{"id":5061,"date":"2026-09-28T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/?p=5061"},"modified":"2026-09-06T21:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T21:52:12","slug":"nonprofit-email-open-rates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/communication\/nonprofit-email-open-rates\/","title":{"rendered":"Email Open Rates for Small Organizations: What Is Normal and What Is Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before you judge your nonprofit email open rates against anyone else&#8217;s, one fact should change how you read every benchmark you find. M+R, which runs the most widely used nonprofit email benchmark study there is, stopped reporting open rate altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not adjusted it. Not caveated it. Removed it. Among the organizations in their study able to separate human opens from machine opens, 64% of all opens were machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So if your board is asking whether 32% is good, the honest answer is that the number doesn&#8217;t mean what it meant five years ago, and the people best placed to benchmark it gave up trying. Here&#8217;s what the published data actually says, what it&#8217;s worth, and what to look at instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-rank-math-toc-block\" id=\"rank-math-toc\"><h2>On this page<\/h2><nav><ul><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#broken\">Why the nonprofit email open rate broke<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#numbers\">What the published benchmarks actually say<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#trend\">Nonprofit email open rates track Apple, not your members<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#delivery\">The number nobody checks: did it arrive at all<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#instead\">What to measure instead of nonprofit email open rates<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#kannect\">Where Kannect fits<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#sources\">Where these nonprofit email open rates came from<\/a><\/li><li class=\"\"><a href=\"#faq\">Frequently asked questions<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"broken\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why the nonprofit email open rate broke<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An open is counted when a tiny invisible image loads in the email. That worked as a proxy for a human reading it, right up until Apple started loading that image whether or not anyone opened the message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apple Mail Privacy Protection arrived in late 2021. M+R&#8217;s own research tracked what happened: combined opens for the organizations in their study rose 17% between September and November 2021, and by mid-March 2022 more than 80% of Apple users had it on, which was roughly 40 to 50% of all email users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nothing about members changed in those ten weeks. The measurement changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">M+R&#8217;s conclusion is worth quoting because it&#8217;s blunter than anything a software vendor will tell you: an open used to mean a human probably at least glanced at your email, and now it could be Apple&#8217;s machines opening the message. They dropped the metric from the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"numbers\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What the published benchmarks actually say<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every open rate below is unadjusted. We checked all of them, and no publisher we found reports a figure corrected for machine opens. Read them as a rough ceiling rather than a measure of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table class=\"has-fixed-layout\"><thead><tr><th>Source<\/th><th>Segment<\/th><th>Open rate<\/th><th>Click rate<\/th><th>Data from<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>Higher Logic<\/td><td>Associations and nonprofits<\/td><td>33.54%<\/td><td>2.68%<\/td><td>2025 to 2026 edition, ~1,500 orgs, 2 billion emails<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Mailchimp<\/td><td>Non-profits<\/td><td>40.04%<\/td><td>3.27%<\/td><td>Last updated December 2023<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Constant Contact<\/td><td>Nonprofit membership organizations<\/td><td>35.82%<\/td><td>Not published<\/td><td>Q1 2026<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Constant Contact<\/td><td>Faith-based organizations<\/td><td>41.81%<\/td><td>Not published<\/td><td>Q1 2026<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Campaign Monitor<\/td><td>Nonprofit<\/td><td>26.6%<\/td><td>2.7%<\/td><td>2021 data, predates Apple MPP<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>M+R<\/td><td>Nonprofits<\/td><td>Not reported<\/td><td>0.59% fundraising<\/td><td>2026 edition, 180 organizations<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Read from each publisher on 6 September 2026. None is adjusted for machine opens.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Three things stand out. The spread between the highest and lowest published nonprofit figure is 15 percentage points, which tells you these are not measuring the same thing. Campaign Monitor&#8217;s number is from 2021 and carries no Apple caveat anywhere on the page, so it is describing a different world. And M+R, the most rigorous of the set, declines to give you a number at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One genuinely useful cut, from Higher Logic: association lists under 500 contacts average around 48% open and over 8% click. Small lists outperform big ones, consistently. If you run a few hundred members and you&#8217;re comparing yourself to a national association&#8217;s numbers, you&#8217;re comparing down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"trend\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Nonprofit email open rates track Apple, not your members<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Higher Logic has run the same panel of roughly 1,500 associations with the same method for five years, which makes it the cleanest published series in this category. Here it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table class=\"has-fixed-layout\"><thead><tr><th>Year<\/th><th>Open rate<\/th><th>Click rate<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>2021<\/td><td>27.45%<\/td><td>2.42%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>2022<\/td><td>34.63%<\/td><td>2.32%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>2023<\/td><td>38.18%<\/td><td>2.71%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>2024<\/td><td>35.64%<\/td><td>3.69%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>2025<\/td><td>33.54%<\/td><td>2.68%<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Higher Logic association email benchmarks, same panel throughout. The open column tracks Apple. The click column does not.