Building Digital Power In The Age Of The Radical Right. If it’s a battle for attention, they’re winning and we need to respond with as much determination and focus as they do.
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Let joy be unconfined! The 2025 M+R and Rally UK & Ireland Digital Benchmarks Study has just been released. Read our key takeaways and access the data!
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
Rally exists to help build power. To show people they have it and help them to use it.
One way to do this is to bring together like minded people who don’t know each other in an attempt to create connections that didn’t exist, which can lead to collaborations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
A few weeks ago our founder Paul de Gregorio and one of our favourite people in the world Georgie Laming, collaborated to put on a virtual screening of an episode of the incredible US documentary ‘And She Could Be Next’. In the film makers words - ‘a documentary series that focuses on a defiant movement of women of colour, transforming politics from the ground up’. Here’s the trailer…
In this edition Ruby takes us through a reading list that explores strategy, anger, feminism and protest. Ruby describes herself as a fundraiser and feminist organiser. She’s raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for good causes in her career and is a fundamental believer in the art of protest. As are we.
If you’ve ever heard us talk out loud, you will have heard us talk about mobilisation.
What do we mean by mobilisation? Well, the dictionary defines it as…
‘The action of organising & encouraging a group of people to take collective action in pursuit of a particular objective’
And if you’ve heard us talk about mobilisation, it’s very likely that you’ve heard us talk a lot about the lessons we can learn from successful movements of the past and recent history.
We’ve summarised these lessons in the following 5 principles to consider when we’re talking to clients about mobilisation strategy and leadership.
A VISION TO BELIEVE IN: Your goal is inspiring, is important to society and feels believable.
A BELIEVABLE PLAN TO DELIVER THE VISION: Not only is the goal believable, but so is the plan to deliver it. The plan is well articulated and available for all to see. It’s easy for the public to see themselves playing an active role in success.
VALUES THAT ARE EASILY SUBSCRIBED TO: The values that underpin the mobilisation activity aren’t overly complex or intellectual, they have huge mass appeal and aren’t framed in a way that excludes participation.
USEFUL & VALUABLE THINGS TO DO: Those who participate are offered things to do that are rooted in the plan and connect to the values of the movement. Nothing is transactional - it’s clear every action moves the movement on towards its goal.
CHARISMATIC LEADERS OR LEADERSHIP: The leadership or individual leaders are inspiring and have the personal qualities that drive belief and loyalty. They speak with experience of the issue and can tell stories in a way that drives action and participation.
Let’s apply those principles to what we’ve seen Marcus Rashford do.
But first watch this video…
It’s hard not to be impressed by him. Back to those 5 principles and how Marcus exhibits the behaviours.
A VISION TO BELIEVE IN. Marcus believes that all children irrespective of their background should be able to fulfil their full potential. It’s hard to disagree with this.
A BELIEVABLE PLAN TO DELIVER THE VISION. He’s kept the plan simple, he uses his platform to call on the government to do the right thing. Whether it’s the provision of food in the short term or a review of how children are viewed by policy makers. He makes everything simple and easy to engage with.
VALUES THAT ARE EASILY SUBSCRIBED TO. Decency, equality, justice, compassion and fairness. It’s hard not to align with the core values that drive his efforts.
USEFUL & VALUABLE THINGS TO DO. He recognises that there is work he needs to do, which involves him using his power to get access to politicians and make direct asks of them. He asks the public to sit alongside his efforts and help by signing petitions, amplifying the campaign or in some cases providing food when the government wouldn’t.
CHARISMATIC LEADERS OR LEADERSHIP. We think he has this covered. He is a global star in his profession, speaks with direct experience of the issues he is campaigning about so he has authenticity baked in to everything he does and doesn’t fear any backlash. In a recent Guardian article it was reported that ‘he shrugs off criticism, saying he’s heard 10 times worse on the pitch. Setbacks make him redouble his efforts.’ Which is probably what makes him such a formidable activist.
There is a lot of talk about movement building in UK NGOs right now. This is a natural response to the new ways in which movements have formed and attracted public support and participation - think BLM, MeToo, TimesUp and the rise of XR. Charities need to learn from them because they are successful at attracting at scale and creating action, especially in the digital age.
