Donor retention statistics 2026: the numbers every fundraiser should know

Every year the nonprofit world raises more money from fewer people. The 2026 numbers show that pattern clearly, and they point to the most affordable fix in fundraising: keeping the donors you already have. Here are the retention statistics worth knowing this year, each one linked to its original source.

The 2026 headline numbers

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a joint research effort from AFP and GivingTuesday that tracks giving across thousands of small and midsize US nonprofits, reports overall donor retention at 43.3% in its latest quarterly data, up slightly from 43.1% a year earlier. That blended figure hides two very different groups: repeat donors stay at 69.2%, while people who gave for the first time stay near 19%.

Those two numbers are worth sitting with. Once someone gives a second time, they are more likely to stay than to leave. Nearly all of the loss happens between the first gift and the second, which means the days right after someone gives matter more than almost anything else in your fundraising year.

The first gift is where donors disappear

A first-time retention rate near 19% means about 81% of new donors never give again. When researchers ask donors why they stopped, the answers are rarely about the cause. They are about the experience of giving. Donors describe receiving a receipt but not a thank-you, and being asked for a second gift before anyone told them what the first one did.

The best-known experiment here is Penelope Burk’s thank-you call study. New donors who received a personal thank-you call from a board member within 48 hours of their gift went on to give 39% more at their next gift than donors who didn’t get a call, and fourteen months later they were still giving 42% more. The organizations didn’t change their appeals or their asks. The only difference was the thank-you.

Dollars up, donors down

Giving USA 2026 reported that Americans gave a record $617.2 billion in 2025, up 5.7% in current dollars and the first year total giving passed $600 billion. Gifts left in wills, called bequests, rose nearly 20%, the fastest growth of any source.

Put that beside the falling donor counts and you can see what is happening: more of the money is coming from fewer, larger, older gifts. M+R’s digital benchmarks tell the same story from the online side. Email revenue grew 16%, but much of the growth came from one-time gifts and year-end spikes that M+R itself describes as difficult to repeat.

What the research says works

Retention studies keep arriving at the same short list. None of it requires a bigger budget. It requires treating the moment after the gift as seriously as the moment of the ask:

• Thank promptly and personally. Burk’s 48-hour window is the classic benchmark. Speed and a human voice matter more than polish.
• Show the outcome before the next ask. Donors who learn what their gift accomplished give again. Donors who only receive appeals quietly drift away.
• Treat first-time donors as their own program. Their benchmark is the 19%, not the blended 43%, and the second gift is the one that changes everything.
• Measure the splits. Track first-time and repeat retention separately each quarter, the way the FEP does. A healthy blended rate can hide a struggling new-donor program.

The retention math

Here is an illustration with round numbers (the arithmetic, not a study). A nonprofit with 1,000 donors giving an average of $150 a year, at the sector’s 43% retention, keeps 430 donors. That is about $64,500 of repeat revenue, and it means finding 570 new donors next year to stand still. Lift retention to 50% and the same organization keeps 70 more donors and about $10,500 more revenue, before counting the compounding Sargeant describes: retained donors give more often, give larger gifts over time, and are the group from which monthly, mid-level, and legacy gifts eventually come.

Before you compare your numbers

• FEP figures come from giving records across mostly small and midsize US nonprofits. That makes them the right comparison for most organizations, but they are not a complete census of the sector.
• Giving USA estimates all US giving (individuals, foundations, bequests, and corporations). It describes the whole country, not any one organization’s retention.
• M+R Benchmarks draws on nonprofits that opt in, most of them larger and digitally mature. If you’re smaller, treat its channel numbers as directional.
• “Retention” throughout this piece means donor retention (did the person give again), not revenue retention. The two can move in opposite directions when giving is concentrating.

We’ll keep this page updated as new FEP quarterly reports land. The current reports are here.