Benchmarking reports and celebrities. They’re just like us. (Or are they?)

Have you ever noticed how much we, as humans, tend to compare ourselves to others? According to Psychology Today, as much as 10% of our thoughts involve comparison of some kind. There are some obvious benefits and drawbacks to the behaviour, so it’s important to understand it and perhaps make the most of it.

I enjoy reading benchmark reports. However, I’d argue they are often given too much importance in our sector. I’d go so far as to say benchmark reports should be read and enjoyed like celebrity magazines. Fun to read and think about, but not something to base big decisions on.

Most fundraisers want to stay up to date on the latest trends. Who wouldn’t want to understand how their fundraising program is performing compared to trends in the sector, or how their program may be impacted by forces beyond their control? Some people turn to their peers, the media or industry experts to figure it out. Others turn to benchmark reports to look for those answers.

In the non-profit sector, the most common benchmark reports include the annual Giving Report from CanadaHelps, The Status of Canadian Fundraising Report from Blackbaud, and the Direct Mail Benchmarks report from Good Works. We can also access reports from the United States, like the M&R benchmarking study, to assess the state of digital fundraising, and the report from the Fundraising Report Card. Sometimes, there are one-off reports like from PayPal Giving Fund Canada that produced the results of a study called the Future of Giving: Online Across Generations.

Those tools can be really helpful for understanding industry trends; however, we should be cautious in how we use them. Unfortunately, I have witnessed firsthand an organization that altered its entire fundraising program mid-fiscal year based on findings from a benchmark report, which led to disappointing year-end results.

This experience highlighted the need to share “the good, the bad and the ugly” of benchmark reports.

Benchmark Reports: Proceed with Caution

While celebrity magazines are fun to read, for obvious reasons, most of us can’t compare ourselves to celebrities and how they live. Perhaps the results would be different if we had the means to employ a personal trainer and the time to train every day. If we had a dietician and a cook preparing healthy meals for us. Or if we had a pilot to fly us anywhere we wanted to go on a private jet.

Similarly, benchmark reports aggregate results from many not-for-profit organizations that likely operate very differently from yours and have different resources, budgets, brand awareness, and business objectives. They can help provide a hypothetical general vision of what an average program could look like. But I would never recommend comparing your program to those used on benchmark reports or implementing changes based on them, expecting to match the results of an aggregate of multiple organizations.

5 considerations when reviewing any benchmark report:

1. Category context

    

   The Canada Helps Giving Report from 2025 outlined 14 categories of not-for-profit organizations: Animal Charities, Arts & Culture, Education, Environment, Health, Indigenous Peoples, International, Local/Regional, National, Uncategorized, Provincial, Public Benefit, Religion, and Social Services. Most of these categories involve very different fundraising programs from each other, and therefore, the KPI expectations differ.

   For example, the average gift of an international humanitarian development and relief organization will generally be much higher than the average gift for many health not-for-profit organizations. The former typically benefits from gift-match opportunities from the Humanitarian Coalition and the Canadian Government. Additionally, they tend to be very active in international emergency campaigns, and those have increased media exposure, which positively affects the results and KPIs for those campaigns.

   Raising money for causes related to sick children (or animals) is generally easier than for public benefit, social services, or rare diseases. Children are typically perceived as beautiful, hopeful, and innocent. So, for them to be impacted by diseases is devastating to most people. Therefore, storytelling requires less explanation and motivation to donate, given the emotional connection that existing and prospective donors already feel.

2. Organization size

    

   If you succeed in finding a benchmark study that focuses exclusively on your sector of activities, that is a great first step, but it is also important to consider the size of the program. For example, the University of Toronto, the largest University in Canada, could be compared to other large universities like McGill University and the University of British Columbia. But the Education category would most likely also include smaller universities like Brock University and Trent University. If the benchmark report contains two smaller and two larger universities, you end up with aggregated KPIs that fall between two very different realities.

   Not-for-profit organizations with larger donor bases will generally have more resources to invest. They will be more likely to test new initiatives, impacting KPIs, but also having more bandwidth to resist storms such as economic downturns.

