The 0.66% figure gets quoted a lot, usually as shorthand for how little nonprofits spend on marketing. It is a real number from a real study, but it measures something narrower than the way it is normally used. Worth knowing what it actually covers before you benchmark yourself against it.
What the figure measures
It comes from the Whole Whale 2024 Nonprofit Advertising Benchmark Study, produced with CauseIQ from Form 990 filings for more than 7,000 US nonprofits. The study's wording is precise: “For nonprofits dedicating funds to advertising, median ad expenses were $12,950, representing .66% of total expenses or just over $1K per month.”
Four things in that sentence do the work.
- It measures advertising, not marketing. Advertising expense is a specific line on the Form 990. It does not capture staff time, a website, email tooling, design work, printing, or anything else an organization would reasonably call part of its marketing. A nonprofit at 0.66% on advertising may be spending considerably more on marketing overall, and the study does not tell you how much.
- The denominator is total expenses, not revenue. This matters whenever the figure is compared with for-profit marketing benchmarks, which are usually quoted as a share of revenue.
- The population is only nonprofits that already advertise. The median is taken among the 62% of the sample with advertising spend, not across all nonprofits. Organizations that spend nothing are not in it, so the figure is not a sector-wide average.
- The period is fixed. The study compares Form 990 data from 2022–2023 against 2018–2019. It is a snapshot of those filing years, not a current-year figure.
What it looks like in practice
For illustration, 0.66% of $200,000 in annual expenses is $1,320 in advertising. That is not a measurement of total marketing spending, and it is not a recommended budget. It is one point on a distribution, for one expense category, among organizations that were already advertising in those filing years.
The comparison you will often see alongside it (for-profit companies spending 7.8% of revenue on marketing in the Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, or 9.0% in The CMO Survey, 35th edition, 2026) is measuring a different category against a different denominator for a different kind of organization. It is worth knowing those figures exist. It does not follow that any particular nonprofit should be spending 7% or any other percentage, and nothing in either study supports that conclusion.
Why the number gets used the way it does
The figure usually appears in an argument about overhead. That argument has a real history: for years, donors and rating organizations leaned heavily on overhead ratios as a proxy for whether a charity was well run. In 2013 the leaders of GuideStar, Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance jointly wrote to donors to argue against that practice, making the case that overhead ratio alone is a poor measure of performance and that transparency, governance, leadership and results matter more.
That is a reasonable thing to cite when a board is deciding whether spending on communications is legitimate. It is not evidence for a target percentage, and the 0.66% figure should not be used as one either.
A more useful way to use it
If you want to benchmark yourself against 0.66%, compare like with like: your own advertising expense, as a share of your own total expenses, for a filing year. That is an answerable question, and the answer is genuinely informative about one category of spending.
What the figure cannot tell you is what your marketing should cost, whether your current spending is working, or what any individual organization ought to budget. Those depend on what you are trying to reach, who you are trying to reach, and what you already have in place.
Sources: Whole Whale 2024 Nonprofit Advertising Benchmark Study with CauseIQ (median advertising expense $12,950, 0.66% of total expenses, among the 62% of 7,000+ US nonprofits studied that reported advertising spend; Form 990 data 2022–2023 compared with 2018–2019). Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey (7.8% of revenue). The CMO Survey, 35th edition, 2026, sponsored by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association (9.0% of revenue). The for-profit figures measure total marketing as a share of revenue; the nonprofit figure measures advertising as a share of expenses. They are not like-for-like, and neither establishes a recommended budget. Reviewed 11 October 2026.