Decoding the 2025 M+R Benchmarks: the UK and Ireland edition
It's become a bit of a tradition around here — every year I sit down with the M+R Benchmarks, crunch through the data, and pull out the bits that actually matter for digital fundraisers, so you don't have to.
This time it's the UK and Ireland edition, produced by M+R in partnership with Rally (with a hat-tip to Ask Direct, who help wrangle the Irish participants). It's the fourth time they've brought Benchmarks to this side of the Atlantic, and it's the version I'd point UK fundraisers to first — because while the global study is brilliant, the headline numbers it's famous for are heavily shaped by the US. The UK and Ireland picture is its own thing, and in a few important places it tells a noticeably different story.
This year's edition draws on data from 39 UK and Ireland nonprofits. Here are the takeaways I'd want every digital and fundraising lead to sit up for.
Online revenue dipped 2% — but that headline hides a far more interesting story
If you read one number from this report, read this one. In the UK and Ireland, regular giving now accounts for 48% of all online revenue — and it grew by 8% in 2024, even as cash giving fell by 6%. The average regular gift sits at a modest £10.
Pause on that 48%. In the global M+R study, monthly giving makes up around 31% of online revenue. Here, it's pushing half. UK and Ireland nonprofits are markedly further down the recurring-revenue road than their US peers, and the gap between cash and regular giving is widening year on year.
This is the most important strategic signal in the whole report. Regular giving is what stabilises income against a volatile, news-driven, cost-of-living-battered fundraising environment — it's predictable, it compounds, and a £10-a-month supporter quietly outvalues a one-off gift many times over within a couple of years. If your donation journeys still treat monthly giving as the secondary option behind a one-time ask, this is your cue to test flipping that emphasis: prominent sustainer asks, monthly-as-default experiments, and serious investment in keeping the regular donors you already have. Acquisition gets the budget; retention earns the return.
The big one: regular giving is now nearly half of all online revenue
Getting started with SEO doesn't have to be a costly headache. There's a plethora of SEO tools to help digital marketers get started, from AHrefs to SEMRush. With subscriptions costing less than £100, the cost is less about cost, and more about time and investment
The best SEO tools can only get you so far – they may be able to suggest key SEO optimizations, such as metadata and broken links, they cannot read between the lines or shape a tailored SEO strategy.
At the heart of every ROI positive SEO roadmap there's a data-driven content plan, that considers three golden factors:
Potential: the total volume of searches a keyword or phrase represents if an organization successfully ranks for it
Intent: the quality of the search term and the predicted intent of the user who is searching it
Competition: the extent of challenge to rank for the term, also known as “keyword difficulty”
The first step is typically to conduct deep keyword research, using these factors, to shape a priority keyword list to rank on.
It would be more sensible for a climate change charity to consider “best climate change charity” than “donate”, for example: while the latter may have high volumes, the chance of ranking is very low while the former is relevant, more targeted and achievable.
Once the research is done, the mission to rank begins – with data-driven content plans at the heart of everything. Not only is this the fun bit from a creative perspective, it’s also the bit that’s clearly measurable – with teams able to track how their position is changing over time and the impact increasing traffic is ultimately having on the bottom-line.
Email is sending more and earning less
Email remains a workhorse, but the UK and Ireland data shows it getting harder to wring revenue from. The average across participants came in at just £58 for every 1,000 emails sent, with total email revenue down — more messages going out, less income coming back.
And the spread between sectors is enormous. Wildlife and animal welfare organisations pulled in around £98 per 1,000 emails; rights-focused organisations managed roughly £30. That's not a rounding error, it's a threefold difference, and it says a lot about how cause, audience and creative interact.
The lesson is one Rally bang the drum about constantly, and they're right to: the answer to a softening email programme is almost never "send more." It's to segment more intelligently, sharpen the ask, and make the creative and the storytelling work harder so each send earns its place in an already-crowded inbox. Volume is the easy lever. Relevance is the one that actually moves the number.
Mobile drives the traffic, BUT desktop still drives the money
Here's a tension that keeps showing up, and the UK and Ireland data states it plainly: the majority of website traffic is now mobile, yet desktop still accounted for 57% of donation revenue. Larger charities also posted stronger conversion rates, most likely off the back of better-known brands and more polished, more trusted donation journeys.
Read that as an opportunity, not a verdict. If most of your visitors arrive on a phone but most of your income still comes from desktop, the gap is the prize — it's revenue you're already attracting and then losing at the form. Simplifying mobile donation forms, stripping out non-essential fields, and offering the payment methods people actually want on a phone (Apple Pay and Google Pay among them) is some of the highest-leverage work a smaller charity can do. It's also exactly the kind of friction a structured test-and-learn programme is built to find.
Advertising: that Meta cost-per-lead deserves a hard look
One figure Rally rightly flag: the median cost per advertising lead on Meta across UK and Ireland charities came in at £2.86. Their reaction — that this feels high against what's genuinely achievable — matches mine.
And it points at something worth saying about benchmarks generally. The median is the middle of the field, not a target. Half of participants did better than £2.86, and the best will have been dramatically more efficient than the median. Treating any benchmark as "the number to hit" is how programmes quietly settle for average. The more useful instinct is to ask what the top quartile is doing — tighter audiences, better creative, cleaner journeys from ad to landing page — and to keep testing relentlessly toward it. In my work with Amnesty International and Unicef, it is sometimes surprising tactics that work the best: with open targeting often securing a lower CPL and stronger onward ROI than more segmented targeting.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Read across the whole UK and Ireland edition and a consistent throughline emerges. Growth is absolutely possible — smaller charities proved it in a flat market — but it isn't uniform, and it isn't accidental. The organisations doing well are the ones leaning hard into recurring revenue, making email smarter rather than louder, taking their mobile donation experience seriously, and refusing to treat "median" as "good enough."
That last point is the one I'd leave you with. A benchmark report is at its most dangerous when it's used as a comfort blanket — "we're about average, so we're fine." Used properly, it's the opposite: a map of where the ceiling actually is, and an invitation to close the distance between your results and the best in the sector. Half of all participants, by definition, sit below the median. The interesting question is never whether you're average. It's what the organisations beating you know that you don't yet.
If 2024 was a year of holding steady in a tough environment, I'd love 2025 to be the year UK and Ireland fundraisers go after the gaps this report makes so visible — the mobile conversion gap, the email relevance gap, the regular-giving opportunity that's clearly there for the taking.
If you'd like to talk through what any of this means for your own programme — from audience insight to a practical test-and-learn roadmap — drop us a line. It's the kind of thing we love getting our teeth into.
For the full data, explore the UK and Ireland edition of the M+R Benchmarks, and a big thank-you as ever to the team at Rally for bringing it to this part of the world.