If a movement is defined as ‘a group of people working together to advance their shared political, social or artistic ideas’, our view is that established charities cannot start one. They can harness the power of an existing movement, but can’t and shouldn’t think they can start one. This is a bold statement to make, but if you think of the environmental movement as an example, no one organisation can lay claim to owning it. There are a wide and diverse range of actors in that movement from charities like Greenpeace and the RSPB to campaign groups like XR, Green New Deal and Youth Climate strikers to brands like Lush and Patagonia - all are part of the movement, no single group can throw their logo on it and claim it.
Instead, charities should identify where they are in the movement ‘map’ that surrounds them and figure out what they can do to push the entire movement forward, as well as mobilise its power and energy to help them deliver on their specific goals. This could be as simple as providing resources and capacity to smaller groups in the movement.
We will leave you with this quote from that recent article in the Guardian.
“As global charities unsurprisingly clamour to hitch his star power to their causes, his response is always the same: “I need to fix what’s going on in my own backyard first.”
Link to that article: 'It is never about him': how Marcus Rashford became such a devastating activist. [The Guardian]
Main Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Matthew is one of the few Brits to make it in the USA - we could sit for hours and listen to him tell stories from Greenpeace. Those stories are one of the reasons Rally exists: it was those stories and his commitment to fusing comms, campaigning and fundraising that formed a major inspiration for the creation of Rally.
One of Rally’s founding principles is that we want to drive change at a scale that is bigger than our size. And that central to creating change is exposure to new ideas and partnerships. So we are always keen to be generous with our knowledge and network, helping make connections to spark change that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This is a story of one of those moments.
In January 2020 - back when being out and about was ‘A Thing’ - we spent three fantastic days touring the coffee shops, charity meeting rooms and lunch spots of London with one of our favourite people in the whole world.
Meet Adrian. Adrian is a Dublin based pal of ours, he’s a brilliant thinker and all round Facebook fundraising genius. We love him.
Adrian.
He’d been developing a new approach to virtual challenge events that was delivering mind blowing results with his clients in Ireland, achieving both scale and huge returns on investment. He does it all on Facebook and it’s transformational. Honestly. Transformational.
We could see the results and knew the UK needed what Adrian was doing. Thankfully Adrian also believes in being generous with knowledge and was keen to share the approach beyond Ireland.
Back to our tour of London.
Adrian was keen to meet people who were smart, agile, open to new ideas and able to make decisions quickly. So with that brief Rally set Adrian up with a load of meetings with the right people at the right organisations. And we accompanied Adrian to make the introductions and show these clients, who didn’t know Adrian, that we really believed in him and his model.
In those two days we generated a lot of inspiration, some excitement and a lot of enthusiasm to try new things. We had 8 meetings in three days. Adrian got back on the plane to Ireland with connections that turned into 6 charities testing his approaches. Over the next few weeks and months, as the pandemic hit, we set up Zoom sessions that turned into another 5 relationships.
And the point of this story?
Well it’s the impact our collaboration has had - especially at a time when events fundraising has been severely impacted by the pandemic and many charities have experienced huge challenges in income generation, just when their services are needed more than ever.
We’re delighted to have helped inspire charities with new ideas in the most challenging of fundraising and working environments. And to have enabled them to access expertise to test and roll out a new approach to virtual events.
One year on we are incredibly proud that those introductions have turned into millions of pounds raised for the charities who chose to partner with Adrian. When we checked at the end of January they’d made £4,611,084 from an investment of £550,301. Which blows our mind.
And we know there are already a couple more million (yes, MILLION) pounds to be added to the income total - as some of those organisations have virtual events live right now.
And it’s honestly more than the money. The clients who’ve worked with Adrian have started applying his methods to other elements of their digital programmes and are seeing incredible results. And the eyes of organisations have been opened to the true potential of creating, engaging and empowering digital communities, whose members share values and passions with each other and the charities themselves.
All of this means that in the course of a year - because of COVID which has forced charities to act quickly to innovate and diversify - those meetings back in January have helped change the way digital is done across the whole sector.
Main photo by Nastya Dulhiier on Unsplash
When we say a digital mobilisation model, we mean an approach which engages the public at scale by elevating values over transactional ‘products’. And then using those values to attract people who share them and to inspire them to take actions to make change happen - all in a digital space.
"We loved working with Rally on this project. Their skill, expertise and collaborative way of working helped us at every stage of the process – from designing the approach and engaging our trustees to connecting us to the very best delivery partner in Forward Action and supporting us throughout the project’s execution to ensure we delivered against our strategic goals. Jasvir Kaur, Director of Fundraising & Communications at Brooke