3. Cost & Revenue Tracking

    

   Because ST is a fundraising agency dedicated to the not-for-profit sector, I have been fortunate to work with many different types of not-for-profit organizations. I have been exposed to different leadership styles, strategic approaches, and attitudes. I am generally involved with budgeting, planning, forecasting, and data analysis. My experience has been that most charities track revenue and costs differently.

   You might wonder how that is possible. Well, tracking cost and revenue accurately is more complicated than it appears. Here are 4 simple examples:

• • If a monthly donor is acquired as part of campaign A, how is the revenue captured? Will the campaign revenue account for the first month of donation, or will it include the full year of donation? If it is the full year, will it be the first full calendar year, or the fiscal year, or from the first donation date? What if the monthly donor leaves before year one? Alternatively, will the revenue be captured by the annual program or the monthly donor program? If the revenue is accounted for by another program, will the cost be moved accordingly?
  • In some organizations, the internal staff salary is accounted for as part of the fundraising expense as well as the partial cost of the office. Do all not-for-profit organizations capture the cost in the same manner?
  • Many years ago, when we won the opportunity to work with a new organization, we had the mandate to match (not exceed) the prior year’s program cost. But we soon realized that the cost had not been tracked properly by their former agency. This was true for all items that were bulk-printed and not properly allocated afterwards.
  • Does your fundraising budget include or exclude taxes? If it includes taxes, does it include the full taxation, or does it consider the rebate received by the government at the end of the year?

  Each of these examples show how cost and revenue can be tracked differently. This impacts program reporting and the numbers provided for benchmark reporting.

4. Solicitations

    

   Regardless of the category, size of the organization or how revenue and cost are tracked, the number and nature of solicitations also heavily impact the KPIs. An organization with a high frequency of fundraising campaigns will tend to have a higher total gross revenue. But other KPIs, such as response rate, might not be as high as an organization that sends fewer solicitation campaigns.

   The nature of the solicitation will also impact the KPIs. For example, highly incentivized campaigns (premiums, lottery, and more) will have higher response rates, but lower renewal rates. Some organizations rely heavily on premiums and incentives, some use them moderately, and some are entirely mission-driven. The KPIs will change significantly depending on the solicitation type and frequency.

5. Brand awareness

    

   A charity’s brand awareness plays a key role in achieving fundraising objectives and can definitely help or hinder fundraising. The more emotive and resonant a brand is, the more it feels relevant to donors, the more likely it is to benefit fundraising. So, benchmark reports can aggregate large charities (who have huge aided and unaided recall among donors and potential donors) with smaller charities who have little or no budget allocated to brand awareness. Therefore, it can be risky to put too much stock in benchmark reports that don’t consider those factors when reporting aggregate information and results.

   As a side note, we are witnessing an interesting trend where brand awareness is overpowering fundraising in some respects. By that I mean, fundraising best practices (those techniques that still help generate a response) are being sacrificed for creative that builds awareness but doesn’t inspire a donation, ever. I truly hope this trend is short-lived because, if not properly executed, it can be significantly damaging to the fundraising program.

   There is an integrated way for both brand awareness and fundraising to co-exist. My colleague Bryan Tenenhouse wrote a blog called Integration is the Solution where he makes a strong case for integration rather than letting one discipline overpower another at the expense of donations.

There is a place for enjoying benchmarking reports.

Benchmark reports have a place in fundraising planning and analysis. However, they need to be used with caution and with an understanding of the many considerations I’ve outlined above. Reviewing “fine print,” like survey methodology and the footnotes, is key to understanding the KPIs presented and whether the KPIs are relevant to your situation.

The executive summary is also very important, but when possible, it is best to stay away from simply reading headlines, as they could be misleading. As a result of the latter, I have encountered many situations where a client called in a panic due to a discrepancy in KPIs versus a recent benchmark report. Being aware of the five considerations above and reading the survey methodology will generally prevent any panic — perspective is everything.