Fundraising
- Online revenue for the average nonprofit increased by 15% in 2025.
- Revenue from one-time giving increased by 17%, while monthly revenue increased by 12%. Monthly giving accounted for 27% of all online revenue in 2025.
- Revenue from donor-advised funds (DAF) increased by 44% from the previous year.
- Nonprofits received 37% of all 2025 online revenue in December. The last day of the year accounted for 4% of annual revenue.
One of the few constants in online fundraising is that emergencies drive response. When a hurricane makes a devastating landfall somewhere in the world, frontline organizations see a surge of revenue. Spikes in unemployment tend to drive donors toward food banks. We’ve gotten used to seeing that impact show up in Benchmarks.
What we have not seen, at least since the first year of the COVID pandemic, is a sense of emergency so widespread that it sweeps across sectors. And we have never, ever reported numbers that indicate an uprising of emergency donor response for Public Media. Until now.
Online revenue increased by an average of 15% in 2025, following relatively flat changes the previous two years. Nearly every sector reported average revenue growth in the double digits. This revenue growth reached nonprofits of every size, with an increase of at least 14% for Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large organizations.
While revenue growth was widespread, it wasn’t spread evenly.
Public Media nonprofits saw average online revenue increase by 37%, with revenue at the 75th percentile growing by 76%!
Hunger/Poverty also saw a 37% average increase, with 50% growth at the 75th percentile!
The median revenue increase for Rights nonprofits was 16%, and 53% at the 75th percentile!
In case all those breathless numbers and exclamation points don’t make it clear: this is not normal! Looking at the last few years of revenue changes, we see a mixed bag. Some years, some sectors see a bit more growth, others may report a small decline. A spike in giving one year might presage a regression the following year.
As we noted above, a hurricane might spur giving to nonprofits engaged in humanitarian relief. What kind of disaster sparks giving to Rights, Environmental, International Aid, Hunger/Poverty, and Public Media nonprofits all at once?
One answer: as we explore in our Big Story, two-thirds of nonprofits that receive federal funding reported a drop in that funding in 2025. When people see the causes and communities they care about under threat — whether the cause is natural or all-too-human — they step up.
One-time revenue growth outpaced monthly
Revenue from monthly giving accounted for 27% of all online revenue in 2025. Many nonprofits received a third or more of revenue from monthly donors, with the importance of monthly giving scaling along with nonprofit size.
For the Small cohort (nonprofits with annual online revenue under $1 million), monthly giving made up 22% of all revenue. For Extra Large nonprofits (annual online revenue over $10 million), 37% of online revenue came from monthly donors.
With that sense of scale in mind, let’s turn our attention to year-over-year change.
If we accept that nonprofit supporters experienced 2025 as a rolling series of disasters (relatable), then we should also expect donors to be focused on making an immediate impact.
And so they were. Average online revenue from one-time gifts increased by 17%, outpacing the 12% growth for monthly revenue.
This is a clear break from the long-term trend. In just about every other edition of Benchmarks, we have reported a larger net change in monthly giving. Over time, more and more donors have embraced monthly giving, and nonprofits have increasingly optimized their donation experience to prioritize sustainer recruitment.
The divergence from this long-term trend was most notable for Public Media nonprofits, which have long been leaders in emphasizing monthly giving. That makes the 21% average increase in monthly revenue all the more impressive — and the 74% increase in one-time giving all the more dramatic. Hunger/Poverty nonprofits also saw a large spike in one-time giving, with revenue increasing by 52%.
Cultural and Rights nonprofits were the only sectors to see revenue from monthly gifts increase at a higher rate than revenue from one-time gifts; for Rights nonprofits, revenue from monthly gifts grew by 40%.
Given the challenges of one-time donor retention (especially among emergency donors) and the durability of sustaining donors, this shift may strengthen Rights nonprofits for a long time to come.
Did somebody say “retention”?
We did! But hold on, let’s talk about some terminology first.
When we refer to “new” online donors, we mean donors who made an online gift in 2025, and not in any of the previous three years. It’s possible some of these folks have given before in other channels, or further back in the past — but since not all Benchmarks participants are able to include detailed cross-channel or historical data, we keep things simple.
In 2025, new donors accounted for 31% of online revenue.
Of course, every year brings another cohort of new donors — there were a whole bunch of new donors in 2024 as well. Most of them did not return to make another gift; new donor retention was 24%.
