Email remains one of the highest-ROI fundraising channels for nonprofits, yet declining revenue per email and shifting privacy regulations demand a more sophisticated approach to measurement than most organizations currently practice. Nonprofits raised just $58 per 1,000 fundraising emails in 2024—down 10% from the previous year according to M+R Benchmarks 2025—while email’s share of online revenue dropped from 14% to 11%. Understanding which metrics matter, how to calculate them accurately, and what benchmarks to target has never been more critical for maximizing your email program’s impact on fundraising outcomes.
The challenge facing nonprofit email marketers extends beyond simply tracking numbers. Apple Mail Privacy Protection has fundamentally altered the reliability of open rate data, new Gmail and Yahoo authentication requirements threaten deliverability for unprepared organizations, and the proliferation of metrics available in modern email platforms can overwhelm teams trying to identify what actually drives donations. This guide provides a framework for email reporting that cuts through the noise to focus on measurements that inform better decisions.
Understanding Core Email Metrics and How to Calculate Them
Before diving into advanced analytics, every nonprofit must master the essential metrics that define email performance. These calculations underpin all strategic decisions about your email program and provide the vocabulary for discussing results with leadership and board members.
Open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened your email, calculated by dividing unique opens by emails delivered and multiplying by 100. While nonprofit open rates average 28.59% according to M+R Benchmarks—significantly higher than the 21% for-profit average—this metric has become less reliable due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which we’ll address shortly. Despite its limitations, open rate still serves as a rough indicator of subject line effectiveness and sender reputation health.
Click-through rate represents the percentage of all recipients who clicked any link in your email, calculated by dividing unique clicks by emails delivered and multiplying by 100. The nonprofit benchmark sits at 3.29%, with fundraising-specific emails averaging just 0.48% due to the higher friction inherent in donation asks compared to informational content. CTR has become the more reliable engagement metric in the post-iOS 15 environment because clicks require genuine human action that privacy tools cannot simulate.
Click-to-open rate provides deeper insight into content effectiveness by measuring clicks among people who actually opened the email—unique clicks divided by unique opens, multiplied by 100. This metric reveals whether your content compels action once someone engages with your message, isolating content performance from subject line and deliverability factors. A CTOR between 10% and 30% indicates strong content performance that resonates with your audience.
Unsubscribe rate tracks the percentage of recipients who opted out after receiving your email, calculated by dividing unsubscribes by emails delivered and multiplying by 100. The nonprofit benchmark of 0.18% reflects the sector’s relatively engaged subscriber base, though rates above 0.5% warrant investigation into content relevance or sending frequency. While unsubscribes feel painful, they’re healthier than spam complaints—subscribers who leave cleanly don’t damage your sender reputation.
Bounce rate measures emails that failed to deliver, calculated by dividing bounced emails by total sent and multiplying by 100. Healthy lists maintain bounce rates under 2%, with hard bounces representing permanent failures like invalid addresses that require immediate removal. Soft bounces indicate temporary issues like full mailboxes that may resolve on subsequent sends. Bounce rates above 2% signal list hygiene problems that can damage sender reputation if left unaddressed.
Understanding the critical distinction between delivery rate and deliverability rate separates sophisticated email marketers from novices making decisions on incomplete information. Delivery rate measures emails accepted by recipient servers without bouncing—typically 95% to 99% for healthy lists. Deliverability rate, also called inbox placement rate, measures emails actually reaching the primary inbox rather than spam folders or promotions tabs. The average U.S. inbox placement rate hovers around 77%, meaning nearly one-quarter of successfully delivered emails never reach subscribers where they’ll see them.
Current Nonprofit Email Benchmarks Reveal Challenging Trends
The M+R Benchmarks 2025 report, analyzing data from 216 nonprofits representing billions of emails and billions of dollars in online revenue, documents a troubling pattern: organizations are sending more emails while generating less revenue. Email volume increased 9% to 62 messages per subscriber annually, yet total email revenue declined 11%. This inverse relationship suggests that more isn’t better—strategic engagement matters more than inbox presence.
