Indigo

Global fundraising benchmarking

Participation now open for the 2025 study!

Welcome to INDIGO

Indigo exists to drive global fundraising excellence for a better world.

INDIGO is an IFL Forum study of Individual Giving behaviour across different organisations and markets. The study is built from anonymized donor and gift records stretching back for the previous 6 calendar years.

For the INDIGO study Adroit audit, collate, model, analyse and present your data to draw out key insights. Typically, over 1 billion gift records are processed on 80-90 million individual donors.

This is shared via Power BI reporting as well as webinar insight sessions with members from each market.

The study reveals details of each organisation’s performance across regular and single giving. It enables organisations to understand market level trends and make peer comparisons, providing insights into donor acqusition, retention, upgrades, reactivation, life-time value and many more metrics.

About the IFL Forum

The International Fundraising Leadership Forum (IFL Forum) is a peer group of international fundraising directors in some of the world’s biggest NGOs and UN agencies raising funds from individuals, companies and foundations in multiple markets or markets. There are currently 18 members of the International Fundraising Leadership Forum. The senior fundraisers meet on a monthly basis to focus on different relevant topics, and a range of working groups meet regularly to consider specific areas from Major Donors, Legacy to DRTV and Face to face recruitment.

The IFL Forum Data Steering Team works closely with Adroit to develop a series of products to understand market and fundraising trends.

For Plan International, participating in the Indigo benchmark meant we could compare Individual Giving fundraising not only to our peers, but also internally. The level of detail Indigo gives us is unsurpassed and the Power BI dashboard makes turning data into insights very easy.
Gijs Pelser
Global Fundraising Data & Intelligence Lead. Plan International

Global scale

6 years of data
27 Markets
105 organisations
Over 88 million donor records
Over 850 million transactions
Donation value over £24 billion

The INDIGO benchmarking study is a unique opportunity for charities to get in-depth insights into supporter behaviours and compare their performance with similar organisations in their market

What are key individual giving trends in the market?
What channel recruitment strategies are organisations pursuing?
How are supporter profiles changing over time?
What levels of donor retention are being achieved?
What is happening with single giving and conversion to Regular Giving?
How does attrition differ across markets by channel?

A unique window into fundraising performance across the World

Market KPI’s

Market Volumes
Income & Donors
Market Share

Acquisition products

Single Giving
Regular Giving
Child Sponsorship

Acquisition features

Channel trends
Digital trends
Trends in Gift values

Lifetime Values

LTV Trends
Trends by Channel
LTV Value Journey`

Retention

Single Giving give again rates
Regular Giving retention

Retention features

Retention by recruitment channel
By first gift value
By age and gender

Reactivation

% of Single Givers reactivated
% of Regular Giving reactivated

Major donors

Major Donor volumes
Major Donor revenues
Major Donor Journey

The INDIGO study is growing each year, and by joining us you’ll be helping to make the study even stronger.

UNICEF has participated in the Indigo project from the beginning. The insights it provides into patterns of giving by individual donors is unique. There’s no other product that offers so much information at a global, regional and market level, and in so much detail. Whenever we ask the question ‘Where can we improve?’ Indigo is one of the first products to provide answers.
Steve Andrews
Senior Advisor, Fundraising Investment and Analysis, UNICEF

Opportunities to learn & share

Alongside access to the reports, Adroit host online webinars for each bench-markable market to share the key insights from Indigo.

Webinars offer a fantastic opportunity to understand what’s happening in each market and discuss with fundraisers from other NGO’s the key trends shaping fundraising performance.

The sessions are collaborative, and participants can share their experiences and interpretation to add context to the data, providing additional insights. Each webinar is recorded and can be shared within your organisation

Over 18 webinars each year
Led by insight specialists
Delivered as PowerPoint presentation within interactive webinars

Insightful, accessible and actionable

Indigo makes all of your and the other participants fundraising data available on demand via a Power BI series of dashboards throughout the year. This enables you probe, delve and explore the amazing dataset to product new insights and create additional analysis tailored to your exact fundraising needs.

Access to interactive reports
Training support
Help desk

Common Q&A's

Not at all, any charity from any category is welcome to join. The only requirements are that they should be able to supply 6 years history of gift data, and have a minimum of 5,000 active regular givers per market.

No, many participants operate in a single market and benefit from benchmarking insights from just their market

Don’t worry you don’t need to supply any cost & expenditure data. For those organisations who do wish to understand their changing patterns of Net Donor Value we offer an additional add-on piece of analysis. Please let us know if that’s an option you’d like to explore

The exact description of the data required is contained within the Indigo data specification sheet, however we don’t ask for a detailed communications history

The benchmarking is on an annual basis so we ask for one supply of data files containing the last six years of data. We ask all organisations to submit by the end of February and after that there is no further requirements. The study doesn’t allow for a continuous resupply of data that updates results on a regular basis. We are able to help with this type of reporting if it’s of interest, but it’s not part of Indigo.

The dashboards are interactive so you can apply your own selections to tailor the date and export data and graphs from the dashboards

If your country is not yet covered by Indigo you can still benefit from benchmarking at both the regional and global level. And if there is a need for more participants within a new country we purposefully approach others within that country to join.

Pricing

The 2024-25 cost of joining the Indigo benchmarking study starts from just £5,627 per annum for non-members of the IFL Forum, and £5,116 per annum for members.

Different pricing models are available for organisations wishing to join the study across multiple markets and for those signing up for multiple years in advance.

Included within those costs

All year-round access to interactive reports in Power BI*
Participation in market webinars
Training support & documentation
Data audit & review process to support your data supply
Project management support & help desk

Interested in joining Indigo?

If you would like more information on the benefits of joining the Indigo benechmarking study then please complete the form or contact us at [email protected]