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Look at 2021 to 2022. Opens jumped more than seven points. Clicks went down slightly. If members had genuinely become more engaged, clicks would have risen too. That jump is Apple Mail Privacy Protection arriving, nothing else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now look at the decline after 2024, which is the part almost nobody explains. Validity found that from April 2024 Apple changed when it pre-loads images, and its share of pixel-firing events fell from around 77% to around 70%. Organizations saw that as a sudden drop in open rates. Their members had not gone quiet. Apple had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the five-year curve is mostly a chart of one company&#8217;s engineering decisions. If you have been reporting your open rate to a board every quarter since 2021, some of what you showed them was Apple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"delivery\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">The number nobody checks: did it arrive at all<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Open rate arguments assume the email reached an inbox. Often it didn&#8217;t, and this is the more fixable problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Validity&#8217;s deliverability benchmark, using 2022 data, is the most recent nonprofit-specific figure we could verify. Nonprofit inbox placement was 83.5%, with 5.9% going to spam and 10.6% simply missing. Roughly one in six nonprofit emails never reached an inbox at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s worth sitting with. Before you rewrite a subject line, it&#8217;s worth knowing whether a sixth of your list was never given the chance to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is one thing open rate is still genuinely good for, and M+R make the point themselves: a message sitting in spam won&#8217;t trigger Apple&#8217;s pre-fetch. So if your opens fall off a cliff, that&#8217;s a deliverability alarm rather than a content problem. Use it as a smoke detector, not a scoreboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"instead\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">What to measure instead of nonprofit email open rates<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Click rate.<\/strong> Machines don&#8217;t click. Higher Logic calls click rate the more reliable indicator of real engagement, and it&#8217;s the metric M+R kept when they dropped opens. Track it per send, and track your own trend rather than an industry average.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Click to open rate, with care.<\/strong> Useful for comparing two subject lines against each other in the same week. Not useful year over year, because the denominator is polluted.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Unsubscribes and list churn.<\/strong> M+R put annual list loss at 12% across nonprofits, rising to 21% in some sectors. If yours is far above that, you have a frequency or relevance problem that no open rate would have told you about.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Inbox placement.<\/strong> Send a test to accounts on the big providers and see where it lands. This is unglamorous and it is the highest-leverage thing on this list.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The action you actually wanted.<\/strong> Registrations for the event, dues paid, volunteers signed up. An email that produced 40 RSVPs did its job whatever the open rate said.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Reach on the channel that isn&#8217;t email.<\/strong> If half your members never engage with email at all, the question isn&#8217;t your open rate. It&#8217;s whether email is the right channel for the message.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That last one is the uncomfortable one. There&#8217;s more on it in <a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/communication\/members-not-seeing-announcements\/\">why your members never see your announcements<\/a>, and on the social side in <a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/communication\/facebook-group-reach\/\">what Facebook group reach actually is<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"kannect\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where Kannect fits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kannect is our product, so check the <a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/pricing\">pricing page<\/a> yourself. It&#8217;s a community engagement platform for membership organizations, staffed or volunteer-run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Memberships, properly.<\/strong> One membership type with multiple pricing tiers on every plan, or multiple membership types each with their own tiers on the higher plans. Custom application forms, manual or automatic approval, and a welcome flow. Discounts and renewals are built in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>And the rest of the organization.<\/strong> A member directory with unlimited listings, groups and programs for chapters and committees, a people database members keep current themselves, events, broadcast email, a community website and a member app.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table class=\"has-fixed-layout\"><thead><tr><th>Plan<\/th><th>Monthly<\/th><th>Billed yearly<\/th><th>People<\/th><th>Admins<\/th><th>Emails\/mo<\/th><th>Platform fee<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>Starter<\/td><td>$29<\/td><td>$276<\/td><td>500<\/td><td>3<\/td><td>5,000<\/td><td>2%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Launch<\/td><td>$69<\/td><td>$660<\/td><td>2,000<\/td><td>5<\/td><td>20,000<\/td><td>2%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Growth<\/td><td>$149<\/td><td>$1,428<\/td><td>5,000<\/td><td>10<\/td><td>50,000<\/td><td>1.5%<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Scale<\/td><td>$299<\/td><td>$2,868<\/td><td>15,000<\/td><td>25<\/td><td>150,000<\/td><td>1%<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Annual billing takes 20% off the monthly rate. Read from kannect.co\/pricing, 6 September 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Email is included rather than metered by contact, at 5,000 sends a month on Starter through to 150,000 on Scale, which matters if your list has grown faster than your budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The part relevant to this article is what sits alongside email. Every opted-in member receives every announcement, so the messages that genuinely have to land are not competing with a spam filter or an algorithm. Email stays where it&#8217;s good, which is the weekly detail, and the things that must arrive stop depending on an open rate you can&#8217;t trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Kannect: The All-in-One Community Operating System\" width=\"860\" height=\"484\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0J-kATUNVps?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A quick tour of Kannect: memberships, events, payments and announcements in one place.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most organizations start with one job, usually events, payments or the directory, and bring the rest across as they need it. Setup is self-serve at no cost, with an optional one time setup service starting at $150.