Revenue per 1,000 fundraising emails dropped to $58 from $76 the previous year, representing a 24% decline over two years. Email’s contribution to online revenue fell from 16% to 14% to 11% over three consecutive years. The average nonprofit now generates $2.63 per email subscriber annually, with donation page completion rates at just 12%—down 13% year-over-year. These figures represent medians across participating organizations, meaning half perform worse.
However, not all the data discourages. Small nonprofits dramatically outperform larger organizations on a per-contact basis, raising $6.15 per contact compared to just $0.88 for large nonprofits. This suggests that smaller, more engaged lists consistently beat large disengaged ones—a crucial insight for organizations tempted to prioritize list growth over list quality.
Neon One’s analysis of 37,472 nonprofit email campaigns found the average campaign raises $5,598, with small organizations maintaining 250 to 999 contacts achieving higher open rates around 46% compared to larger organizations whose scale dilutes engagement. Mailchimp data shows nonprofits achieving 40.04% open rates—among the highest of any industry—with unsubscribe rates of just 0.18%, suggesting that nonprofit audiences remain genuinely interested in mission-driven communication when executed well.
Sector variations matter significantly when setting expectations. Environmental nonprofits historically capture the highest email revenue share at 21% of online giving. Wildlife and animal welfare organizations see email drive 57% of online revenue, reflecting their audiences’ particular responsiveness to visual storytelling and urgent appeals. Political organizations experience substantial spikes during election years, while international aid organizations benefit during crisis events that generate media attention.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection Changed Everything About Open Rates
Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in September 2021 with iOS 15, creating the most significant disruption to email metrics in decades. Understanding its impact is essential for accurate reporting and strategic decision-making.
MPP works by pre-loading email content through Apple’s proxy servers, automatically downloading tracking pixels regardless of whether recipients actually view messages. This registers every email as opened for the approximately 55% of all email opens that occur on Apple devices. Some analyses suggest over 95% of eligible Apple Mail users have enabled this privacy feature, making its impact nearly universal among iPhone and Mac users.
The practical impact was stark and immediate: open rates for many organizations nearly doubled overnight when MPP launched. One newsletter documented rates jumping from 28% to 55% immediately after the feature’s introduction. Industry-wide, open rates increased by 18 percentage points due to this artificial inflation that has nothing to do with actual engagement improvement.
Open rates are now unreliable for several critical functions that email marketers historically depended on. Identifying your most engaged subscribers based on opens produces misleading segments. Resending campaigns to non-openers may target people who actually saw the message but were registered as machine opens. A/B testing subject lines based on open rates produces invalid results when a significant portion of opens come from privacy bots rather than human decisions. Triggering automated journeys based on open behavior initiates sequences for people who never engaged. Optimizing send times using open data reflects when Apple’s servers process emails rather than when humans read them.
The shift toward click-based metrics is now essential for organizations that want accurate engagement data. Clicks remain completely unaffected by MPP because they require genuine human action—tapping a link—that privacy tools cannot simulate without breaking email functionality entirely. For measuring content effectiveness, track click-through rate as your primary engagement metric. For segmentation purposes, define engaged subscribers by click behavior within timeframes like 90 or 180 days rather than opens. For automation triggers, replace “did not open” conditions with “did not click” triggers that identify genuinely disengaged subscribers.
Many email service providers now allow filtering to identify MPP opens separately from human opens, enabling adjusted calculations for non-Apple users who still provide reliable open data. However, the wisest approach treats open rates as a rough deliverability indicator—if open rates suddenly plummet, something is wrong with inbox placement—rather than a precise engagement measure informing strategic decisions.
Revenue Metrics Reveal Your Email Program’s True Fundraising Impact
For fundraising-focused nonprofits, engagement metrics only matter insofar as they drive donations. Revenue metrics provide the accountability your board and leadership require when evaluating email program investment.
Revenue per 1,000 emails sent offers the clearest productivity measure, calculated by dividing total email revenue by total fundraising emails sent, then multiplying by 1,000. The 2024 benchmark of $58 represents a concerning decline from previous years, but organizations with highly engaged lists and sophisticated segmentation can dramatically exceed this figure. Tracking this metric over time reveals whether your email program is becoming more or less efficient at converting sends into donations.
