Beyond Silos: benchmarks for telephone, face-to-face and digital fundraising, and how they fit together. Comparing how each channel performs, following what donors give over time, and matching recruitment costs to what those donors give back.
Public Outreach is a full-service, people-first fundraising agency working across face-to-face, phone, digital and SMS. We work alongside charity teams on recruitment, continued giving and the experience people have when they hear from a charity.
PO Benchmarks is part of that shared work. Participants are mostly Canadian charities, with some US programmes. Canadian Red Cross is named with permission, and every other organization stays anonymous. All dollar figures are in USD.
60+organizations contributed telephone campaigns, face-to-face reports, digital lead results and donor files
~2Mpositive-value donor records in the channel value comparison
Beyond silos
One donor, many channels
We are either big and siloed, or small and overwhelmed. Few organizations are understanding or tracking origin to ROI and everything in between.
01Signs a petitionThe digital team brought them in.
02Email welcomeA colleague wrote the welcome.
03Talks by phoneThe caller answered their questions.
04Receives mailA specialized direct mail team takes it from there.
A fundraising director can have all of those reports and still need someone to piece the relationship together. That was the starting point for PO Benchmarks.
Part one
A few benchmarks at a glance
The big numbers first. The full report carries the nuances and the data markers that are even nerdier.
Channel benchmarks
Telephone benchmarks: who answers, who gives
Telephone calls have different purposes, so a monthly upgrade is compared with other upgrade calls, while an invitation to give for the first time has its own reference.
35.95%monthly upgrade outcome per contact
27.76%monthly upgrade contact rate
Calling objective
Contact rate
Outcome per record
Outcome per contact
Digital leads to monthly giving
16.00%
1.85%
11.54%
Lapsed reactivation
19.29%
4.23%
21.94%
Monthly upgrade
27.76%
9.98%
35.95%
One-time to monthly
26.25%
1.87%
7.11%
Try it with your own calling file
See what the benchmark rates would look like at your file size. This is a reference point to compare against, not a forecast for your programme.
records
1,600people reached at the pooled contact rate of 16.00%
185monthly commitments at the pooled rate of 1.85% per record
146 to 287if your results matched the middle half of participating organizations, 1.46% to 2.87% per record
Rates from Public Outreach telephone campaign results, 94 campaigns from 25 organizations. Outcomes are pledges, reactivations or upgrades, not payments. One contributor supplies 52.1% of lapsed-reactivation records.
Channel benchmarks
Face-to-face retention
A shortfall at month three calls for a close look at the welcome, payment schedule, failed collections and cancellations. Pick a checkpoint to follow 100 donors.
57of 100
still giving at month 12. Pooled retention 56.6%, with programmes ranging from 55.6% to 60.3%.
Based on 6,763 eligible donors.
Public Outreach face-to-face retention reports, 10,544 donors at month 1. Dots are rounded from pooled retention, and later checkpoints include only donors recruited long enough ago to reach them.
Costs and recovery
Recruitment costs are recovered over time
Ongoing gifts collected for every $1 of reported recruitment cost. Face-to-face recovery builds month by month, and the speed differs by channel and donor group.
$0.48collected per $1 by month 12, face to face, median organization
$1.61returned per $1 by month 24 in one phone programme
Face to face, collected per $1, median organization
Month 3$0.15
Month 6$0.27
Month 12$0.48
Phone, one organization, six matched groups
Month 12$0.89
Month 24$1.61
White line marks $1.00, where giving equals the recruitment cost.
Face-to-face sign-ups cost $263 at the median organization. Read that price beside how long the same donors take to give it back.
Face to face: program cost and receipt reports, 23,742 donors at month 3 and 16,050 at month 12, ongoing gifts only. Range at month 12: $0.41 to $0.52. Phone: one organization, six matched groups from 2015 to 2020, 3,040 monthly donors, both months measured. Servicing costs are not subtracted. The phone example is a case study, not an industry average.
Donor value
Lifetime value by recorded acquisition channel
We compared donors who made their first gift in the same year, within the same charity. 1.00 is that charity's average donor for that year. Switch to all-history to see why mail can look stronger than it is.
65%higher value for face-to-face donors than the same-year reference, pooled
10%higher at the median organization
Why two numbers?
Pooled puts every donor from every charity into one big group. A charity with lots of face-to-face donors pulls the number up.
Median lines up the charities and takes the one in the middle, so every charity counts once, big or small.
When the two are far apart, a few large files are driving the pooled number.
Face to face
Phone coded
Digital
Mail
White line marks the reference. Same year compares donors who started giving in the same year. All history compares every donor against the whole file, so long-time donors count for more.
Positive-value records with valid first-gift dates: 180,205 face-to-face, 32,607 phone, 587,627 digital and 547,020 mail donors. Values capped at the 95th percentile of each reference group. In some channel groups one contributor supplied more than half the records. A value index is separate from return on investment.
Donor value
Long-term value by original channel
Average giving per donor so far, for donors whose first gift was in 2018 to 2022. The capped view trims very large gifts so channels are easier to compare. Uncapped keeps them in.
$753face-to-face donors, capped average
$249 to $825mail, capped to uncapped, as a few very large gifts come back in
A higher uncapped average shows that a few donors gave a lot. It does not predict future value. These totals come before recruitment cost, so read them beside the $263 median face-to-face sign-up cost.
