If you’ve spent any time in the nonprofit or fundraising world, you’ve probably heard it before: This time is different.
Economic warning signs, stock market dips, rising interest rates, shifting federal policies and inflation at the grocery store — the media stories seem relentless. And yes, it does feel different. But let’s back up for a moment and remember what the headlines often forget:
We’ve been here before.
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have been compassionate. In fact, since the 1860’s, nonprofit organizations have weathered global wars, recessions, disasters and societal upheaval. From famine, to the Great Depression, to the 2008 financial collapse, to the pandemic that shut our doors but not our missions — we’ve faced the unimaginable and made it through. Not just intact, but wiser, stronger, and more innovative.
Why? Because nonprofits don’t just survive. We adapt.
We’re not fragile. We’re foundational.
We’re not scrambling. We’re solving.
We’re not “just” nonprofits. We are employers, economic engines and frontline responders.
We carry both compassion and strategy. Heart and hustle.
And most of all, we carry hope.
So if you’re feeling uncertain, you’re not alone. But let that uncertainty sharpen your focus — not your fear. Life around you is shifting. And we’ve never been better at navigating change.
Now is not the time to shrink back or panic. It’s time to zoom out, breathe deep, and remember:
You’ve done hard things before.
You’re doing them now.
And you’ll keep doing them because your community needs you, and you know how to show up.
Let’s continue to be innovative, collaborative and talk about how we move forward — together.
OK, take a breath and let’s review what’s happened in the last month.
⚠️ Here’s a quote that caught my attention the first week of April: Your visitors don’t compare your service to your competitors; they compare it to the best experience they’ve ever had. ~ Comm100
That quote can easily take you down a rabbit hole as you compare it to website visitors and donors and their experience in every channel, including in person or onsite.
🎯 The Fundraising Effectiveness Project has launched a new website: www.fepreports.org. No more needing to enter your email and wait for a link to gain access. Bravo Tim Sarrantonio, board members and volunteers, and the new paths being forged ahead!
💰 Bravo to foundations who are stepping up and dipping into their endowments to go extra lengths to support the nonprofit issues they care about this year. Here’s a beautiful news story serving as an example for other foundations: Marguerite Casey Foundation Dips Into Endowment to Donate $130 Million This Year: The grant maker, which has given $23 to $57 million annually since 2019, is increasing its support in response to the Trump administration’s actions.
🗓️ Mark your calendars for May 12-16 and get ready to reimagine recurring giving. It’s Monthly Giving Awareness Week. Join RKD Group, GivingTuesday and Positive Equation for five days of free, expert-led resources — released daily — to help you launch, grow and sustain recurring gifts.
💵 By the way, monthly giving is your safeguard, your launchpad, your legacy builder. Definitely take time to read the interview with monthly giving expert Dana Snyder. A priority read: Why every nonprofit should prioritize monthly giving today.
🎙️Our own RKD Group CEO Tim Kersten joins host Kevin Gentry on the Going Big! Podcast for a powerful conversation on bold leadership, transformational growth and why now is the time for nonprofit leaders to think bigger than ever before. In a rapidly changing world, nonprofits can’t afford to think small. It takes vision, courage and a willingness to challenge the status quo to truly drive impact. Worthy of a listen: Words That Move the World: Tim Kersten on Leading with Vision, Creativity, and Courage.
🎁 New from Chariot, a DAF grant payment solution: Chariot Disbursements. Not only do they offer DAFPay, they have now rolled out a product for nonprofits to receive gifts from Payers as quickly as possible and see all gift details in the user-friendly Chariot dashboard. It’s starting out with six Donor-Advised Fund providers.
🤖 The New York Times reported over the weekend, A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse. The newest and most powerful technologies from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. Even the companies don’t know why. OpenAI found that o3 — its most powerful system — hallucinated 33 percent of the time when running its PersonQA benchmark test, which involves answering questions about public figures. That is more than twice the hallucination rate of the company’s previous reasoning system, called o1. The new o4-mini hallucinated at an even higher rate: 48 percent. When running another test called SimpleQA, which asks more general questions, the hallucination rates for o3 and o4-mini were 51 percent and 79 percent, respectively. The previous system, o1, hallucinated 44 percent of the time.
