Revenue is up. Individual gifts are larger. Acquisition is climbing. By every headline metric, the state of fundraising looks pretty good right now.
But there’s a number hiding underneath all of that — one that doesn’t make the front page of the Giving USA report — and it’s the number that should be keeping every development director up at night.
Donor participation has declined for five straight years.
Compounding, every single year.
That’s not a typo. And it’s not a blip.
How do you get ahead of this in your year-end plans?
Teams that are seeing growth embody this core belief:
The donors you already have are the ones that matter most.
Watch the full conversation with Nathan Hill & Karina Rodriguez.
Revenue Looks Good. But Generosity is Down.
Giving USA data from 2025 tells an optimistic story on the surface.
Individual giving was up 4.1%.
Foundations up.
Corporate giving up.
Even bequest giving made a dramatic comeback.
But when you adjust for inflation, that 4.1% becomes 1.4%. We’ll take it — but let’s not confuse it for major momentum.
More importantly, the growth that happened wasn’t broad. It was concentrated. A significant portion of the increase came from major and affluent donors. When growth in giving is isolated to major and mega donors, you don’t have a healthy fundraising sector. You have a fragile one.
When we look at Avid’s real-time benchmark data — pulled directly from over 1,000 organizations representing more than $14 billion in annual giving — the same tension shows up.
Average gift is up 7.1% since the start of the year.
Revenue per donor is up 8.6%.
The people who are giving are giving more generously.
But fewer people are giving.
Active donors are down 1.8% over the trailing twelve months.And that’s on top of a 3.5% decline in 2025, 3.9% in 2024, and 4% the year before.
These aren’t independent data points. They’re compounding. Every year, we lose ground — and then we lose more ground on top of that.
Acquisition is actually up significantly — in some cases by as much as 50%. And it still isn’t enough to offset the donors walking out the back door.
Let that sink in.
More people coming in.
Even more leaving.
And the ones leaving? They gave more, gave longer, and were worth far more to your program than the ones just arriving.
Here’s the Belief We Keep Coming Back To
The donors you already have are the ones that matter most.
Not because acquisition doesn’t matter — it does, and you should keep doing it. But because we’ve built an entire sector culture around chasing the next donor while quietly letting the current ones drift away.
Someone who has already given to your organization has already done the hardest thing: they raised their hand. They said, I believe in this mission enough to put money behind it. That moment of trust is extraordinarily valuable — and far too often, we don’t treat it that way.
We send the welcome email. Maybe the receipt. And then the next thing they hear from us is another ask.
Thirty-three percent of nonprofits send zero cultivation in the first ninety days after someone gives. That’s the honeymoon period — the window when a new donor is most open, most excited, most ready to deepen the relationship. And a third of us are silent.
This is where the back door starts to open.
What Investing in Your Donors Actually Looks Like
The good news is that the things that work here aren’t complicated. They’re just easy to deprioritize because the ROI isn’t immediate and obvious.
Here’s what the data actually supports.
1. Start with cultivation before the ask.
Before year-end season hits — before Giving Tuesday, before the December push — your donors need to hear from you in a way that has nothing to do with money. A story from the field. A piece of content that’s actually useful to them. A simple thank-you that doesn’t have a donate button at the bottom.
One organization committed to this kind of multichannel cultivation — no asks, just value — and saw a 19% increase in recurring donor retention. That’s not a coincidence. That’s relationship-building paying off when it counts.
A simple ratio to aim for: three cultivations for every one ask. If you’re sending more appeals than value, you’re training your donors to stop opening your emails.
2. Segment like you know who they are — because you do.
One-size-fits-all messaging is the enemy of retention.
Your recurring donors are not the same as your lapsed donors. Your most engaged subscribers are not the same as the people who haven’t opened anything in six months.
Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue is a small team. Segmentation was always on the to-do list — and always getting bumped. When they finally used Avid to version their monthly appeal for different donor groups, they saw a 130% increase in appeal revenue.
Same message. Better targeting. That’s the whole unlock.
For year-end, consider these three segments worth prioritizing:
Your recurring donors.
Don’t suppress them from the campaign because they’re “already giving.” Version the email to acknowledge what they do, thank them for it, and invite them into something above and beyond. You’ll be surprised how many say yes.
Your lapsed donors.
Talk to them like you know they were there — because they were. Acknowledge the gap. Invite them back. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen.
Your engaged versus unengaged list.
Send to your engaged file first. Let the open rates and click rates build the signal. Then send to the unengaged list an hour or two later. You’re warming the room before opening the doors.
3. Find the next best donor inside the file you already have.
This is where the data gets genuinely exciting.
One Avid customer ran a propensity model on their existing file — looking across CRM data, donation history, email engagement, ad behavior — to identify who was most likely to give to their summer match campaign.
Not new prospects.
Not cold lists.
People already in their database they just hadn’t asked.
They tested it against their normal segmentation.
The result: 103% increase in donor conversion rate. Higher average gifts too.
The donors were already there. The data just found them.
This is what propensity modeling actually is — not prediction, not guesswork. Recognition. Looking at the patterns across thousands of programs and thousands of campaigns to say: here’s who, based on everything we can see, is most ready to give. And doing it before year-end, not during the sprint.
The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this:
none of it works if your data is trapped in silos.
Your transaction data is in your CRM.
Your email engagement is in your email platform.
Your ad data is somewhere else entirely.
Your direct mail results? Probably in a spreadsheet.
No one has a full picture of the donor. Which means no meaningful segmentation. No propensity model. No ability to act on what you know about the people who already believe in your mission.
Most fundraising teams don’t have too few tools. They have too many — and they don’t connect. Every new platform adds complexity instead of clarity. The data gets more fragmented. The manual work of syncing lists and pulling reports grows.
Want to see where the gaps are with your fundraising tools? Take the free assessment »
You can’t get ahead of the work if you’re buried in the infrastructure maintaining the work.
This is the problem a fundraising operating system is designed to solve — not by replacing your CRM or your email tool, but by running across all of them.
Connecting the data.
Keeping the segments in sync.
Surfacing what’s actually happening with your donors in real time, so when the year-end season hits, you’re not starting from scratch.
The Donors Are Already There
Here’s the thing about the declining participation numbers: the donors who walked out the back door didn’t leave because they stopped believing in the mission. Most of them left because we stopped making them feel like they mattered.
They gave. We cashed the check. And they waited to hear back.
The fundraising teams that grow aren’t the ones who launch the most appeal campaigns. They’re the ones who make the investment in making their existing donors feel known — so that when the ask finally comes, it lands with someone who already feels like a partner.
The donors you already have are the ones that matter most.
Start there.
Not sure if your tools are set up to do any of this?
Take Avid’s free fundraising infrastructure assessment — it takes about six minutes and gives you a personalized read on where your current setup is helping, and where it’s getting in the way.