Email’s share of online revenue contextualizes your email program within your overall digital fundraising ecosystem. At 11% in 2024, email contributes less than in previous years but remains significant—representing millions of dollars annually for large organizations. If email’s share is declining while other channels grow, that may reflect healthy diversification. If email’s share is declining while total online revenue stagnates, the email program needs attention.
Average gift size from email helps optimize ask amounts and understand how email donors compare to those acquired through other channels. Email donations average around $45, notably lower than the $135 average for text-to-give campaigns that reach more committed supporters. Device matters considerably within email: desktop users give an average of $118, tablet users $96, and mobile users just $79. This device disparity suggests that emails optimized for mobile reading should drive recipients toward completing donations on desktop when possible.
The cost-effectiveness of email remains compelling despite declining revenue metrics. For every $1 spent on email marketing, nonprofits can raise $36 to $45 in return—far exceeding paid digital advertising returns. Search ads return just $2.70 per dollar spent, while social advertising returns approximately $0.50. Text messaging generates $92 per 1,000 messages, making it more productive per message than email but reaching substantially smaller audiences who’ve opted into that channel.
Donor-Specific Metrics Connect Email Engagement to Long-Term Value
The most sophisticated nonprofit email programs track metrics specific to donor cultivation and retention, recognizing that email’s value extends far beyond immediate revenue from individual campaigns.
The golden donation phenomenon underscores why early engagement matters more than most organizations realize. Only 19% to 20% of first-time donors ever give a second gift—a devastating attrition rate that decimates the return on acquisition investment. However, after securing that second gift, 60% to 63% continue giving long-term, transforming from flight risks into reliable supporters. Email sequences designed to secure second gifts within 90 days of the first donation can increase the likelihood of long-term loyalty by four times, making this the highest-leverage application of email automation.
Donor retention correlates strongly with email engagement in ways that justify treating email as a retention tool rather than merely an acquisition or solicitation channel. Overall donor retention averages just 42.9% according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, with first-time donors retaining at only 19.4%. But donors with email addresses on file retain 29% better than those without—even for donors who only give offline through direct mail or events. The communication relationship that email enables builds connection that transcends channel. Monthly and recurring donors, often cultivated through email sequences, retain at 83% to 90%, demonstrating the value of sustained engagement.
Lifetime value differences by engagement level justify significant investment in cultivating engaged subscribers rather than simply maximizing list size. The average donor lifetime value sits at $784, but recurring donors average $7,604 in lifetime value—5.4 times higher than single-gift donors. According to fundraising researcher Adrian Sargeant, a 10% increase in donor retention can drive up to 200% increase in lifetime value, making retention-focused email strategies extraordinarily valuable compared to acquisition-focused approaches.
Lapsed donor reactivation via email achieves 4% to 12% success rates, with reactivated donors showing 40.4% subsequent retention—higher than the 27.9% for newly acquired donors. This makes reactivation campaigns highly cost-effective compared to acquisition, since the organization already has the relationship history and contact information needed to attempt reconnection.
List Health Metrics Determine Long-Term Program Sustainability
Your email list is a depreciating asset requiring constant attention and investment. Understanding list health metrics enables proactive maintenance before deliverability suffers and engagement declines compound.
List growth rate measures net list change over time, calculated as new subscribers minus unsubscribes minus bounces, divided by total list size. The nonprofit benchmark from M+R shows 3% to 4% annual growth, though this has declined from 6% in previous years as acquisition costs rise and privacy-conscious users become more selective about newsletter subscriptions. Monthly growth of 2.5% represents a healthy target for organizations actively investing in list building.
List decay affects 22% to 23% of email addresses annually due to job changes, provider switches, and abandoned accounts. This natural attrition means organizations must continuously add subscribers simply to maintain list size, let alone achieve growth. An organization adding 15% new subscribers annually but losing 23% to decay is actually shrinking, even if the gross acquisition numbers look healthy.
