your open rate to the sector line while shrinking the reachable file, which shows up two quarters later as a collapse in gross response.
- Track your own trend line quarter over quarter. External benchmarks tell you whether you are in a healthy band; your own history tells you whether you are improving.
🎬 [VIDEO: "Nonprofit Fundraising Metrics That Actually Matter" - youtube.com - a walkthrough of donor retention, LTV, and CPA calculations aimed at nonprofit marketers, useful as a visual companion to the formulas above]
Key Takeaways
- Never benchmark public sector or nonprofit performance against consumer tech norms; Amazon and Apple operate with commercial intent, repeat purchase and budgets you do not have.
- A peer set has to match on cause, budget tier, channel mix and regulatory regime. Comparing a small charity to Cancer Research UK is as useless as comparing it to Amazon.
- Check the denominator before the number: media-only benchmarks against fully loaded internal costs will make a healthy programme look expensive.
- Sector CPA typically runs $40 to $150 for digital acquisition and 40 to 45% donor retention is normal, not failure.
- Open-rate history breaks at September 2021 because of Apple Mail Privacy Protection; do not quote a series across that line.
- When no sector benchmark exists, your own history is the comparison, adjusted for media inflation and for years with restricted communications periods.