⏲️ Over on the Thinkers Newsletter on LinkedIn, Ronnie is ruminating on the fact lifesaving information can fall flat if it’s not delivered well. Even the most important messages need clarity, emotion and a compelling hook to break through the noise. Ronnie has packed this month’s Thinkers newsletter, Don’t bore your donors: When seconds matter, clarity counts, with strategies to help you do just that:
✔️ Launching Monthly Giving Awareness Week (May 12–16)
✔️ Navigating paper, postage and tariffs
✔️ Re-engaging lapsed donors
✔️ Understanding how AI is reshaping search
✔️ Plus insights on community, stewardship — and a great convo with Donna Tschiffely on the Thinkers podcast
Have you grabbed your favorite drink and possibly a snack? There has been a slew of released reports in April. Let’s begin the review:
Tim Sarrantonio dripped findings all month on LinkedIn, and on April 6th Neon One released A Sneak Peek. The Generosity Report analyses how nearly 100,000 everyday donors supported their favorite nonprofits over five years and what their behaviors mean for you. The key is to remember two simple truths: People are generous; and their generosity takes many forms.
Key takeaways:
About the data:
The latest data on donor behavior shows nonprofits must improve their engagement strategies, particularly with donors giving smaller gifts. Though major donors are back, resulting in more money donated to charity last year than in 2023, micro donors and small-dollar donors aren’t engaged — and the number of those giving to nonprofits continues to decline. In fact, the numbers of these smaller donors declined steeply at year end in 2024, and their behavior strongly affected retention year over year.
These findings and more are in the latest "Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) Quarterly Fundraising Report" released today. The report from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday features 12 nonprofit tech vendors that provide aggregate data from more than 12,000 organizations that raised $10.5 billion from 6.7 million donors last year. The aggregate data is used in year-over-year comparisons to evaluate the state of fundraising.
While dollars are up 3.5% overall, the number of donors is down 4.5% year over year. 2024 became the fourth straight year the number of donors has declined. Dollars had fallen from pandemic-inflated years and then remained relatively flat year over year until 2024. Interestingly enough, donations were strong in the first half of the year, outpacing 2023 year-to-date figures, but fell short by year’s end.
Major Donors: Major gifts have been softening downward in dollars raised, but the reduction in the number of donors shows that nonprofits are relying more heavily on wealthier donors to fund their missions. After all, the data shows these large gifts are driving the increase in dollars going to charities. But statistics have shown that wealthier individuals pull back their generosity when the stock market and economy declines, so it’s unclear if this trajectory will continue with how volatile the market has been so far in 2025.
Small Donors: Countering rising everyday costs, like the price of eggs increasing 37% last year, micro donors (those giving $100 or less) gave nearly 9% last year. Those giving slightly more ($101 to $500) had the second biggest decline in giving of 4%. Drops in donor participation for these groups mirrored decreases in dollars given. While all these small donations might not seem significant at first glance (about 2% of total dollars), micro donors comprise slightly more than half of the sector's total donor base, or 81% if you combine micro and small donors. The retention rate for micro donors was 32%, while 50% of small donors were retained.
Recurring Donors: One-time donors made up 69% of donors in 2024, but their 6% decline accounted for three-quarters of the overall decline in donors in 2024. And in terms of dollars, they contributed 40% of total gifts last year.
The remaining 31% of donors gave at least one additional gift in 2024. It’s important to note that donor participation and retention were down across all giving levels, but those giving three or more gifts gave more year over year.
Year-End Donors: While year-end donors could overlap with any of the other segments, there was a noticeable drop in the number of donors giving from October to November (when the 2024 presidential election occurred), with just a slight increase in the number of November to December donors. When it came to retention, the rate of decline accelerated in November and December. While the election may have played a role, year-end giving hasn’t been as strong.
Retained Donors: Retention is down across the board, with the exception of dollar figures when it comes to those retained from the previous year. Overall, retention declined by 2.6% to 42.9%. This marks five years of declines, meaning 2019 was the last year retention increased year over year. So while the pandemic introduced nonprofits to many new donors, since then, donors have churned at high rates. This group accounts for the largest proportion of dollars, making up 60% of dollars. These donors’ total dollars also grew about 1%.
