After a year away, the UK & Ireland Digital Benchmarks Study is back for 2027.
Since 2020 over 100 UK and Irish charities have taken part in the Study. So a lot of you already know all about it and some of you will want to register immediately, so if that’s you, here’s the link.
We’re partnering with our friends at M+R again to establish comprehensive up to date performance benchmarks across fundraising, email performance, donation page conversion and much, much more.
The Study will review data points across the full spectrum of email, website, mobile and social media for the 2025 and 2026 calendar years, as well as where charities are spending their digital advertising budget and the returns they are seeing.
If you want to know things like…
how your cost per email subscriber and donation compare to the sector
what your donation page conversion rate should be
how much money is being raised by email
what % of digital advertising budget is being spent in various channels
… then this is the Study for you. It only takes a few minutes to register.
We’re now running the study every two years rather than annually, so sign up for the 2027 Study today - or you’ll have to wait until 2029!
Better data helps us all make better decisions - we can be guided by facts rather than opinions to make informed choices. It tells us what good looks like. And if we know what’s possible, we can be honest with ourselves about how our programmes stack up and challenge ourselves to do better.
As a participant you’ll get a personalised report showing how your performance compares to the sector as a whole, your subsector (if enough similar organisations join) and charities of a similar size to you in terms of digitally fundraised income.
You’ll be able to see how well you’re doing and how efficient your programme is. In a challenging environment where we need budgets to work as hard as possible, this data will help you focus on where you can improve performance, cost efficiency and conversion. Or even identify a competitive advantage you can exploit.
And by taking part, you ensure the Study exists so the entire sector can benefit from it and use it as a resource to drive more effective digital programmes.
The process is easy and M+R supports you all the way through it. As in previous years there will be a kick off webinar, dedicated Slack channels and other support for pulling together your data. The outline schedule for the 2027 Study is as follows.
Confirmation of participation by the end of December 2026.
Data submission templates sent by the end of December 2026.
Launch webinar (to go through data submission process) early January 2027.
Data due early February 2027.
Launch and personalised reports shared July 2027.
We know budgets are tight, so we work hard to keep the price as low as possible. Costs are £1,400 / €1,600 and there’s no VAT to pay as M+R take care of all the billing and are US based.
Benchmarks alone won’t improve our digital programmes. But we know from the feedback we get year after year, that the Study helps participants identify areas of their programmes to focus on and truly unlock their potential.
The more people who see the power of Benchmarks and join the Study, the richer and more robust the dataset, so we can all make even better decisions in future. Get involved today and tell all your friends.
Main Image: Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash