You can't blast your way out of a shrinking donor base
Fewer donors, a thinner pipeline, a decaying channel - the data in one place. Plus: what to do about it, this week's funding radar, and news worth your time.
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. To read about how we’re helping a local newspaper archive content and reach more people, scroll to the end of this issue.
Donors down, dollars up — why healthy toplines are masking a structural break, and where the way out actually is.
We’ve all done it. A soft quarter, an amber dashboard, and the instinct fires before the meeting ends: add an appeal, send the extra email, squeeze one more ask into November. Volume is the lever that’s always within reach — and the sector data now says volume is precisely what’s failing. Three trends are compounding under all of us. If your income is flat, your file is ageing, and more email is going out for less coming back, you’re not mismanaging anything; you’re watching a structural break from the inside.
The base is shrinking. UK charitable participation is down to around 50% from 58% in 2019 — roughly four million fewer donors, the lowest since CAF’s tracker began — and public donations fell nearly 10% in a single year, 2024 to 2025 (CAF UK Giving; UK Fundraising). The US mirror: donor numbers down 4.5% in 2024 (FEP). Fewer people are giving — not less enthusiastically, fewer people.
The pipeline is thinner. US retention sits at 42.9%, a fifth straight decline; fewer than one in five first-time donors ever gives again, against 65–69% for repeat donors (FEP 2024). And the board-agenda number: small donors (under $100 — more than half of all donors) fell 8.8% while total dollars rose 3.5% (FEP Q4 2024). Big gifts are masking a collapsing base — a CFO would call that concentration risk and refuse it in any other revenue line. If your board hasn’t seen this picture, that’s not negligence; a rising topline is exactly the mechanism that hides it.
The channel is decaying. US nonprofits raised $58 per 1,000 fundraising emails in 2024, down 10%; email revenue for non-political organizations fell 13% (M+R Benchmarks). More email sent, less earned — and the marginal blast spends the one asset that compounds: your supporters’ willingness to open the next one.
The part that should make you optimistic. Look at the retention pairing again: under one in five first-timers return, but donors who make a second gift stay at 65–69%. The sector doesn’t have a generosity problem — it has a second-gift problem. And second gifts aren’t won by volume; they’re won by relevance — what supporters hear connecting to why they gave in the first place. That lever sits entirely within your control, with the supporters you already have. Until recently that kind of relevance was a big-org luxury; AI now makes segment-of-one communication feasible at small-org scale and cost. We think it’s the most consequential shift in fundraising practice in a decade, and we’ll spend coming issues showing how it works, touchpoint by touchpoint.
Four moves to start this month:
Pull four numbers: three-year donor count trend (not revenue), overall retention, first-time retention, income share of your top ten gifts. Can’t get them in an afternoon? That’s finding number one.
Add one slide to the board pack — donors and dollars, side by side. Name the masking effect before someone else discovers it.
Freeze the volume ratchet for a quarter. Cap sends at last year’s level and watch what happens.
Run the 100-supporter test: does what any 100 supporters hear from you bear any relationship to what you know about them? Where the answer is no, you’ve found your second-gift problem — and your biggest untapped asset.
Next week, we’ll be sharing our grant cohort, and how we’re working with them on this exact challenge above. Watch this space for live learnings and case studies.
Reply with your retention rate and I'll send you the one-slide 'donors vs dollars' board template so you can show your trustees the masking effect this month. Hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org.
📡 FUNDING RADAR
Humanity AI — $10M open call: still not open. The 10-foundation coalition promised a summer launch; as of this week it hasn’t dropped. Prep against the four focus areas — democratic institutions, workers’ rights, journalism, education (prep guidance). We’ll flag it the week it opens.
NextLadder Ventures — $1B for AI serving frontline workers. Gates Foundation, Ballmer Group, Stand Together, Valhalla, and John Overdeck, with Anthropic as AI partner. No formal open call yet — but if your org supports case managers, benefits navigators, or social workers, get on their radar now: nextladder.com.
WORTH A LOOK
“Agentic giving” is now officially a thing. Fundraise Up — the donation platform behind The Salvation Army UK and the USO — coined the category last week: donors telling an AI assistant what they care about, and the assistant finding, comparing, and completing the gift. Zero usage data in the announcement — which tells its own story. We’re unpacking what’s real vs. category-making in a coming issue.
Jeff Brooks on the AI slop wave. Three minutes well spent from one of fundraising’s sharpest copywriters: “If you are bad at fundraising, AI won’t help you be better. It’ll probably make you worse. But faster.” A useful companion to this week’s story — volume was failing before AI made it free.
Funders are moving on AI-written grant applications. The NIH now caps investigators at six applications a year and won’t treat proposals “substantially developed by AI” as original ideas. Foundations are quieter but moving the same direction. What that means for your grant strategy — full story soon.
The AI for Non-Profits Network is supported by Whitelabel.ai — whose whole thesis is this week’s story: relevance over volume, personalised supporter journeys, AI-powered giving at small-org scale. If the 100-supporter test stings, that’s the conversation to have. Just reply to this email.