After 2023’s 1% decline in online fundraising, 2024 rebounded with a 2% increase, according to the new M+R Benchmark report that attributed a 5% increase in monthly giving revenue for that spike. The M+R “Benchmarks” report is an annual look at online fundraising outcomes. This year’s iteration features 216 participants and, as always, relies on their year-over-year comparisons as opposed to the prior year’s study results.
M+R found that despite 64% of nonprofits defaulting their donation page to a one-time gift, recurring giving continues to outpace one-time giving, which remained flat year over year. The only mission type that defaulted to monthly giving was public media. About 40% of total online giving came from one-time donors, who gave $1,000 cumulatively in 2024. However, those donors consist of only 5% of donors, whereas 47% of one-time donors gave less than $100.
M+R 2025 Benchmark Key Findings
This new report takes a deep dive into donor behavior and its impact on giving across Canada, the USA, the UK and Australia. It explores insights across regions, verticals, channels and more — unlocking what moves the donation needle.
The report provides a forecast for 2025:
This new release examines how generations have given to charity over the past decade, and it now has comparative data snapshots for four generations.
Here’s a look at what the data shows for baby boomers (1946-1964), Generation Xers (1965-1980) and millennials (1981-1996) in 2015, 2022 and 2024, as well as Generation Zers (1997-2012), who were added to the study in 2022.Want to read more? Reach out if you don’t have access to The Giving USA Foundation reports.
While the data from FEP and GivingPulse can tell us about the past, to learn for the future, the GivingTuesday Data Commons wanted to better understand what these data may be able to tell us about the opportunities we haven’t yet realized in the giving economy.
What shifts could we make in our fundraising practices that could help us realize some of the untapped generosity. What would it take?
Here’s what we found: With the right strategies, nonprofits could unlock an estimated $55 billion more in charitable giving each year.
The Bottom Line: While challenges in fundraising are real, there’s also enormous opportunity. With smarter strategies that borrow from what’s worked in other industries — year-round engagement, subscription-like recurring giving and broader outreach — nonprofits could dramatically grow giving in the years ahead.
The resources are there. The generosity is there. The next step is creating the conditions that allow it to flourish.
Migrating to a new fundraising platform can help nonprofits improve efficiency and supporter engagement, and even future-proof operations. Without detailed consideration, however, many factors can cause recurring donors to unintentionally lapse during a migration, leading to lost revenue and weakening supporter relationships. A well-executed software migration should be seamless for sustainers. By securing payment continuity, maintaining data accuracy, communicating with donors and testing vigorously, nonprofit organizations can minimize risk and protect their most valuable supporters.
Planning a fundraising platform migration? Download the Migration Without Disruption Guide for more detailed guidance on a retention focused fundraising platform transition.
In early April, Patrick had a stellar webinar worth your while to go watch and download the slides. He discussed the Eight Steps for a Resilient 2025:
The two largest donor-advised fund (DAF) sponsors in the United States, Fidelity Charitable and DAFGiving360 (formerly Schwab Charitable), both reported 25% year-over-year growth in grant dollars in 2024.
DAF sponsors offer donors information from external databases: DAF portals ― where DAF donors make grant recommendations — often source details on organizations from other databases, such as Candid or Giving Compass. Keeping your organization’s Candid profile up to date with your mission, financials and program information ensures that DAF donors can make grant recommendations to your nonprofit with confidence. Contributing high-value content on your organization to the Giving Compass’ learning center also provides more context on your mission for their search tools to pull from.
DAF sponsors often share lists of relevant nonprofits during moments of crisis: In response to humanitarian emergencies such as hurricanes or wildfires, many organizations like the Center for Disaster Philanthropy or community foundations serving the areas affected will post “where to give” lists of nonprofits to donate to. If your cause is relevant to disaster response, try to get on those organizations’ radar.
DAF account holders often work with financial or philanthropic advisors: While DAF donors ultimately make their own decisions on grant recommendations, some do consult with an advisor. This is especially true for DAFs sponsored by community foundations, which offer more hands-on services and local expertise.
