Nonprofits Raised More From Fewer People Last Year. That's a Strategy With an Expiration Date.

In 2025, nonprofits raised about 5 percent more than the year before — the strongest growth the field has seen in five years. In the same year, they lost donors for the fifth year running.

The money went up. The people went down.

That isn't a contradiction, and it isn't a rounding error. It's the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's full-year 2025 report, and it describes a pattern that looks like a good year on the surface and a quiet problem underneath. Most nonprofits will see the revenue number, feel relief, and keep running the program that produced it. That's the part worth slowing down on.

When Fewer People Carry More of the Budget, You Get More Fragile, Not Stronger.

Look at where the 2025 gains came from. Total dollars rose about 5 percent, but the number of people giving fell about 3.6 percent, continuing a slide that started in 2021. The growth came from the top — a handful of larger gifts carried the year — while the number of smaller, everyday donors kept shrinking.

Here's what that means if you're the one watching the numbers. Your year-end total can look healthy while the pool of people who'll ever give again gets smaller. And when a few big gifts are doing the heavy lifting, you're one major donor away from a very different year — someone moves, changes priorities, or simply doesn't renew, and there's a hole no spring appeal will quickly fill. A broad base of engaged supporters is what makes a budget steady. Leaning harder each year on fewer people is the opposite of steady, even when the total goes up.

It Costs More to Keep Replacing Donors Than to Keep the Ones You Have.

Of every group of donors a nonprofit had in 2025, fewer than half came back to give again, and first-time donors — the ones who just discovered you — almost never returned for a second gift. So organizations spend the year working hard to bring new people in, then watch most of them leave before they're worth what it cost to find them. The list refills at about the rate it empties. That's a treadmill, and it's an expensive one.

The instinct when a year feels soft is to send more appeals and chase more new names. That instinct is also what wears people out and pushes them off your list. Bringing donors in and keeping donors aren't two separate problems. The harder you push on the first without fixing the second, the faster good supporters tune you out.

"Relevance" Sounds Soft. It's the Most Practical Fix You Have.

The thing that keeps donors is simpler than it sounds: send people things they actually care about, and stop sending them things they don't. An engaged supporter is worth far more than a big list of people who skim past you.

You don't need a data team or a new system to start. You already know things about your people — what they gave to, the event they showed up for, the issue that got them to sign up in the first place. Even splitting your list into two or three groups around that, and writing to each one like the thing they care about matters, beats one all-staff blast to everyone. When a program commits to that, the results aren't subtle. In one program we built, an engaged audience grew from around 2,000 people to more than 50,000 in twelve months, with more than two-thirds of them opening what we sent. That didn't come from sending more. It came from being relentless about relevance — getting the right message to the people who'd actually care, and leaving everyone else out of that particular send.

The mechanics aren't the hard part. The hard part is bandwidth — relevance takes more thought per message than a blast does, which is exactly why so few organizations stick with it, and exactly why the ones that do pull ahead.

Every Email Nobody Wanted Makes the Next One Harder to Deliver.

Relevance also protects the one thing you can't easily buy back: your ability to actually reach people. Sending the same tired list more and more email doesn't just fail to win anyone back. It works against you. Neon One's review of tens of thousands of nonprofit email campaigns found that piling on asks without enough value in between wears donors out and trains them to treat your email as noise. Worse, when enough people ignore or delete your emails, the inbox providers notice — and they start routing you to spam folders, including for the supporters who do want to hear from you.

So the fix is the opposite of what it feels like you should do. Email the people who open less often, not more. Give the people who do open a reason to keep opening — a story, an update, proof their last gift mattered — before you ask for the next one. You earn the right to someone's inbox before you ask anything of them, and that's what keeps a donor around long enough to give a second time.

The 2025 Numbers Are a Warning Light, Not a Trophy.

It's easy to file this year's report under good news and move on. Revenue is up. But the same report is telling nonprofits that the ground under that revenue is narrowing, and that the organizations most exposed are the ones still chasing dollars by sending more instead of building real relationships with the people they already have.

The nonprofits whose numbers still hold up in three years will be the ones that treated a shrinking donor base as the real story this year — and treated relevance, not volume, as the fix.

If you want a clearer picture of what's actually happening underneath your year-end total — who's engaged, who's drifting, and where a few simple changes would help most — that's a conversation worth having. We're glad to talk it through.