MOBILE MESSAGING
- Revenue sourced to mobile messages accounted for 0.9% of all online revenue in 2025.
- Mobile messaging (a.k.a. text messaging or SMS/MMS) subscriber list size increased by 4%, after double-digit growth the previous two years.
- Nonprofits had 176 mobile subscribers for every 1,000 email subscribers and raised $0.09 through mobile messaging for every dollar in email revenue.
- The average response rate for mobile fundraising messages was 0.17%. The average response rate for mobile advocacy messages was 2.6%.
We get excited about the data in Benchmarks every year, and you should not listen to the people who say it’s because we are giant nerds who love graphs and have a secret crush on John Venn. (Talk about the intersection of “influential mathematician in the field of symbolic logic” and “dreamy”!)
No, we get excited for this data because we believe in the potential and collective power of countless individual people making a commitment to important causes. Big change comes from small actions added up over time.
That perspective is important to keep in mind as we examine mobile messaging. For many nonprofits, mobile messaging is a tiny part of the overall digital program — but there’s a whole world of opportunity taking shape.
To ground ourselves with that sense of scale, mobile messaging directly drove 0.9% of total online revenue in 2025. Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits reported an average of 2.7% of revenue from mobile, and the average for Small nonprofits was 3.1%.
Mobile messaging drove far less revenue than email for most organizations. For every dollar raised through email, nonprofits raised $0.09 through mobile messaging. Again, Wildlife/Animal Welfare nonprofits saw stronger relative results for mobile, with 18 cents raised per dollar of email revenue. Small nonprofits brought in 20 cents via mobile per dollar of email revenue.
On the whole, on average, mobile messaging drove a relatively small amount of revenue, and our focus throughout Benchmarks is what happens on the whole, on average. But we can say, both from our own experience working with nonprofits that have invested in mobile growth and from the outliers in our data set, that dramatically different results are possible. (In fact, one participant in our pool raised more through text messaging than through email [we will never tell you which one].)
The rapid rate of change offers a glimpse of what is possible. As we’ve seen, overall online revenue increased by an average of 15% in 2025; mobile revenue increased by 48%. Mobile revenue growth was especially robust for Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, which reported a 93% increase in revenue for the channel.
This growth was driven by changes in mobile list size, volume, and message performance. We’ll take those one at a time.
Mobile lists grew by 4% on average in 2025, slowing down from the 13% and 15% rates of growth in the previous two years.
It is not unusual to see fairly large swings in the number of mobile subscribers. Partly, that’s because the baseline is low, so it doesn’t take as many people being added or removed to show up as a major percentage change. Nonprofits had an average of just 176 mobile subscribers for every 1,000 email subscribers, so each new signup matters a lot more to the overall list size.
It’s also the case that mobile list changes can be highly dependent on differences in strategy and investment. Nonprofits can quickly alter the makeup and magnitude of their mobile lists through direct data uploads, investments in lead generation, web form optimization, or any number of efforts. For some nonprofits, a single in-person event might be a chance to add a meaningful number of new mobile subscribers.
The median volume for mobile messaging in 2025 was 7.3 fundraising messages; 5.9 advocacy messages, and 4.3 “other” messages (which could include surveys, event invitations, thank-you messages, photos of cute puppies, etc.). Nonprofits at the 75th percentile had volume about twice this high; at the other end, some nonprofits sent just a handful of mobile messages all year.
Along with that substantial variation in the number of mobile messages sent, there was also a marked increase in total volume. Overall, nonprofits sent 40% more mobile messages in 2025 than they did in 2024. Advocacy messaging volume more than doubled, an increase that was not matched in email.
Mobile fundraising messages had an average click-through rate of 3.7%, and a page completion rate of 4.2%. In other words, a bit less than 4% of recipients clicked on the link, and a bit more than 4% of those people who clicked completed a gift. The average response rate for mobile fundraising messages was 0.17%, slightly below the previous year.
As with email, mobile advocacy messaging metrics were quite a bit higher than for fundraising. The average response rate for mobile advocacy messaging was 2.6%, which represents a 16% drop from the previous year.
Across nonprofits of all types, there was a 3% increase in revenue per 1,000 mobile fundraising messages sent — but that small change masks big changes by sector. Environmental and Hunger/Poverty nonprofits saw double-digit growth on average. On the other hand, Health and Rights nonprofits reported double-digit declines.
The way individuals use their mobile devices, and the way nonprofits use mobile messaging, continues to evolve swiftly and unpredictably. For some, that has made steady, reliable growth a challenge. For others, big swings mean big opportunities. Even if we have to start small.
