How do your lead generation costs stack up with other charities?

At this year’s Fundraising Everywhere Digital Fundraising Conference Sarah presented the results of our first Hynt Index. 

The Hynt Index is a snapshot of different themes affecting digital fundraisers, shared by your peers, so we can learn together about what’s working (and what’s not). Survey questions are short and super-focused - you’ll finish before you’ve had time to drink a cup of tea. 

The first area we’ve chosen to spotlight is cost per opted-in email lead, read on to see what we found...

What is digital lead generation?

Lead generation is where you attract people who share your values to take a small action - like saying they care about an issue and giving their email address.

Now you have a direct line to the people you share your values and you can continue to build a relationship with.

It’s a priority area for many charities to generate first-party data like this for two reasons:

• It increases your prospect base for donors but also legators, volunteers, community fundraisers, customers and active community members

• It can drive greater income - reducing Cost Per Acquisition for cash and Regular Giving donations

Ultimately, it means you own the data and you can control the messaging your audience sees.

Our email lead cost data

We wanted to understand what charities were typically paying for opted-in email leads. We combined overall spend and total leads across the year data from 32 charities, totalling just over half a million pounds of spend. 

The average cost per lead across all charities was surprisingly lean at  £1.07 per email lead. How does that compare to what you’re paying? Better? Worse? About the same?

Cost per lead performance by cause area and charity size

Digging further into the data, we had 9 different cause areas across the data we had. We found some cause areas were significantly outperforming the £1.07 average.

Top performers:

• Environment & Conservation £0.48

• International Development £0.86

• Human Rights & Social Justice £0.88

Causes with premium cost per lead

A few cause areas are paying more for their average cost per lead:

• Children & Youth £1.53

• Sport & Recreation £2.11

• Disability £3.03

Lead cost averages by charity size

Larger organisations tend to drive a higher CPL, while smaller charities can often be quicker to respond to news cycles. This helps them get more from a lower ad budget as they’re able to achieve lower cost leads.

• £0-1M - £1.01

• 1-£5M - £0.75

• 5-£10M - £1.52

• 20-£50M - £2.64

• 50-£100M - £1.24

  
  

How can I improve my cost per lead?

If you’re paying more than £1.07 for an email lead, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could be that you need to optimise your campaign set up, creative assets or landing page copy. 

Ask yourself:

• Is your campaign timely and relevant?

• Does it speak to the world around our audience?

• Is it easy for people to take action?

And remember, cheap doesn’t always mean quality. Make sure you’re assessing the quality of your lead through the actions they take afterwards - are they engaged with your email program and responding to actions you send them?

If you’ve read this and are feeling underwhelmed by your own spend to lead ratio we’d love to chat. 

You can find some inspiration in our Liberty case study where we generated new leads for as little as £0.38 per lead (yep, that’s below the best performing cause average in the Hynt Index 😎). 

Email hello@hynt.studio and we’ll set up a call.

We’ll run the Hynt Index regularly throughout the year. Is there an area where you’d really like to compare notes with your sector mates? Let us know.