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"sources\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Where these nonprofit email open rates came from<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every figure came from the organization that published it, read on 6 September 2026. We have linked the original studies rather than articles quoting them, because most of the numbers in circulation have lost their date somewhere along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mrbenchmarks.com\/email-messaging\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">M+R Benchmarks 2026: email and messaging<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrss.com\/lab\/what-actually-happened-apple-mail-privacy-protection\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">M+R: what actually happened with Apple Mail Privacy Protection<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.higherlogic.com\/news\/higher-logic-releases-2025-2026-association-email-benchmark-report\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Higher Logic: 2025 to 2026 association email benchmark report<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.higherlogic.com\/blog\/the-latest-association-email-usage-and-engagement-benchmarks\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Higher Logic: association email benchmarks, earlier years<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailchimp.com\/resources\/email-marketing-benchmarks\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mailchimp: email marketing benchmarks by industry<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.constantcontact.com\/blog\/what-is-a-good-open-rate-for-email\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Constant Contact: what is a good open rate for email<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.campaignmonitor.com\/resources\/knowledge-base\/what-are-good-email-metrics\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Campaign Monitor: what are good email metrics<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.validity.com\/blog\/case-closed-the-mystery-of-declining-email-open-rates\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Validity: the mystery of declining email open rates<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"faq\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Frequently asked questions<\/h2>\n\n\n<div id=\"rank-math-faq\" class=\"rank-math-block\">\n<div class=\"rank-math-list \">\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439680\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">What is a good nonprofit email open rate?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Published nonprofit and association figures for 2025 and 2026 sit between about 33% and 40%, but none is adjusted for machine opens, so treat them as a ceiling rather than a measure of attention. Higher Logic reports 33.54% for associations and nonprofits, Mailchimp 40.04% for non-profits from December 2023 data, and Constant Contact 35.82% for nonprofit membership organizations in the first quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439681\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">Why did M+R stop reporting open rates?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Because the metric stopped meaning the same thing across email systems. Among the organizations in their study able to separate the two, 64% of all email opens were machine opens rather than people. Rather than publish a number that mixes the two, M+R removed open rate from its benchmarks entirely and reports click and response rates instead.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439682\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">Does Apple Mail Privacy Protection inflate open rates?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Yes, and substantially. Apple pre-loads the tracking image whether or not anyone reads the message. M+R measured combined opens rising 17% between September and November 2021 as the feature rolled out, with no matching rise in clicks. By March 2022 it covered roughly 40 to 50% of all email users. No benchmark publisher we checked adjusts their figures for it.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439683\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">Why did our open rate suddenly drop in 2024?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Probably Apple again, rather than your members. Validity found that from April 2024 Apple changed when it pre-fetches images, and its share of pixel-firing events fell from around 77% to around 70%. Organizations experienced that as an unexplained drop in open rate. Check whether your click rate moved at the same time; if it did not, the change was in the measurement.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439684\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">What should we measure instead of open rate?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Click rate first, because machines do not click and it is the metric the serious benchmark studies kept. Then list churn, since M+R put annual nonprofit list loss at 12%. Then inbox placement, because Validity found nonprofit email reached the inbox only 83.5% of the time in its 2022 data. Then the action you actually wanted, such as registrations or dues paid.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"faq-question-17886547439685\" class=\"rank-math-list-item\">\n<h3 class=\"rank-math-question \">Is open rate completely useless now?<\/h3>\n<div class=\"rank-math-answer \">\n\n<p>Not quite. It is a poor scoreboard and a decent smoke detector. A message sitting in a spam folder will not trigger Apple pre-fetching, so a sudden collapse in opens is a strong signal of a deliverability problem rather than a content one. Use it to spot something breaking, not to judge whether a campaign worked.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<h2 id=\"related\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Related reading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/communication\/members-not-seeing-announcements\/\">Why your members never see your announcements<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/communication\/facebook-group-reach\/\">What Facebook group reach actually is in 2026<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/memberships\/member-engagement\/\">Why members join and then go quiet<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/compare\/community-engagement-platform-comparison\/\">12 best community engagement platforms, with verified pricing<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/guides\/reach-every-member\/\">How to reach every member without paying to boost your post<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/resources\/emails-to-automate\/\">10 emails every community should automate<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/kannect.co\/guides\/\">All 16 free guides and templates<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The biggest nonprofit benchmark study stopped reporting open rate entirely. What the published figures say, why they are inflated, and what to track instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kannect.co\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}