We contrast new donors with “prior” donors: these are individuals who made an online gift in 2024, and also in at least one of the five previous years. These are donors with a proven capacity for retention, who have already made at least two one-time gifts. Retention among these supporters was 66% — far higher than for new donors.
Overall retention, including both new and prior donors, was 48%. In other words, about half of all online one-time donors in 2024 returned to make an online one-time gift in 2025.
Tracking retention for monthly donors looks a little bit different, as the default is for gifts to continue until a donor actively cancels their support. Or until their credit card number gets stolen and they have to update their payment information across a couple dozen subscriptions, stores, and hopefully nonprofits.
(Not to nag, but have you taken a look recently at how easy you make this process for donors?)
In any case, rather than year-over-year retention, we calculate the percent of sustainers retained by month. Overall, 10% of sustainers stop giving within two months of setting up a new monthly gift. After 7 months, 81% of sustainers are still giving; after a full year, 71% of sustainers are still active.
After a year, nonprofits can expect to lose one or two percent of sustainers each month. A little more than half of all monthly gifts are still active after two full years of regular, reliable support. This gradual decline is a key part of the long-term growth of monthly programs. As long as nonprofits are able to bring in new sustainers faster than the rate of attrition, monthly giving will continue to grow.
Another element that complicates the retention picture is the fact that many donors — both sustainers and those who made only one-time donations — gave more than once over the course of the year.
Donors who made only one-time gifts online gave an average of 1.3 times in 2025, with an average of $183 in annual revenue per donor.
Monthly donors made an average of 0.2 one-time gifts in addition to their monthly donation(s), with average one-time giving of $21. This includes contributions made before becoming monthly donors as well as one-time donations made by existing sustainers, but does not include the value of monthly gifts.
DAF-initely growing
Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) were one of the fastest-growing sources of revenue we tracked. These are investment accounts that allow donors to make tax-deductible contributions (including money, stocks, real estate, and other assets), and later have those funds along with any capital gains distributed to the organizations of their choice.
In 2025, revenue from Donor Advised Funds increased by a massive 44% overall, with significant variation between sectors. Average DAF revenue doubled for Hunger/Poverty nonprofits, and grew by 133% for Rights nonprofits.
The number of DAF donations also increased significantly. Nonprofits received 23% more DAF gifts in 2025 than they did in 2024, and results were somewhat more consistent across sectors.
In addition to eye-popping year-over-year change, DAF giving stood out from other sources of revenue with an exceptionally large average gift. In 2025, the average DAF donation was $1,430 (as a quick but unfair-for-several-reasons point of comparison, the average gift received via direct mail was $120).
This was essentially the same as the average DAF gift the previous year, though some sectors did report more substantial year-over-year change. For example, the average DAF donation to Hunger/Poverty nonprofits increased from $2,105 to $2,510.
Giving Season keeps on giving
There are times, as a fundraiser, deep in the cold grasp of December, when daylight reaches a minimum and you are pulling reports and setting up your 12th email appeal and optimizing ad spends and managing all of the everything that keeps a modern end-of-year fundraising program running, there are times when you think to yourself:
Okay, this is hard work, but it is important and will be well worth it if we can manage to raise 37% of our annual revenue in this month alone.
Well guess what. In 2025, nonprofits received 37% of all online revenue in December alone. It’s important to remember that Giving Tuesday fell in December, and as always, the closing days of the year were especially important for online fundraising. The last week of the year accounted for 10% of annual revenue; the last day of the year accounted for 4% of annual revenue.
Hunger/Poverty nonprofits raised 46% of online revenue in December, the highest percentage of any sector. Interestingly, this giving was spread a bit more evenly across the month, with just 8% of annual revenue in the last week of the year.
The timing may be important here. Broadly, the period of time around Thanksgiving (including Giving Tuesday) has long been an important one for food banks and other organizations in this sector. In 2025, a high-profile fight over the withholding of federal food aid just before Giving Season began may have drawn increased attention and support.
Similarly, at the close of a year in which federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting suddenly ended, Public Media nonprofits reported a 32% increase in December revenue, well above the overall average growth of 11% (which is, itself, fairly extraordinary).
For nonprofits facing unprecedented funding cuts, this surge in individual donor support may not be enough to close the gap — especially if retention proves difficult. But at a time when crisis response was an ongoing state of being for so many causes, supporters showed resilience, generosity, and an eagerness to help.