Active subscriber percentage varies by definition, but most email platforms define active as engagement within 60 to 90 days. Subscribers inactive for 6 or more months warrant re-engagement campaigns attempting to revive the relationship. Those inactive for 12 or more months may need removal from regular sending to protect deliverability, since consistently mailing unengaged addresses signals to inbox providers that you don’t maintain list quality. Typically, about one-third of subscribers become inactive over time, making re-engagement and sunset policies essential program components.
Email list value calculations help justify investment in both acquisition and retention activities. The formula divides total email revenue minus overhead costs by active subscribers. Analyses find values ranging from $1.53 to $2.63 per subscriber annually for typical nonprofits, with small organizations maintaining highly engaged lists seeing values exceeding $6 per contact. Understanding this value helps frame appropriate acquisition costs—spending $5 to acquire a subscriber who generates $2 annually produces negative returns.
Deliverability Metrics Require Technical Attention After 2024 Requirements
Gmail and Yahoo implemented significant new requirements for bulk senders in February 2024, making deliverability metrics more important than ever for maintaining inbox access.
Inbox placement rate measures emails reaching the primary inbox rather than spam folders or promotional tabs. A strong rate exceeds 90%, with certified senders achieving 99.2% through established reputation and proper technical setup. The average hovers around 77%, meaning roughly one-quarter of emails miss their target destination even when successfully delivered. Gmail-specific inbox placement has declined from 89.8% in early 2024 to 87.2% by Q4, possibly reflecting stricter filtering as the new requirements take full effect.
Sender reputation scores on a 0 to 100 scale determine how inbox providers treat your emails. Scores above 80 indicate good reputation with rare spam filtering; below 50 signals serious problems requiring immediate remediation. Organizations can check reputation through free tools like Sender Score, Google Postmaster Tools for Gmail-specific metrics, and Microsoft SNDS for Outlook and Hotmail.
Authentication pass rates for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC should approach 100% for legitimate email sending. These protocols verify that emails genuinely originate from authorized senders rather than spammers spoofing your domain. The 2024 Gmail and Yahoo requirements mandate that bulk senders dispatching 5,000 or more daily emails implement all three authentication methods with proper alignment. As of late 2025, non-compliance results in outright message rejection rather than merely spam folder delivery.
Google Postmaster Tools provides essential dashboards for any organization sending significant volume to Gmail addresses. The interface shows spam rate—which must stay under 0.3% with 0.1% as the ideal target—alongside domain reputation displayed as color-coded ratings from Bad to High, IP reputation for your sending infrastructure, authentication success rates, and specific delivery errors. Checking this dashboard weekly catches problems before they compound.
Bounce rates must stay under 2% total to maintain good sender reputation, with hard bounces representing permanent failures requiring immediate removal from your list. Higher rates damage sender reputation progressively and can trigger account suspension by email service providers trying to protect their shared infrastructure. Soft bounces after 3 to 5 consecutive failures to the same address should also result in removal.
Campaign Type Benchmarks Set Appropriate Expectations
Different email types generate dramatically different results based on subscriber expectations and the nature of the ask. Understanding these variations prevents inappropriate comparisons between campaign types and enables accurate goal-setting.
Welcome emails achieve extraordinary performance that justifies significant investment in onboarding sequences. Open rates range from 68% to 91%—the highest of any email type—with click-through rates of 14% to 27% and conversion rates 9.4 times higher than typical promotional emails. A series of three welcome emails generates 90% more completed actions than a single welcome message. Yet remarkably, 48% of nonprofits send zero emails in the first two days after signup, squandering the window of maximum subscriber attention and receptivity.
Newsletters perform solidly with approximately 40% open rates and 3.84% click-through rates among nonprofits that send them—which 86% do according to Nonprofit Marketing Guide research. Monthly sending is most common at 45% of organizations, followed by quarterly at 24% and weekly at 13%. Newsletters serve relationship maintenance rather than direct fundraising, making engagement metrics more relevant than conversion metrics for this format.
Fundraising appeals see open rates around 28% to 37% depending on audience warmth and segmentation sophistication, with the nonprofit-specific fundraising click-through rate at just 0.48%. The lower engagement reflects the higher-friction nature of donation asks compared to informational content—subscribers approach appeals with more skepticism and require stronger motivation to act.
