Unpacking Benchmarks with M+R’s Jonathan Benton

Last week, I broke down the 2026 M+R Benchmarks report, and the toplines were good news for emailers.

But topline numbers only tell you so much.

I sat down with Jonathan Benton, Senior Vice President at M+R, who heads the analytics team and has worked on the Benchmarks report since around 2014, to dig into what’s actually driving the numbers.

Sara Cederberg: Email revenue was up 16% after a few rough years. What do you think changed?

Jonathan Benton: Urgency. This was a disaster response crisis year across a bunch of sectors.

In particular, international relief organizations were hit early by budget and staffing cuts, public media faced funding cuts, and food banks responded to the government shutdown in the fall.

I’m used to emergency years hitting one sector and making big waves in any given year.

This time, almost every sector faced a major crisis — and also saw some sort of lift in donor response in the wake of that.

SC: Advocacy emails pulled a strong click-through rate this year. How should email teams think about the relationship between advocacy engagement and donor conversion?

JB: Advocacy plays an important role in many integrated email programs.

Within these audiences, advocacy provides a chance to engage an audience in ways that fundraising doesn’t always cover.

A lot of the time, an order of magnitude more people will take an action than donate in response to an email. And topics can work in advocacy that fall flat for fundraising.

Advocacy isn’t relevant for every organization, but if you’re only doing fundraising, you’re going to miss out on opportunities to keep people clicking, opening, and taking action with you.

SC: Email volume increased by 15%. Is the takeaway that nonprofits should send more email?

JB: No, the fact that email volume is increasing doesn’t mean groups should all be sending more email.

It really comes down to what’s working for any individual organization.

If you have timely, relevant reasons for sending an email and getting into someone’s inbox every day, and if people respond positively, then you should be there every day.

But candidly, that’s not most organizations.

You should be sending as many emails as are relevant to the audience, and that can vary widely from organization to organization and audience to audience.

SC: One-time giving outpaced monthly giving growth in 2025. What do you think caused that?

JB: I’ve been doing the study for a while now, and almost every year, monthly giving outpaces one-time giving.

But this year, one-time giving was ahead.

Though some groups have been able to make the most of crisis moments to convert monthly donors, oftentimes, emergency donors are making one-time gifts.
It really underscores how much this was an emergency year.

SC: The 3.8 billion Scout AI email analysis you mentioned in the webinar found that personal stories got 29% lower response rates. What’s your read on that?

JB: The analysis isn’t saying stories can never work, but it does identify traps groups run into.

One is telling a story that doesn’t align with the donor’s reason to give.

A health organization writes about someone’s cancer journey, and the reader might think, “That’s totally different than my situation or my loved one’s.” It doesn’t connect.

The other is when an organization tells the entire story, including the victory. There’s no role left for the donor.

If it’s missing the “why I should donate now,” it can fall flat.

Personal stories CAN work. But on average, they’re underperforming other message types.

SC: Organic website traffic dropped 40% over 2025 due to AI search. How does that change email’s job?

JB: It’s not just email. Every channel needs to pick up the slack!

Thankfully, that did happen this year — email did really well, advertising saw good returns, and groups’ mobile programs were growing too.

But everything needs to do more work because organic search will keep dropping.

SC: This is the 20th Benchmarks report. What’s changed most about how nonprofit orgs use the data compared to early years?

JB: When I started working on the study in 2014, it was a very email-focused study. We focused on big trends in digital fundraising, but email really was the bulk of the study.

The biggest change from then to now is how much groups really need to be covering to keep up.

The study itself is three times as long because we’re diving deep into advertising, social media, mobile giving, and more.

That’s not just because we decided to grow the scope of the study — it’s because the importance of all these other channels has really grown too.

To keep up these days, groups need to focus on all of these channels.

SC: Was there a finding in the email section that surprised you?

JB: Fundraising response rates held steady for the first time I can ever remember.

I’m used to the story being that groups are sending more to raise less per email, because any individual email does a little worse than the year before.

It’s an unfortunate trend year over year over year — groups are grinding harder and harder to eke out the returns.

Sometimes all that work leads to a growth in revenue, and sometimes it doesn’t.

But this year, I think donors responded and stepped up to fill a gap that wouldn’t otherwise be met.

The bottom line
The 16% jump in email revenue is real, but it was mostly crisis-driven.

The findings that matter beyond the news cycle: storytelling can work, but only when you leave a problem for the donor to solve.

And organic web is declining fast enough that every other channel has to carry more weight.

The full 2026 M+R Benchmarks report is available now.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara