This is a short blog to make a big announcement.
We have always been committed to helping our clients transform their use of digital to engage the public at scale. We are working with a lot of UK organisations to do this.
But when we start digging into the details of a client’s digital ecosystem, we always come across the same problem. And that problem is a sector-wide lack of understanding of what good looks like.
What should our email open rate be?
What’s a good cost per new email subscriber?
How much money should we be making from our email programme?
What's a good donation page conversion rate?
What’s a good Facebook engagement rate?
Are we maximising the Facebook donate opportunity?
What’s a good return on our digital ad spend?
And many more questions.
The truth is there isn’t a comprehensive or accurate answer for any of these questions in the UK. The data that exists isn’t detailed enough or presented widely enough to drive change.
So myths build up. Opinions rather than facts take hold. And we see poor performance being accepted as the norm or in some cases being presented as success. If we are to truly unlock the potential of our digital programmes to drive change, we need access to better data. Data will drive our success.
To counter this, we have always looked to the USA, and the annual Digital Benchmarks Study produced by our friends at M+R. It’s an incredible source of benchmark data - the report released in April 2020 reviewed over 100 data points from over 200 North American charities.
So we are beyond thrilled to be partnering with M+R to bring their Digital Benchmarks Study to the UK.
We need a minimum of 20 UK charities to sign up for the project to go ahead. Every charity that signs up will get a personalised report benchmarking their digital performance against all UK & US participants.
If you want to be a part of this exciting project please register your interest today and we will be in touch to tell you more and keep you updated.
We will gauge sector interest over the coming months and make the final decision to go ahead in November 2020. We plan on launching the UK report in July 2021.
Benchmarks alone won’t improve your programme. And our combined ambition should always always be to beat the benchmark. But accurate, wide-ranging benchmarks will enable you to identify the areas of your programme to invest in, to improve and to optimise.
Header photo by Fabrizio Chiagano on Unsplash