Thank-you emails generate 8 times more opens and clicks than regular marketing emails and can produce 6 times more revenue when used strategically to suggest additional engagement opportunities. They’re critical for donor retention—personalized thank-yous can increase subsequent giving by up to 39% according to Penelope Burk’s research on donor-centered communication.
Re-engagement campaigns for lapsed subscribers achieve 14% to 29% success rates in best cases, with automated winback sequences showing 42.5% open rates and 18.3% click-through rates—far exceeding standard campaigns. These elevated metrics reflect the self-selecting nature of subscribers who respond to re-engagement attempts, demonstrating continued interest worth nurturing.
Automation Performance Justifies Technology Investment
Automated email sequences deliver substantially better results than batch campaigns across every meaningful metric, making automation investment highly worthwhile for organizations with sufficient list size to benefit.
Triggered emails generate 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than routine newsletters sent to full lists. More remarkably, they drive 180% higher conversion rates than batch sends because they reach subscribers at moments of demonstrated interest or action. While automated emails represent only about 5% of total email volume for most organizations, they generate 24% of email marketing revenue—a dramatic efficiency advantage.
Welcome series automation exemplifies this impact most clearly. Three-email welcome sequences produce 90% more completed actions than single welcome messages and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. The average revenue per recipient for welcome flows reaches $2.35, compared to pennies for typical batch campaigns.
Sequence completion rates and trigger performance should be tracked for each automation to identify optimization opportunities. Birthday and anniversary workflows achieve among the highest engagement at 24.4% open rates because they arrive at personally meaningful moments. Abandoned action sequences targeting incomplete donation forms show strong recovery potential for recapturing giving intent that technical friction or distraction interrupted.
The efficiency gains from automation compound over time. Marketers reclaim 2 or more hours per campaign through automation, and organizations using marketing automation see revenues climb by more than 33% on average compared to organizations relying solely on manual campaigns.
Mobile Email Behavior Demands Responsive Design Investment
With 50% to 60% of all email opens occurring on mobile devices—53% specifically for nonprofit audiences—mobile optimization is non-negotiable for effective email programs.
Device breakdown shows Apple devices dominating at 50% to 60% of opens, followed by Gmail at 26.5%. iPhone specifically accounts for 28.4% of mobile opens, with iPad at 9.3%. Android represents a smaller 2.3% share. This Apple dominance connects to the MPP discussion earlier—the majority of your subscribers likely have privacy protection enabled.
Mobile click rates actually exceed desktop at 47.5% versus 41.7%, though desktop users show 2 times higher overall engagement rates when considering full session behavior. Critically, desktop users donate at significantly higher amounts: $118 average versus $79 on mobile. Desktop still generates 78% of donation revenue despite lower open share, suggesting that mobile-opened emails often lead to desktop donation completion as supporters return to larger screens for financial transactions.
Non-mobile-optimized emails face harsh consequences from impatient subscribers. Deletion within 3 seconds is common for emails that render poorly on phones, with up to 15% of recipients unsubscribing from senders who consistently deliver poorly formatted messages. Responsive design increases unique mobile clicks from 2.7% to 3.3%, and the first link in mobile-optimized emails gets 3 times more clicks than subsequent links—a reminder to prioritize your primary call-to-action in template design.
Segmentation Delivers the Highest-Leverage Performance Gains
Segmented campaigns achieve 760% more revenue than unsegmented sends according to Campaign Monitor research, making list segmentation perhaps the single highest-impact tactic available to email marketers seeking improvement.
Klaviyo’s analysis of 2.5 billion emails quantifies the difference precisely: unsegmented emails achieve 9.95% open rates and $0.06 revenue per recipient, while highly segmented emails reach 16.17% open rates and $0.19 revenue per recipient—a 3 times improvement in revenue generation. Unsubscribe rates for segmented campaigns run 50% lower because subscribers receive content matching their interests rather than generic broadcasts.
RFM segmentation based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value provides a proven framework for donor email programs. Scoring donors 1 to 5 on each dimension creates 125 possible segments that can be grouped for practical campaign targeting. Common strategic segments include Shining Stars with high scores across all dimensions who warrant high-touch cultivation, Rising Stars showing recent high-value first gifts who represent upgrade potential, At-Risk Donors with declining engagement requiring re-engagement intervention, and Lapsed Donors with no gift in 12 or more months requiring specialized winback approaches.