Face to face$753
Phone$456
Web / online$329
Mail$249
Event / peer$213
Average per donor, USD. Same scale in both views.
36,629 face-to-face, 6,178 phone, 173,178 web, 150,623 mail and 27,188 event donors who gave more than $0. Capped at each organization and year's 95th percentile. Giving is counted up to each data extract, so this differs from a fixed 36-month lifetime value. USD, converted from CAD.
Part two
Into the multi(channel)verse
Where have my people gone? Follow the donor across channels and the picture changes.
Our biggest learning
People who start as a lead or on your list come back and commit more often than people whose first contact is a one-time gift.
28.2%of list-first donors gave a second gift within 12 months, against 13.7% of donation-first donors
12.39%of Canadian Red Cross digital leads reached by phone gave monthly, against 5.64% of new one-time donors
88%of first gifts from digital leads called by phone were monthly, against about 17% in platform-led digital fundraising
One advocacy case study, the Canadian Red Cross calling case and the PO digital lead conversion archive. Second gifts and monthly commitments point to longer relationships. The report does not yet measure their full lifetime value side by side.
Across channels
Mail can lift results in other channels
The prompt, the follow-up and the payment channel can all differ. A mailed appeal can lift response and revenue in other channels.
11.9%relative response increase when targeted Facebook advertising accompanied mail, in NextAfter's experiment
28.43%higher email revenue in the four weeks after a mail drop, reported by Blueprint
Keep the full campaign calendar beside an email result.
External research: a NextAfter experiment, and Blueprint across five organizations. Blueprint's figure is an association, not incremental lift.
Digital leads and phone
Digital leads to phone: the funnel
A person responds to an online action and may later receive an invitation to give monthly by phone. Commitments are kept separate from successful payments.
2.06%of 1,187,467 digital actions became an initial donor, 24,422 in all
~88%of those first gifts were monthly
2022 campaigns2.32%
2023 campaigns1.51%
2024 campaigns1.92%
Initial donor outcomes per digital action, by campaign start year.
Size up a digital lead campaign
Drag to set the number of digital actions. The archive rates show what lead-to-phone campaigns produced from 2022 to 2025. This is a reference point, not a forecast.
actions
1,030initial donors at the archive rate of 2.06% per action
906of them monthly, at the archive share of about 88%
755 to 1,160across the annual rates seen from 2022 to 2024, 1.51% to 2.32%
Public Outreach digital lead conversion archive, 2022 to 2025. Actions can include repeat submissions by the same person. First results are pledges, not confirmed payments.
Canadian Red Cross
Digital leads give monthly more often
Canadian Red Cross reached almost the same share of both calling files, 23.90% and 24.10%. Digital leads then made monthly commitments about 2.2 times as often per contact.
12.39%per contact for digital leads, against 5.64% for new one-time donors
2.96%per supplied record, against 1.36%
Digital leadsNew one-time donors
Monthly commitments per contact
Digital leads12.39%
One-time donors5.64%
Monthly commitments per supplied record
Digital leads2.96%
One-time donors1.36%
Canadian Red Cross calling case, named with permission. 12,628 digital lead records and 7,431 new one-time donor records. The audiences and reporting periods differ, so the comparison does not establish a causal recruitment advantage.
Time to first gift
Some donors take years to give
~43%of those who eventually became donors made their first gift more than a year after signing up
19.8% first gave after two to five years, and 8.3% after more than five.
Follow the original unique leads, including people who have not given yet, and measure revenue after costs per original lead.
Revenue per lead that had not given
$7.79one-time revenue per non-donor lead within 24 months
$19.42cumulative revenue per non-donor lead in mature 2015 to 2023 groups
Single-organization case study, national advocacy. Revenue excludes monthly giving and ongoing fundraising costs. USD, converted from CAD.
Welcome and follow-up
One more welcome email did not mean more monthly donors
Before a fundraiser calls, a welcome email can acknowledge the action someone took and explain why the charity is getting in touch. That makes the welcome a shared concern for email and telephone colleagues.
Longer sequences did not convert more conversations. Audience, content, topic and time before the call could all explain the pattern.
Compare sequences within one campaign. Follow first payments, ongoing giving, opt-outs and complaints.
Welcome emails before the call
Reported monthly outcomes
Monthly outcome per conversation
None
2,230
14.06%
One
934
14.88%
Two or three
2,683
14.15%
Four or more
11,315
12.73%
Public Outreach digital lead conversion campaigns. Small client-run groups reported about 19.5% for two or more emails, but they are not equal tests. The comparison cannot separate content from timing.
Time to the next gift
List first, second gift sooner
In the 2022 to 2025 groups, the share making a second gift within twelve months was 28.2% for donors who joined the list first and 13.7% for donors whose gift came first. The gap held in each reporting period, though its size varied.
28.2%list first, second gift within twelve months
13.7%donation first
Cumulative lead conversion
6.4%within twelve months
7.8%within twenty-four months
10.3%within five years
Single-organization case study, national advocacy. Donation-first includes several routes, and some systems create a record only at the first gift.
Get the full report:
All four sections in full: how your program compares, what acquisition costs and when it comes back, which relationships reports overlook, and what could change in the budget.
Return per $1 by year for face to face and phone
The Canadian Red Cross case, named with permission
Three actions to assign and questions to take back to your team
Appendices: definitions, external benchmarks, research priorities and sources
