I grew up in a subscription household. My dad was a newspaper journalist for 44 years. In addition to his subscription-supported salary, we had our own subscriptions to multiple newspapers and magazines. I did my part with my many paper routes during my middle school and high school years. Add in our utility subscriptions for things like water, phone, electricity and that was the extent of our monthly subscriptions.
Today, it is not that simple as we have subscriptions for all sorts of things. The classic utility subscriptions persist, but now we have subscriptions for kitty litter, dog kibble and even vet care. Heck, you can even get a subscription to help you monitor your subscriptions.
That is why we’re so excited to announce that we now include monthly giving behavior in our Animal Care benchmark ― starting with our 2024 year-end observations.
Sustainer donors are changing fundraising
Monthly giving is simply a big deal. On average, a third of all 2025 gifts supporting Animal Care organizations are now from monthly giving. In fact, 4 Animal Care organizations now have the majority of their gifts (50%+) in monthly gifts. An additional 5 organizations have more than 40% of their 2024 gifts in monthly giving. Those combined 9 organizations compromise 11% of the RKD Animal Care benchmark.
The third of the total 2024 gifts constitute 11% of revenue, which is up 2.4% from 2023 and has more than doubled from 2015. This represents a fundamental shift in what we observe in the RKD Animal Care Benchmark.
Animal Care Benchmark
The year-end 2025 Animal Care Benchmark is a compilation of 83 of RKD’s Animal Care clients who are willing to collectively share 10 years of giving data with us for this purpose. The data is straightforward and anonymous:
- This donor
- Gave this amount
- On this date
And we have been publishing the overall benchmark insights for years.
This year, we looked at the data patterns in a new way and created a magic wand that identifies monthly sustainers. We require that donors make the same gift (dollar amount) on 3 consecutive months; that is the genesis of the monthly giving pattern. From that, we work to identify as many months as possible with this pattern for this donor (and gift amount).
This pattern recognition process does not work if a donor signs up for monthly giving and then cancels after one gift. From the data pattern’s point of view, that is a single gift.
We’ve validated our pattern recognition process against known recurring payments, and it only misses the 1- & 2-month cancellations. It does, however, find more monthly gifts. The pattern is easy to find: if a donor gives $15 per month on the 20th, it is evident what it is.
Donors are not restricted to monthly gifts via an Animal Care organization’s system. A donor can manually give once a month, or they can use a variety of payment platforms to make that donation automatically.
Regardless of how the donor makes the gift, it is the pattern which is important. And that’s what we’ve added to the 2025 benchmark.
A brief aside on annual gifts. The annual pattern is less obvious ― requiring 3 consecutive years of giving is too much time, and the data pattern is, unfortunately, less evident than the monthly patterns. Thus, we focus on monthly giving in our benchmark.
Small but mighty
In the 2025 Animal Care benchmark, nearly 57% of donors only give one time. An additional 27% give no more than 5 times in 10 years. That means that this monthly sustainer audience is small. Out of just over 3.3 million donors in the 2025 Animal Care benchmark, only 3.5% of them (just under 116K) give monthly.
That shows the power of monthly gifts. These 3.5% of donors now represent a third of all gifts in 2024.
This is why Jennifer Bivens wrote about this on the RKD blog in December and why RKD interviewed Dave Raley, who wrote the book about sustainer giving (The Rise of Sustainable Giving), on the RKD podcast.
This is a fundamental shift in fundraising behavior. It is part of a bigger trend in subscriptions: from a streaming subscription to a monthly subscription for cat food, things are changing beyond fundraising. It is a new way of thinking. A new way to strategize.
That is why we will be writing articles about monthly giving throughout 2025. Each month we’ll focus on an interesting tidbit that might give you pause in how you think about your fundraising plans, strategies and choices.
Change in gift frequency
But let’s first focus on the macro trends. The most obvious is the increase in gift frequency. 12 monthly gifts are much more than a single yearly gift. And we certainly observe that trend in the 2025 Animal Care benchmark. In total, we observe a 3% increase in gift frequency from 2023 and a 28% increase from 2015.
Of course, all this cannot be explained myopically with monthly giving, but when you separate them out, we observe that non-subscription gift frequency is essentially flat.
The point here is that it is becoming critical to separate monthly giving from non-subscription giving. The 28% increase in 10-year gift frequency is nearly all due to monthly gifts.
Average gift
The next obvious metric to consider is average gift. We should expect to see a dramatic decrease in average gift ― as a monthly gift of $10 per month is, dollars wise, the same as a $120 annual gift, but its average gift is $10 and not $120.
However, from the big picture, we don’t see that pattern ― average gift has increased 21% since 2015:
The story dramatically changes once we separate the monthly gifts from non-monthly subscriptions:
In this case, monthly gift amounts have only increased 2.7%, but the non-monthly gift amounts have jumped an astounding 47%! This incredibly interesting data nugget is buried within the love of monthly sustainer giving.
2025 is the year of animal care sustainer giving
And this is just the start! We have a whole year of interesting insights planned to help you rethink your fundraising for your Animal Care organization. Please let us know what questions you have or if you’d like to talk about this more.
Until next time ― keep up the important work you are doing!
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