Segment performance metrics to track include open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, revenue per recipient, and unsubscribe rate—all broken down by segment to identify which audience slices respond best to which messaging approaches. The best-performing segments typically target 5% or less of your full list, use two or more defining conditions, incorporate specific recipient behavior, and define timeframes for that behavior.
Warning signs of underperforming segments include open rates significantly below list average, rising unsubscribe rates, declining conversion trends over multiple campaigns, and revenue per recipient below the cost to serve that segment. Organizations should reduce frequency to low-engagement segments before removing them entirely, giving subscribers opportunity to re-engage before cutting communication.
A/B Testing Requires Statistical Discipline for Valid Results
Effective testing demands adequate sample sizes and proper statistical methods—cutting corners produces misleading results that lead to worse decisions than no testing at all.
The 95% confidence level represents the industry standard for A/B tests, meaning only a 5% acceptable risk of declaring a winner that actually isn’t better than the control. For high-stakes decisions affecting major campaigns, consider 99% confidence. Resource-constrained organizations might accept 90% confidence for lower-stakes optimizations, but should understand the increased risk of false positives.
Sample size requirements are substantial and often underestimated. The general guideline suggests at least 20,000 recipients per variation—40,000 total for an A/B test—for reliable statistical significance with typical email metrics showing single-digit percentage differences. Smaller lists should run tests across multiple sends over time to accumulate sufficient data, or focus on higher-baseline metrics like subject line testing where 20% or higher open rates are easier to measure than 2.5% click rate differences.
High-impact elements to prioritize for testing include subject lines measured via open rate, sender names where personal names show 0.53% higher opens than organizational names, send times and days, preview text, CTA button design including color and size and text and placement, and overall email layout. Testing only one variable at a time isolates effects so you know which change drove results.
Common mistakes undermining test validity include ending tests before reaching statistical significance because early results look promising, testing multiple variables simultaneously so you can’t isolate which change mattered, and using auto-deployment features that declare winners prematurely based on insufficient data. Setting minimum test durations of at least one full day captures complete subscriber behavior patterns including different time zones and work schedules.
Reporting Cadence and Dashboard Design Enable Better Decisions
Effective reporting requires the right metrics at the right frequency, presented clearly enough to inform decisions rather than overwhelm with data.
Daily monitoring should track delivery rate watching for sudden drops, bounce spikes that might indicate list problems or technical issues, spam complaints that must stay below 0.1%, and urgent campaign performance during time-sensitive appeals. Catching deliverability issues early prevents them from compounding into reputation damage.
Weekly reviews should cover open rate trends as a rough health indicator, click-through rate as the primary engagement measure, bounce rate ensuring list hygiene holds, and unsubscribe patterns that might signal content or frequency problems. This cadence catches gradual declines before they become severe.
Monthly reporting addresses conversion rates showing fundraising effectiveness, revenue per email tracking program productivity, list growth net of churn, and subscriber engagement trends over time. This level informs tactical adjustments to content strategy and sending practices.
Quarterly analysis examines return on investment for the email program overall, donor retention correlation with email engagement, segment performance comparison, and year-over-year trends for strategic planning. This supports resource allocation decisions and technology investments.
Annual reviews consolidate total email revenue contribution, program growth trajectory, benchmark comparisons against industry standards, and donor lifetime value by engagement level. This level serves board reporting and multi-year goal setting.
Essential dashboard components include an executive summary capturing revenue performance and key issues in three sentences or less, the five core metrics of open rate and click-through rate and conversion and revenue and unsubscribes, list health trends showing growth and decay, revenue attribution by campaign type, segment performance breakdown, and trend charts visualizing changes over time.
The data supporting strategic email investment remains compelling despite challenging trends. Organizations that master these metrics and apply them to decision-making will continue outperforming peers who rely on intuition or vanity metrics. In a channel where 33% of donors report email most inspires their giving according to M+R research, the opportunity remains substantial for those who measure what matters and act on what they learn.
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