Dear {{first_name|Friend}},
M+R’s Benchmarks report is essential infrastructure for anyone in the social change or mission-driven world. Its reputation precedes itself. That’s why I am so proud to announce that Chorus will be helping produce M+R’s 2027 Benchmarks.
It feels surreal, as if I was a humble keyboardist for my local community theater announcing I’ll be playing Taylor Swift’s upcoming MSG residency. Benchmarks is the big show! It’s THE resource for anyone looking to understand how their email program is performing or whether they are underinvesting in ads or what the best practices are in SMS these days. When I worked at a large nonprofit, I used Benchmarks to model the value of investing in a text program and to inform a digital acquisition model.
Benchmarks is always useful, but 2027 has some new stuff in store. With Chorus’s help, we will be able to measure what the content of a message does to the results for every participant who opts in. M+R did this for email in the special Scout AI supplement to Benchmarks 2026, which they built with Chorus, as well. We looked at 3.8 billion emails from M+R clients, measured on personal stories, senders, urgency, length, and other content elements. (The white paper is here.) This year, the analysis adds SMS and digital ads, and it needs no data beyond the standard submission. If you’ve done the January data pull before, you’ll be ready.
Chorus is a content and context-aware marketing intelligence platform, which means we measure what a message said against who got it and what they did next. We do that for one organization at a time. Benchmarks puts a whole sector’s data in one place. Some questions only get can answered with dozens of Benchmarks participants’ programs side by side.
The kinds of stuff I’m looking forward to assessing:
Do the content variables that affect email performance do the same for texts?
What does a dollar of search, Meta, email, or SMS return once unsubscribes count as a cost? Right now, Benchmarks reports ads costs but doesn’t show any for email and text.
How can we expand the definition of peer groups? Previous Benchmarks comparison groups were done by sector and size, but two organizations in the same sector and size band could run programs that look nothing alike: one might depend on sustainers and sends a few emails a week, while the other sends a lot of urgent appeals and invests in ads. In 2027, we will also group organizations by how their programs look, and we’ll be able to assign dollar figures to each gap between you and your peers instead of a percentage point alone.
(Some of this depends on how many organizations opt in and what’s in the submissions, so take this as the set of questions we’re hoping to apply to the data.)
The 2027 participant sign-up is open through December 7. Sign up, and check the AI Analysis Opt-In box when you do!
Thanks,
Sam