In 2025, email continues to be one of the most powerful tools in a fundraiser’s toolkit. But blasting out updates or newsletters a few times a year? That’s not a strategy.
The most successful teams are using email as a data-driven, revenue-generating, relationship-building engine.
This blog breaks down the latest nonprofit email marketing statistics so you can benchmark smarter, optimize faster, and understand how real teams are using email to inspire action.
Key Nonprofit Email Marketing Stats in 2025
Email marketing continues to be a cornerstone for nonprofit organizations aiming to engage supporters and drive donations. The following statistics highlight current trends and benchmarks in the sector:
Engagement Metrics
- Open Rates: Nonprofits experience an average email open rate of 28.59%, surpassing the for-profit average of 21–21.5%. [Neon One]
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): The average CTR for nonprofit emails stands at 3.29%. [Neon One]
- Click-to-Open Rates (CTOR): Nonprofit emails have a CTOR of 10.2%, indicating effective content engagement. [The Nonprofit Times]
- 74% of new subscribers expect welcome email after joining a newsletter and these messages have an average open rate of 202% higher than traditional email campaigns. [Classy.org]
Want to know if your emails are working? Start here. 👇
Open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and click-to-open rates (CTOR) are your baseline for email performance, and knowing how you compare to industry benchmarks can help you refine what’s working and fix what’s not.
Here’s what you can do:
- Use open rates to test subject lines, sender names, and timing. Test subject lines weekly. A/B testing just the subject line is one of the easiest ways to improve open rates.
- Use CTR to evaluate the strength of your content and calls to action. Stick to one CTA per email. Multiple asks = lower CTR.
- Use CTOR (clicks divided by opens) to understand if your message is landing once it’s read. Use CTOR as your storytelling check. If opens are high but clicks are low, your message might not be compelling or clear enough.
Benchmark your metrics quarterly. You don’t need to chase perfection. You need to know what’s improving.
If your CTOR is high but your CTR is low, you might need better subject lines. If your open rate is strong but CTOR is weak, it’s time to sharpen your content or tighten your ask.
Your metrics may vary significantly by segment (new donors vs. recurring, for example), so tracking performance by segment is a good idea. It’ll show you where to double down.
Email Frequency & List Management
- Email Volume: In 2024, nonprofits sent an average of 62 email messages per subscriber, marking a 9% increase from the previous year. [M+R Benchmarks]
- List Growth: Email list sizes grew by 4% in 2024, a slight decline from the 6% growth observed in 2023. [HubSpot]
- Subscriber Management: Only 38% of nonprofits regularly remove unengaged subscribers, potentially affecting overall engagement metrics. [Nonprofit Tech for Good Report]
The average nonprofit sends over 60 emails per subscriber per year. That’s more than one email per week. But more doesn’t always mean better. Volume without strategy can lead to unsubscribes, disengagement, or worse, getting ignored entirely.
And your list? It’s only as strong as the engagement it generates. If you’re not managing inactive subscribers, you’re hurting deliverability, skewing your performance metrics and wasting precious energy on people who aren’t listening.
Here’s what you can do:
- Audit your email cadence. More emails aren’t bad, but they need to be valuable, not just frequent.
- Segment based on engagement. Send more frequent updates to active readers, and slower nurture tracks to quieter subscribers.
- Clean your list regularly. Inactive subscribers drag down open rates and increase spam risk.
- Use re-engagement campaigns. Give disengaged contacts one last shot with a focused, personalized email series.
- Prioritize quality over quantity. List growth is good. List health is better.
Fundraising Impact
- Donor Influence: Email is the most inspiring channel for 33% of donors, surpassing social media (29%) and websites (17%). [2025 Online Donor Feedback Survey]
- Revenue Generation: In 2024, email campaigns accounted for 11% of all online revenue for nonprofits, a decrease from 14% in 2023. [M+R Benchmarks]
- Fundraising Efficiency: Nonprofits raised an average of $58 for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent in 2024. [M+R Benchmarks]
- Donor Value & Retention: Donors with an email address give more. Even if they never give through an online channel. [Avid Benchmarks]
- Donors with an email address retain better. Even if they only give offline. [Avid Benchmarks]
Email remains one of the top drivers of donor action, and it’s because they influence. One in three donors say email is the reason they gave. But the channel’s share of online revenue is shrinking, and return per message is down.
That doesn’t mean email’s broken. It means the bar is higher.
Generic appeals won’t cut it. Smart targeting, strong creative, and campaign-level strategy are what move donors today.
Here’s what you can do:
- Double down on what’s working. If email inspires more giving than social or your site, treat it like your primary channel, not an afterthought.
- Segment fundraising asks. Don’t send the same CTA to lapsed donors, major donors, and first-timers. Customize journeys and giving prompts.
