It’s been an incredibly exciting week here at Rally HQ. The inaugural M+R UK Digital Benchmarks Study has just been launched, bringing comprehensive digital benchmark data to the UK for the first time across a wide range of disciplines including fundraising, digital advertising, email and social media.
Better data will help us make smarter decisions
At Rally we’ve always believed we need accurate and relevant data to help us make smarter decisions about how we invest our time and budgets and where to focus to maximise the success of our digital programmes and the change we can bring about.
But when working with clients, time and time again we see that the sector lacks an understanding of what good looks like in digital engagement. And without this understanding, we see myths get built up, decisions get based on opinions rather than facts and poor performance accepted as the norm (or even as success) as the data often doesn’t exist to prove otherwise.
So we’re extremely proud to have partnered with M+R to bring their Digital Benchmarks study to the UK. The 55 amazing charities which participated in the study have access to their own personalised reports. But because we believe it’s so important for the sector as a whole to have a better understanding of our collective digital performance, the summary report and data is available to all.
Our three big takeouts
As you’ll see there is A LOT of information in there. We could go on for hours about the findings and what they might mean for unleashing the potential of our digital engagement programmes. But if we were to pick out the three biggest things, they would be these…
1. More people are giving online. What are we doing to engage and mobilise them?
UK online revenue increased by 35% in 2020 - extraordinary growth, even accounting for the COVID pandemic. What’s even more exciting is that this growth in revenue is driven by many more (27% more) people giving online, rather than people giving higher amounts.
Only time will tell if this shift in giving patterns will be maintained as the pandemic becomes less dominant over our lives and activities. However, what we do know for certain is that right now as a priority charities should be engaging this influx of digital donors to inspire ongoing actions of support. This means having great onboarding communications and easy things for our new donors to do to continue to make change happen.
2. We need to transform our approach to email to unleash its full potential
Which brings us to email. Last year saw an incredible 38% growth in email list size compared to 2019 but the proportion of UK online income from email remained flat at just 5%. For context, in the US, email delivers 20% of online revenue.
We believe this points to big opportunities to build the engagement of our email subscribers and transform the number of actions of support they take. For many charities this will involve an overhaul of their approach to email: from being clear on its purpose and elevating its importance to building our skills, capabilities and better data. Above all it means increasing communication frequency and simplifying content to focus on one topic and one ask to inspire action. We’ve been banging this drum for a while and can’t wait to work with more of our clients on making email the powerful engagement and activation tool it can be.
3. We need to build our whole digital ecosystem not individual channels in isolation
The study shows UK nonprofits’ digital advertising spending grew by a massive 62% year on year as fundraising programmes were adapted to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Return on Ad Spend (revenue that can be directly sourced to an ad) of course varies by channel with search coming out top, but for us the key takeout is that we need to look at the digital ecosystem in the round rather than focussing on channels in isolation. Our supporters don’t just operate in one channel and neither should we.
If we want to really unlock the potential of digital engagement and make the most of this increased investment, we need to appreciate how channels work together to influence people’s behaviour and how people interact with them. This will help us join up our thinking, integrate our approach and invest in the right areas to both attract interest and convert that interest into action in the most effective way we can.
Using benchmarks to focus and prioritise
Benchmarks alone won’t improve our programmes. But they can help us focus, prioritise and make better, insight-led decisions. If we can identify where we have a competitive advantage, we can choose to exploit it. If we know where we have untapped potential, we can invest to improve our performance. If we can see where we are being inefficient, we can take steps to optimise.
So dive in, compare your own results to the numbers in the report and the experiences of your peer organisations, and reach your own conclusions for your organisation.
Header Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash