We are now tracking monthly sustainer gifts in our Animal Care benchmark. These gifts have dramatically impacted Animal Care fundraising, with over a third of all 2024 gifts now originating from these monthly recurring gifts. Last month, we explored how these gifts impact gift frequency (12 gifts a year will do that) and how they mask growth trends in average gift ($5 monthly gifts will do that).
Before we dig into the findings, let’s define the sizes of our animal care partners as we will be focusing particularly on the Giant and Emerging organizations today.
| Size | 2024 Active Donors | # of Organizations |
| Giant | 30,000+ | 3 |
| Large | 10,000 - 29,999 | 24 |
| Mid | 5,000 - 9,999 | 27 |
| Small | 2,000 - 4,999 | 19 |
| Emerging | Under 2,000 | 10 |
| All Sizes | 83 |
Popular gift amounts
But let’s get practical ― let’s explore the popular monthly sustainer gift amounts so that we can properly set our recurring ask amounts. In the 2025 Animal Care benchmark, the most popular gift amounts are:
The pattern changes slightly when we only look at 2024. The top 6 remain the same; then, the $30 & $100 gifts swap spots ― but most interesting are the two new additions: $25.75 & $5.60. These are gifts in which the donor is adding a little bit extra to cover the credit card fees ― a topic we’ll explore next month.
The RKD benchmarks are split by regions and sizes. As we explore the monthly sustainer-giving gift amounts, we don’t see any interesting stories by geography. But we do see a juicy story when we consider size. The bigger the Animal Care organization, the lower the monthly sustainer gift amount is.
Let’s start the story by observing the average 2024 monthly recurring gift amount:
Let’s now explore the extremes and focus on the Giant (more than 30,000 active donors in 2024) & Emerging (no more than 2,000 active donors in 2024) organizations’ top 5 gift amounts in 2024:
These differences are striking. Emerging Animal Care organizations have more generous gift amounts in their top 5. Not only that, but we observe a tendency for the Emerging organization monthly sustainers to also be willing to pay a bit more for credit card processing.
Let’s dive a bit deeper on the $5 monthly recurring gift. For Giant Animal Care organizations, this gift amount was the 4th most popular in 2024. For the Emerging organizations, it was the 16th most popular gift amount. Clearly, these organizations are doing something different.
Ask amount strategy
From his book The Rise of Sustainable Giving: How the Subscription Economy Is Transforming Recurring Giving and What Nonprofits Can Do to Benefit, Dave Raley talks about setting monthly recurring ask amounts by considering your ask amount anchor:
If you start the conversation with “for $5/month,” you’ve anchored the donor at a $5/month starting point. Price anchoring tells us that if, for example, we start at $5 /month, a donor will be less likely to give an amount like $100/month because we “anchored” them at such a low amount.
Obviously, within a benchmark, we cannot analyze the ask amounts for the different sizes of Animal Care organizations, but we can theorize that the Giant organizations have a different anchor than the Emerging organizations. Since so few of the Emerging organizations’ monthly recurring gifts are at the $5 level, their anchor is logically different than their Giant organization friends.
So, your homework is to look at your monthly recurring gift amounts and to compare them to the benchmarks we’re sharing today. Look at your ask amounts and think about your anchor. Consider testing and raising your anchor.
Even if you have a high anchor and your gift amounts are more wonderful than what we have here, test higher anchors. You may be surprised.
Upgrades
Also explore your monthly sustainer donor journeys. As you communicate gratitude and your mission successes with your monthly sustainers, observe the path you present so that these awesome donors can upgrade their gift amount. Might you be setting another low anchor ― or no anchor at all?
In the 2025 Animal Care benchmark, we observe that only 16% of monthly sustainers changed their gift amount.
What’s exciting is that, of these monthly sustainers who did change their recurring gift amount, 76% of these changes were upgrades ― meaning the donors decided to be more generous in their support to animals in need.
The most popular upgrade was changing from $20 to $25, which was an upgrade of $5. In fact, over 55% of the gift amount changes were modest ― the change was less than $10 per month.
These monthly amount changers liked to make changes. Once they made one change, they were likely to change 1.3 more times within our 10-year RKD Animal Care benchmark.
But let’s get back to anchoring. As we said, 55% of all changes were within $10 per month. Is that due to anchoring? We observe that 7% of monthly recurring gift upgrades were an increase of $25 per month. Are we observing consumer behavior, or are we observing yet another anchor in action?
When do changes happen?
Changes in monthly recurring gift amounts happen throughout the year. No obvious data pattern exists.
However, what is interesting is that out of the 83 Animal Care organizations in the 2025 benchmark, only 3 show a definite anniversary change.
Surprisingly, on the 365th day of the subscription (1 year), on the 730th day of the subscription (2 years), and on the three-year anniversary (1,095th day), changes from these 3 Animal Care organizations happen. Not so much in the days before or after but on the anniversary date itself.
To be clear, these changes are small in number: only with 3 Animal Care organizations... on their anniversary date ― that’s a tiny needle in a haystack. Perhaps it really isn’t a needle but another anchor.
Take a moment and consider your monthly sustainer donor journeys. Identify anchors you have intentionally set and those which exist without thought. And give us a call if you’d like to explore these anchors with us. We’d be happy to talk with you.
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