2018 M&R Study: Monthly Giving Revenue Up 40 Percent

I may have mentioned before that there really are not that many trend statistics tracking monthly giving revenue. For individual organizations, there are some wonderful analytics companies to look at trends and compare against their other clients, but that information is not publicly available.

The only available stats I know of are:

For small organizations (raising $2 million or less): the “Individual Donor Benchmarking Study,” but unfortunately that’s on hiatus.

For organizations with 4,000 sustainers or more, there’s Blackbaud’s Target Analytics Sustainer Benchmarking Study and the Blackbaud’s “Luminate Online Benchmark Report.” I’ve reported on this before.

Finally, there’s M+R Strategic Benchmarks, also focused on online giving. They just published their latest numbers for the calendar year 2017, so I’d like to share some of the good news:

Monthly Giving Revenue Up By 40 percent

Whoa, yes! That’s great news indeed. The main reasons for this.

Giving monthly online is easy to set up and more and more organizations are driving donors there. I’ve personally seen a major increase in the number of emails sent in 2017 with a monthly donor ask. Many included challenges and consisted of multiple email blasts with a clear goal, a deadline and the matching amount as the “carrot.” I’ve also seen more organizations take over the home page for a while, so it’s really the first thing donors see.

After the new administration, there were many reasons for organizations to reach out to constituents and find new donors. You saw this especially with environmental organizations and human rights organizations—and the results show. They were also very strong in trying to convert petition takers to give monthly.

Monthly Donors’ Annual Value Is Almost 3 Times One-Time Donors

Let’s look at the two tables below. The average monthly gift is $18 driven by email and $25 driving online by other channels. If you annualize this, that means between $216 and $300 a year. If you compare this to the average one-time gift of $76 by email or $113 driven online by other channels, monthly donors give almost three times more than one-time donors.

Credit: M+R Strategic

Note: M+R analyzed the results of almost 4.7 billion email messages sent to over 53 million list subscribers, 528 million web visits, more than $738 million of online revenue from nearly 12 million donations and 17 million advocacy actions. Email list size groups were determined by looking at the deliverable email list size at the end of 2017 and grouped participants into three categories:

• Small:Under 100,000 subscribers
• Medium:100,000-500,000 subscribers
• Large:Over 500,000 subscribers)

Of course, as fundraisers you’ll need to raise funds from both types of donors, but it sure makes you focusing on monthly giving a bit more “defendable,” right?

Thank you, M+R Strategic! I love these statistics, how about you?