The AI for Non-Profits Network is supported by Whitelabel.ai, an AI native fundraising platform. Clients include Livestrong, the Canadian Red Cross, Net Impact, and Hunger Free Colorado.
💠Thought for the week: Was your record year mostly inflation?
Four weeks ago we ran the numbers on a shrinking donor base and said a rising topline was hiding a structural break. A few of you replied to say your board had seen the same chart and concluded you were having a good year.
Data published last Wednesday confirms otherwise.
The base is still going. RKD Group’s mid-year benchmark covers 219 nonprofits across the US and Canada through 30 June 2026. Active donors are down to 2,585,127 - 2% off last year, and 22.2% off the 2020 peak. More than a fifth of the base has gone in six years, and it is still going.
The dollars have stopped covering for it. Revenue per active donor reached $229, a ten-year high, up 27.2% since 2021. That is the number that lands in a board pack. However, adjusted for inflation, it is up 3.6%. Almost the entire record is the currency, not the relationship. We charge roughly what we always did to a fifth fewer people, and the nominal figures have been kind enough to hide it.
The concentration got worse. Gifts of $10,000 and above now make up 68.3% of all revenue, while everything below $10,000 fell 16.9%. General gifts are at their lowest revenue share in a decade. In August we called this concentration risk and said a CFO would refuse it in any other line.
If your income looks flat and your major gifts look healthy, this is the shape you are in. It is not a management failure. It is what a decaying acquisition engine looks like.
The part that should make you optimistic
Two things in the data grew, and they are the same thing in different clothes. Monthly giving revenue hit a ten-year high of $114.9M, up 29.9% since 2021. Mid-level giving grew 7%. Everything transactional shrank; everything built on a continuing relationship expanded, across the same six years that took a fifth of the base away.
RKD’s own read is that monthly giving should be the default acquisition offer rather than an upgrade pitched later. Put plainly: the only parts of the file still growing are the parts where the supporter has a reason to be there next month.
That is the same conclusion as four weeks ago, reached from the other end. Then it was the second-gift problem: fewer than one in five first-timers return, against 65–69% for repeat donors. Two datasets, two countries, one answer. The relationship compounds and the transaction does not.
Running that relevance across a whole file used to be a big-org luxury. It isn’t any more, and that’s the shift we said we’d walk through touchpoint by touchpoint.
Three moves this month
Re-run your $10k line. What share of revenue came from gifts of $10,000 and above last year, and the year before? Anywhere near 68% and it’s something to look into.
Deflate your own headline. Adjust three years of revenue-per-donor for inflation. If the growth survives, well done!
Make the monthly ask the first ask, once. Lead one acquisition campaign this quarter with the recurring option instead of holding it back as an upgrade. Reversible, and it’s the one behavior the data says still compounds.
🧪 From the cohort
Our six cohort organizations - Income Movement, Cameron House, CAUSE, Generation180, Livestrong and Net Impact - are a few months into co-designing agentic giving with us. Two of the six questions on their list are first-gift conversion and dormant-list reactivation, both versions of this week’s story: whether the relationship can be rebuilt where the transaction usually ends.
If you want in on cohort two, the waitlist is open: Sign up here to be the first to know.
Reply with your top-ten gift concentration - what share of last year’s revenue came from your ten biggest gifts - and I’ll send you the donors vs dollars board template plus a one-page version of this inflation adjustment.
Hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org
📡 FUNDING RADAR
OpenAI Foundation, $100M for state AI implementation. Committed last month to the Breakthroughs to Follow-Through initiative with the Common Health Coalition, starting with hepatitis C treatment in Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Local nonprofits act as the distributing intermediaries, the grants are deliberately not tied to any AI platform, and technical assistance from pilot to deployment is included.
Health Foundation for Western & Central New York, SEA Change Fund. $1.6M in grants plus $400,000 of capacity-building support, $100,000 each to 16 nonprofits, built as a rapid response to federal funding cuts.
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