DAF portals make it easy to set up repeat and recurring gifts: One key benefit of a DAF is that the portal organizes the donor’s DAF gifts in one place. It makes it easy at the end of the year for donors to look through the organizations they supported last year and see if they’ve missed any this year. This is a key factor behind why, according to Fidelity Charitable’s 2025 report, 77% of DAF grants are either scheduled recurring grants (31%) or repeat grants to causes the donor supported before (46%). If you have donors that support you regularly through their DAF accounts, let them know they can set up a recurring gift in their portal.
DAF donors frequently still end up using a credit card for donations seen as more inspiration-based, time sensitive or socially driven. According to a study on DAF donor behavior from Giving Compass and the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy, 37% of respondents said they did not use their DAF for their most recent donation, citing the extra steps involved: leaving the donation page, logging into their DAF portal, looking up an organization, double-checking its EIN, answering several more questions, etc.
Yet, we know from The DAF Fundraising Report from K2D Strategies & Chariot that when DAF donors use their DAF, they give 96% more on average. Any donor making a small gift today would make a much larger gift if they had a DAF and used it.
Today more than ever, it’s critical to remind donors to use their DAFs whenever we can — and to make it easier for them to do so wherever we can.
The U.S. economy is showing significant resilience in the face of enormous pressure. Employers added more jobs than many economists expected last month, and the low unemployment rate held steady. The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter, but the result was distorted by a rush of imports that offset generally solid demand. The stock market rallied sharply from its April lows. The S&P 500 Consumer Staples sub-index rose 0.7%, underscoring the appeal of everyday goods like groceries and cleansers as defensive plays in a possible recession.
Still, President Trump’s policies are causing unease among consumers, businesses and investors. Tariffs on Chinese imports are causing cargo shipments to plummet. Treasury yields are bowing to lingering concern that tariffs could lift inflation and hurt foreign demand for U.S. debt. Similar fears are knocking down the dollar, which has dropped sharply against other major currencies this year. In early April, economists forecast the likelihood of a recession in the coming year to be twice as high as it was at the start of the year. Spending by the federal government fell, driven by a decline in military-related purchases, but business spending was robust.
Consumer spending, the largest source of demand in the economy, slowed to the lowest pace since mid-2023 but still grew at a 1.8% rate over the previous quarter. Still, worries about tariffs, job security and possible price increases are causing some Americans to tighten their belts. Domestic leisure travel has softened, and restaurant chains have experienced slower U.S. sales.
A preliminary reading on retail sales from the Chicago Fed suggests that spending moderated last month, following a pre-tariff flurry. Based on measures including foot traffic and card transactions, retail sales (excluding autos) fell by an inflation-adjusted 0.5% in April from the previous month, after rising 1% in March. There are conflicting signals coming from the country’s largest credit-card lenders. Some are showing more spending, others less. What is clear is that different groups of consumers are responding in their own ways.
The Conference Board said its index of consumer confidence fell to its lowest level last month since May 2020, shortly after the pandemic hit. People are deeply worried about the job market, with 65% of Americans surveyed by the University of Michigan last month saying they expect unemployment to rise over the next year. Manufacturing and service-firm surveys conducted by regional Federal Reserve Banks show companies expect to rein in capital spending.
RKD GroupThinkers Monthly LinkedIn Update:
To wrap up this month, a donor retention reminder: Setting aside time for donor surveys at least once a year is more than just a best practice. It’s a signal to your donors that their voices matter. Asking for feedback shows respect for their perspective and helps foster a sense of belonging. Just as important: Share back what you’ve learned. It builds trust, demonstrates transparency, and reminds donors that they’re not just giving to your mission; they’re part of it. Surveys, when done well, can have a meaningful impact on donor retention. Put a small story in your next newsletter that shares the top three findings from the donor survey. It’s reporting back to those donors who participated and showing those who did not take time for it that their opinion is valued (which means next survey, they will most likely participate).
And here’s one more opportunity that’s often overlooked: your thank-you letters. Beyond expressing gratitude, use this moment to reflect on the real impact of their gift. Show them how their generosity is making a difference and then take it one step further: Include a simple, sincere invitation for them to reach out if they’re interested in getting more involved in this area of your work. That single sentence can open the door to deeper relationships and increased support. You could include a QR code or website address to encourage them to go read about a success story that they made possible. Think outside the box.
Thank you for the continued trust, collaboration and for our partnership. It’s RKD Group’s honor to support your mission and be an extension of your team.