EMAIL MESSAGING
- Email revenue increased by 16% on average. The share of all online revenue directly sourced to email was 11%.
- For every 1,000 fundraising messages sent, nonprofits raised $54. This marks a 4% increase from 2024.
- Email list sizes increased by 5% in 2025, after 4% and 9% growth in the previous two years.
- Nonprofits sent an average of 50 email messages per subscriber in 2025, with fundraising comprising 31 email messages.
- Nonprofits raised an average of $2.40 in email-sourced revenue per subscriber in 2025, a substantial increase from $1.87 per email subscriber the previous year.
- Email messaging generated an average of 0.14 actions per subscriber over the course of the year.
- Public Media saw extraordinary growth in email fundraising. It was wild.
We’re going to tell you a number that will hopefully make you smile. Then we are going to tell you a number that will make you chuckle in disbelief. Ready?
First, the smile. Last year, email revenue increased by an average of 16%, keeping pace with overall online revenue. That’s solid growth, especially for a mature channel where continued growth can often be hard to come by.
And then: for Public Media, email revenue increased by 130%. What? That’s ridiculous. From one year to the next, email revenue doubled, and then kept growing. One hundred and thirty percent.
Most sectors saw an increase in email revenue, and nonprofits of all sizes reported growth. The difference for Public Media nonprofits was due partly to list growth, as well as an extraordinary activation of existing email subscribers.
Nonprofits sent more email to more people
For the most part, list sizes increased in 2025, with an average net increase of 5% over the year. After modest growth the previous two years, Public Media email lists grew by 12% in 2025.
The only sector to report a decline in list size was Disaster/International Aid — which may be partly explained by a higher-than-average churn rate. Overall, 4% of email subscribers at the start of the year became unreachable due to bounces, and an additional 12% were lost to unsubscribes. Disaster/International Aid nonprofits reported a 6% bounce rate, and a 21% unsubscribe rate.
Nonprofits sent email to more people in 2025; they also sent more emails to those people. Email volume increased by 15% from the previous year, with growth in both fundraising and advocacy messaging.
An individual subscriber on a nonprofit email list could expect to receive 50 messages over the course of the year. Of those, 31 were fundraising appeals, 9 were newsletters, 2 included an advocacy call to action, and the rest were engagement or “other.”
Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits sent the highest volume of email messages at 108 email messages per subscriber, more than twice the overall average. These organizations sent an average of 63 fundraising appeals and 12 advocacy alerts, along with a substantial volume of newsletters and other messaging without a direct call to action.
“Email” did great. What about “emails”?
Since fundraising appeals make up the majority of email messaging, we’ll begin there.
On average, fundraising email generated a click-through rate of 0.59% and a response rate of 0.05%. Nonprofits received $54 in revenue for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent, a 4% increase over the previous year.
The numbers don’t add up cleanly because we calculate the median for each metric separately, but they can give us a general sense of what to expect. A nonprofit sending a fundraising email to an audience of 100,000 recipients saw about 50 donations on average and revenue of about $5,400.
That’s the average, and does not reflect the reality of many nonprofit programs (especially where audiences are segmented). Public Media nonprofits in 2025 saw $309 in revenue per 1,000 fundraising emails, nearly six times the overall average. As always, the Benchmarks figures are a handy way to compare your performance to peer organizations, but the numbers that matter most are your own.
Response rates for advocacy email messages were orders of magnitude higher than for fundraising messages, which is consistent with email metrics since the invention of email and metrics.
Advocacy email generated an average click-through rate of 2.3% and a response rate of 1.4%. Our imaginary nonprofit with a list of 100,000 subscribers could expect to generate about 1,400 advocacy actions from a single full-list email.
The right to petition our government for a redress of grievances is right there in the Constitution, and putting pressure on decision-makers is its own reward. But advocacy email has another benefit: giving highly-engaged audiences a chance to make a donation after completing the advocacy form.
Overall, 0.34% of email subscribers who took action in response to an advocacy email completed a donation on a post-action landing page. Given the higher rate of engagement for advocacy email, and tiny volume relative to direct fundraising appeals, there may be important opportunities there for nonprofits looking to boost email revenue.
Adding it all together — the newsletters, the advocacy messages, the early bird offers, the deadline appeals, the deadline extensions, the welcomes and thank-yous and follow-ups — nonprofits generated $2.40 and 0.14 advocacy actions per email subscriber over the entirety of 2025.
Both of those figures saw large differences between sectors and significant growth from the previous year. The $2.40 raised per email subscriber was up from $1.87. For Public Media nonprofits with their surge of email giving, revenue climbed from $2.32 per email recipient to $4.61.
All told, email accounted for 11% of online revenue, making it an important channel — and one that showed significant growth in 2025.
