How Does Our Fundraising Compare?

Tobin Aldrich

21st May 2024

For as long as I’ve worked in the sector, the issue of how to benchmark the fundraising performance of charities against each other has really bugged me. We have collectively never managed to come up with a way of comparing fundraising activities that manages to be both robust and easy for charities to participate in. As a result we don’t even have a single comprehensive list of the top fundraising charities, let alone good benchmarks for fundraising efficiency across the different areas.

There have been many valiant attempts to address this issue. Remember Fund Ratios anyone? And there are good quality studies that do exist - Open Creates run a very good annual benchmark, mostly focused on individual giving. But it costs a reasonable amount of money to take part in and charities have to provide their data for it, so participation is limited to only a relatively small number of the largest charities.

Is it possible to create an annual benchmark for fundraising that would be accessible to all charities, relatively easy to take part in, free to enter and still able to produce decent usable data? I don’t know, so we at AAW in collaboration with CIOF decided to give it a try.

We are launching the CIOF 2024 Fundraising Benchmarking study this week. This will be based on a self-survey questionnaire sent to Directors/Heads of Fundraising. The aim is to have something fairly simple that answers what we believe are the most common questions about fundraising performance, for example how does our ratio of income to expenditure across each fundraising area compare to other charities or how does our cost to acquire new donors by channel differ from others?

This won’t be an in-depth process and this isn’t intended to compete with or replace existing studies such as the Open Benchmarks (which we still encourage charities to take part in if they can). But we really want to get the biggest possible sample size and the most representative of all parts of the sector, so we can have something that is as robust as we can make it.

The survey is intended to take about 30 minutes to complete (although information will need to be collected beforehand).

We are planning to share the results at the CIOF National Convention at the beginning of July so we will need to have all the entries in by the 20th June 2024.  We would love to hear people’s feedback after taking part in the survey - this is very much a first attempt and something we would hope to refine over time.

You may already have received an email from us or from CIOF that has been sent out to all their  organisational members letting you know the survey is ready, but if you haven’t you can find the link here. Everybody is welcome to take part, there are no fees to pay and everybody who takes part will get a report of the results (and of course, we will anonymise individual charities in the report).

I do hope your charity can take part. In the meantime, please contact me with any questions or feedback.