The 2025 UK / Ireland Charity Digital Benchmarks Study has launched and you can register your organisation’s participation now.
Change, change, change. The UK public were asked to vote for it.
And OMG did they deliver.
But what now?
This year Rally was proud to collaborate with M+R to bring their Digital Benchmarks Study to the UK for the first time. As we’ve said before, comprehensive, accurate digital benchmarks help everyone in the sector to raise their ambition and gain a better understanding of what excellent looks like. So once again, we’d like to thank the amazing 55 UK charities who participated in the study and made it all possible.
Our key takeaways from this year’s study were:
1. More people are giving online. What are we doing to engage and mobilise them?
2. We need to transform our approach to email to unleash its full potential.
3. We need to build our whole digital ecosystem, not individual channels in isolation.
You can read more about these observations in this blog: UK DIGITAL BENCHMARKS STUDY IS LIVE! And of course, all the participating charities have their personalised reports which highlight their specific areas of opportunity.
We have an update about what’s happening next with the UK study: essentially we are going to skip one year of the study in 2022 and, if the sector still wants it, we will bring back a UK specific study for 2023. This means interested charities would need to sign up in mid to late 2022.
Our decision to pause is due to a staffing squeeze at M+R who crunch all the numbers and produce the website. Rather than plough on and potentially deliver a project that didn’t match our high standards we decided to take this short break.
But do not despair. If you want high quality digital benchmarks in your life in 2022 you can join M+R’s Global study. And it’s free. The main difference between the two studies is that there won’t be a specific UK comparison made in the reports. Your data will be benchmarked against your sector and all participants, irrespective of their country of operation. You can register right now for the free 2022 Global study here.
We'll be in touch next year about the next UK-specific Digital Benchmarks Study.
In the meantime, as this year’s UK Benchmarks Study showed us, we have plenty to be getting on with if we want to unleash the potential of our digital engagement programmes. The data helps us focus, prioritise and make better, insight-led decisions to improve our efficiency, invest to improve performance or exploit where we have a competitive advantage. So let’s get to it and maximise the success of our digital programmes and the change we can bring about.
Main photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash
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…
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
Last week we released the names of the first UK charities to sign up to take part in the UK Digital Benchmarks Study we are launching in collaboration with our friends at US digital agency M+R Strategies.
We are absolutely delighted with this first wave of charities that have confirmed their participation! And we’re receiving really positive signals from many more UK charities. So we expect to be adding to this list very soon.
The study has been run in the US for over 14 years and in 2020 reviewed over 100 digital data points from over 200 US charities. So you can imagine how excited we are to partner with M+R to bring this incredible resource to the UK. You can read all about the study in this post.
And a huge thanks to UK Fundraising for helping us spread the word and for being so supportive of the project. You can see their article here.
Main photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
We’re now two years old.
Which means we’re on our way to becoming part of the establishment right?
Nope.
We’re just as committed today as we were two years ago to help our clients attract the public’s support at scale and convert that support into action.
We're still committed to challenging the status quo and being a positive force for change in how the sector approaches the challenges it faces.
We’re still convinced that the sector needs radical change in the way it seeks to attract the public's support in order to remain relevant. We recognise that change is unsettling and for some it’s an uncomfortable process. But it’s a necessary one. As Saul Alinksy said. ‘Change means movement. Movement means friction.’
We know we’re really lucky. We’re lucky to be a part of a brilliant community of people, clients and partner organisations who share our values and ambition.
So we want to say a HUGE thank you to our amazing clients for putting their faith in us and equal thanks to our AMAZING partners who help us make it all happen. We are immensely proud of the collaborations we’ve created and the impact that has come from them. And we’re honoured to work with such an inspiring group of radicals, rebels, agitators, activists and troublemakers.
Being part of such a badass community brings us real joy.
And before we go... Keep an eye on your letterbox. You might get a little something from us.
