Join a community of UK charities benefiting from shared data.
The Charity Digital Benchmark allows you to compare your digital performance against the sector average, and to charities of the same size or cause area. It’s a tool tailor-built for charities to ensure you’re investing your digital spend in the places that’ll actually maximise impact.
Through an intuitive dashboard, you can access a comprehensive overview of your site’s performance and the relevant sector performance, covering a wide range of metrics, including traffic patterns, device usage, and channel effectiveness.
And the best part? Membership is free until July 2025, as the Benchmark’s data team focuses on growing the community and optimising the experience with ongoing feedback from members, so that it serves charities’ needs as efficiently as possible.
How does it work?
Participant charities grant Digital Benchmark Ltd. access to their Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager data. This data is audited by the Benchmark’s analytics specialists, who report back to you on how accurate your data is, laying out any changes that need to be made to your Analytics or GTM settings to ensure your tracking is as reliable as possible.
Once audited, your data is pulled into an interactive dashboard in Google Looker Studio, where you can see all your performance metrics in one place, and the corresponding averages of all the charities in your chosen sample.
You can filter said sample by income bracket, number of employees, and the cause area – whether that be Environmental, Social, Health or Children’s charities.
To get a quick feel for how it works, check out the Charity Digital Benchmark brochure.
What is the Charity Digital Benchmark for?
- To allow charities to compare the performance of their own digital activities to other charities of similar size, income and cause area. The comparative data encompasses a wide variety of metrics, from performance stats like sessions and bounce rate, to breakdowns of device types and social channels.
- In turn, this data can inform your marketing strategy by revealing trends and opportunities. It provides evidence for why you should or shouldn’t invest in a particular social media channel, for instance.
But the Benchmark is also a community, bringing together minds from across the charity world through online and in-person events, to share solutions and experiences.
Who is the Charity Digital Benchmark for?
The three main audiences for the Benchmark are:
- Senior management teams, both as part of an established reporting function and as justification for activity/investment.
- Digital teams, to show how performance compares to other charities.
- Other teams within the organisation, to show what is and isn’t working and to act as both stick and carrot for wider organisational digital participation.
What can you use the data for?
Here’s a few comments that member charities have made about the benefits they’ve gained from the Benchmark so far…
Understand your online performance in context
“The tool has given us a real understanding of what we should be aiming for when it comes to traffic metrics and engagement scores.”
Back-up your marketing strategy proposals with concrete evidence
“An excellent tool to help us plan our digital marketing strategy, and monitor ongoing effectiveness.”
Set realistic goals
“The data available in the Benchmark is great for helping us set KPIs that are relevant to us.”
Make data-driven decisions
“Bringing together digital data from a variety of charities gives us an overview of how our digital marketing is performing against the wider sector. The tool helps us drive evidence-led decisions.”
Who manages the Benchmark?
The Benchmark is managed by Digital Benchmarks Ltd. who are owned by digital marketing agency Uprise Up.
The Charity Digital Benchmark was first created in 2013 by CharityComms, in collaboration with Uprise Up and digital expert Bertie Bosrédon. Here’s a timeline of how it’s evolved over the years:
Timeline of the Charity Digital Benchmark (text)
- 2013: The Charity Digital Benchmark is created.
- 2017: Digital marketing agency Uprise Up steps in to support the Benchmark’s development and management.
- 2020: The Benchmark wins Most Effective Use of Data at the annual Drum Digital Advertising Awards.
- 2023: Ownership and management of the Benchmark passes to Digital Benchmark Ltd, a subsidiary of Uprise Up, created to focus on management and continuous improvement.
- 2024: With 40+ members and growing, and newly expanded Data and Marketing teams, the Benchmark community is in a stronger position to innovate than ever.
If you have any questions, or want to book in a quick demo to see how your charity could benefit, get in touch with the Benchmark team today.