Revenue up 5.0%, donors down for the fifth straight year — the model spends on the second gift

The two published datasets tell one story from opposite ends. Sector giving rose 5.0%, the strongest revenue growth in five years, and the number of donors fell 3.6% — the fifth consecutive annual decline. Online revenue grew 15%, monthly giving grew 12%, and donor-advised fund revenue grew 44%. Retention sits at 43.3% across the sector, and the split underneath it is where the problem lives: 24% of new donors give again, against 66% of prior and repeat donors. An organisation reading only the revenue line sees a good year. The same organisation reading the donor line sees its base shrinking beneath a revenue number being held up by fewer, larger, older relationships.

Roughly three-quarters of the people who gave for the first time this year will not give again. Revenue is up anyway, which is exactly what makes it easy to ignore.

1. 01

   The first gift and the second gift are different products

   24% new-donor retention against 66% for repeat donors is not a gradient, it is a cliff at a specific point. Everything about the first ninety days after a first gift — what it funded, what the donor is told happened, what is asked of them next — is a different job from acquisition and is usually staffed as an afterthought to it.

2. 02

   Sustainers decay on a curve that tells you when to intervene

   Monthly giving retention runs 90% at two months, 81% at seven and 71% at twelve. The steepest loss is early, which puts the intervention that matters in the first quarter of a sustainer relationship rather than at the twelve-month mark, where most stewardship effort goes.

3. 03

   Monthly giving is a quarter of online revenue and is usually one radio button on a form

   Monthly gifts are 27% of online revenue. Against an average of $183 per one-time donor per year across 1.3 gifts, and a donor-advised fund average gift of $1,430, a sustainer converted early changes the arithmetic of the relationship permanently. The model gives sustainer conversion its own funnel and its own pages.

4. 04

   The metric most teams would manage this with no longer exists

   M+R stopped publishing email open rates because Apple Mail Privacy Protection made them non-comparable. Any nonprofit open-rate benchmark still circulating mixes real opens with pre-fetches and cannot be compared across years or organisations. Click-through and response rate are the surviving measures: 0.59% and 0.05% on fundraising email, 2.3% and 1.4% on advocacy.

5. 05

   December concentration makes retention a January problem

   37% of annual online revenue arrives in December, which makes that month's donors the largest new cohort of the year, arriving exactly when the team has least capacity to welcome them properly. That is a plausible mechanism for the 24% figure and a fixable one.

Sector giving **+5.0%** (strongest in five years) while donor counts fell **3.6%** — a fifth consecutive annual decline.

The model reorganises the year around the second gift. Phase one separates numbers currently reported as one: new-donor retention, repeat-donor retention and sustainer retention by cohort month, so the December cohort can be read on its own. Phase two builds the first ninety days as a designed sequence rather than a receipt — what the gift did, who it reached, one piece of evidence, and a single next step that is not immediately another appeal. Phase three treats sustainer conversion as its own funnel with its own page and its own ask, aimed at donors inside their first quarter where the published decay curve is steepest. Advocacy is used deliberately as an entry point, since it draws far higher engagement than fundraising email, with the path from signature to gift built explicitly rather than assumed.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–3

   Cohort reporting

   Retention split by new, repeat and sustainer, and by acquisition month

   Owner: OmniFlow + organisation

2. 2

   Weeks 3–8

   First ninety days

   A designed post-gift sequence: what it funded, evidence, one non-financial next step

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Weeks 6–12

   Sustainer funnel

   Its own page and its own ask, targeted at donors in their first quarter

   Owner: OmniFlow

4. 4

   Weeks 8–16

   Advocacy-to-gift path

   Signature to gift built as a sequence with its own measurement

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Months 9–11

   December cohort plan

   Welcome capacity planned before the year-end load rather than after it

   Owner: OmniFlow + organisation

6. 6

   Month 12

   Review

   Retention by cohort, sustainer conversion rate, revenue per subscriber

   Owner: OmniFlow + organisation

The model reports retention by cohort rather than as a single sector-style figure, because 43.3% across an organisation conceals a 24% number and a 66% number that need completely different work. Revenue per subscriber is reported alongside, against a published $2.40 a year and rising, as the check on whether the list is being asked more often or asked better. Open rates are not reported at all, in any form, because they are no longer comparable. Every published input is replaced by the organisation's own from quarter two. Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results.

Modelled. Inputs: AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 Report; M+R, Benchmarks 2026 (2025 data). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: Fundraising Effectiveness Project *Full-Year 2025 Report* (Apr 2026).

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that the published retention figures come from two different datasets built on different populations: the sector retention rate from a broad donor-transaction sample, the new-versus-repeat split from a digital benchmark weighted toward larger national organisations. A small local organisation's real cohort curve may look like neither. The cohort reporting in phase one exists to replace both before any budget moves.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.