Fundraising Benchmarking: The Findings

By Tobin Aldrich

30th July 2024

I am very excited to announce the results of our 2024 Fundraising Benchmarks report, in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.

I have been looking for years for a robust external benchmark to use to compare how well a charity’s fundraising  is performing against peers. We do this as part of our fundraising reviews (of which we’ve done more than a hundred at this point) and each time I’m frustrated by the lack of decent external data to use.   I covered the issues in my previous blog.

Our hypothesis was that it was possible to create a meaningful benchmark based on a survey if we could be really, really specific in the questions.

In the end 56 organisations ranging from the very small to the biggest charities in the UK completed the survey. We got representation from most sectors and the charities who took part accounted for no less than £1.5bn of fundraised income, around 6% of the total voluntary income of the UK charity sector.

The survey was definitely not perfect. We only got a few respondents from small charities with under £1m of voluntary income and those that did take part fed back that the survey was too complicated for them with many of the questions not relevant. We need to give respondents more guidance in how to fill out the survey and be realistic about the amount of pre-work they need to do. This really wasn’t a 30 minute exercise.

But we got lots of really good data and much of it was pretty robust. We have enough charities who operated in all of the areas at sufficient scale to give us decent samples for things like income and expenditure levels (and hence ROIs) and team sizes and income raised per fundraiser.

Many of the findings were confirmation (but with hard data, so still useful) of things we already knew - the importance of legacy income and regular giving, how events income is concentrated in particular sectors such as health, how little charities spend on promoting legacies considering the importance of this income source. But there were also things that we suspected but didn’t know for sure, that there a real economies of scale in fundraising, that all else being equal the amount raised per member of fundraising staff is higher the bigger the charity is (in voluntary income terms).  I think this is less a case of larger charities being more efficient per se (trust me many of them really aren’t) as of there being a high cost of entry for many fundraising areas such as individual giving. You need specialist staff, for example, whether your income is £1m or £10m. It was also interesting to see that for all the emphasis on digital in fundraising, the vast majority of new charity supporters are still being produced from non-digital channels, particularly face-to-face.

The report is being sent to all participants who also get an individual analysis of their numbers against the survey means. For everyone else, you can download it by providing your email address below.

We are planning to make this an annual exercise and are aiming to keep it free to enter. We’ve been approached by charities looking to replicate this for particular sectors and we might develop some sub-sets if there is enough demand (probably not for free though). If you are interested in exploring this, drop me a line.

We are also exploring a simpler version for smaller charities and may be looking for volunteers to test this on. We’ll announce that when we have something ready.

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