- Invest in testing. Headlines, CTAs, visuals, time of day; small optimizations can make a big difference in response.
- Measure cost per gift, not just open rate. Email should deliver more than engagement. Track how many gifts, and how much revenue, it actually drives.
Personalization & Design
- Personalization Usage: Approximately 63% of nonprofits incorporate personalization in their email marketing efforts. [Nonprofit Tech for Good Report]
- Subject Line Effectiveness: Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. [Campaign Monitor]
- Visual Content: Including videos in emails can boost click-through rates by 65%, and emails with graphics have a 1.12% higher CTR than those without. [Unlayer]
- Personalized calls to action convert 202% better than default calls to action. [HubSpot]
Most nonprofits are already adding some level of personalization, but “Hi [First Name]” isn’t enough anymore. Personalization today means sending the right content, with the right visuals, to the right person at the right time.
Design also matters more than ever. But not always in the way you think. Supporters experience your emails. And how it looks (and feels) directly impacts whether they click, engage, or donate.
This is what you can do:
- Personalize beyond the name. Use donor behavior, giving history, location, and preferences to shape content, not just greetings.
- Segment subject lines. A personalized subject line can make the difference between getting ignored and getting opened.
- Add visuals that serve a purpose. Use video and graphics only when they reinforce your message and guide action.
- Test everything. A/B test your images, CTA formats (buttons vs links), your sender, and your messaging to see what increases clicks, not just opens.
- Communicate like a human. The most effective emails build better relationships. Write copy and use design that conveys authenticity & trust.
Email Marketing Is Still Underused in Nonprofits
For all its proven impact, email is still treated like an afterthought by too many organizations.
- Only 68% of nonprofits use email marketing at all.
- Just 63% personalize their messages.
- Only 38% clean their lists regularly.
- Only 28% use website popups to collect emails. [Nonprofit Resource hub]
- Just 13% use gated content to grow their list.
There are still lots of missed opportunities.
If email is where 1 in 3 donors say they’re most inspired to give…
…then leaving these tactics on the table means leaving donations, relationships, and retention behind too.
Every unpersonalized email lowers engagement. Every unclean list hurts your deliverability. Every missing signup form slows your momentum.
Email isn’t underperforming.
Most teams aren’t giving it the structure and attention it deserves.
If you want better results from email, you need to do it smarter, system-first, and supporter-focused.
And Here’s the Problem: Consistency Is Hard
You can have the data. You can know the benchmarks. You can even write the perfect emails.
But doing it all, segmentation, optimization, testing, sending, reporting, takes time. And most nonprofit teams don’t have it.
That’s why even great strategies break down in execution.
What High-Performing Fundraisers Are Doing Differently
They’ve stopped treating email like a siloed tactic and started treating it like infrastructure.
For them, email is a signal. A way to surface intent, deepen relationships, and drive action across everything they do.
They’re using email to:
- Pinpoint the moment someone is ready to upgrade.
- Trigger a thank-you before the impact fades.
- Reactivate a lapsed donor the second engagement drops.
Not manually. Not with static workflows. With systems built to think, prioritize, and execute.
They’re building smarter fundraising engines, ones that run in the background while their team focuses on strategy, creativity, and connection.
Email is still one of the most cost-effective, high-return channels for nonprofit fundraising in 2025. But the gap between teams who are getting results, and those who aren’t, isn’t knowledge. It’s execution.
That’s why we built Avid, a fundraising intelligence and automation system powered by AI and Playbooks based on 7,000+ fundraising experiments.
We call it the first fundraising agency in the cloud.
Avid Helps Nonprofit Marketers Actually Do What Works
Avid is the fundraising intelligence system that turns your email strategy into action, automatically, at scale, and without burning out your team.
It’s not another nonprofit CRM or workflow builder. It’s your fundraising execution engine. Here’s how Avid helps:
- Unifies your stack connecting your CRM, email platform, donation tools, and ad channels into one intelligent system.
- Identifies high-impact segments in real time, like at-risk donors, second-gift candidates, or recent engagers.
- Launches pre-tested campaigns automatically, like reactivation journeys, upgrade prompts, or welcome series.
- Optimizes send timing, cadence, and content based on performance, no switching platforms or rebuilding logic.
- Surfaces daily insights and automates next steps, so you’re not stuck analyzing data or reinventing the wheel.
It tells you what happened and shows you what to do next (and does it for you).
With Avid, your emails reach the right person, with the right message, at the right time, without your team having to set up new rules, filters, or workflows every week.
It is strategy, segmentation, and execution, all in one system, built exclusively for fundraisers.
Want to see how Avid helps fundraising teams act on insights, automatically? Book a demo here.
