Quick answer: Recurring giving is the highest-leverage fix for the nonprofit sector’s retention problem, because monthly donors retain at far higher rates and carry dramatically higher lifetime value than one-time givers. The Pulse of the Donor 2025 report shows that a donor who gives $25 a month for three years is worth $900, while that same person as a one-time giver is worth closer to $75. Treat recurring giving as a managed program with its own acquisition, retention, and stewardship plan, not a background machine you build once and forget.
Recurring giving is a program in which donors commit to an automatic, recurring gift, usually monthly, and it matters because it is the most direct answer to the retention problem that has defined our sector for years. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project has been telling us for a long time that we lose roughly half of our donors every year. This statistic can seem unrealistic because we have the same donors that we talk to year after year and have built meaningful relationships with them. But there are many recurring donors who fly under the radar, and those are the donors who lapse. They don’t come back because they were not handled with the proper care.
In the nonprofit sector, we are very good at acquiring new donors; however, we have not been so great at keeping the donors we worked so hard to bring in. We have all sat in the board meeting where acquisition was the agenda item. But it seems that for every acquisition meeting we hold, we need to hold two donor retention meetings. And I’ll tell you why, with the math, later in this article.
We need to be careful about how we frame this issue because much of it is not a knowledge problem. It is a problem of bandwidth. Most development directors know that donor retention is the engine driving the year-after-year donation goals they need to hit. They also know that retention competes with every emergency, every gala, and every board report, and it almost never rises to the top of the pile.
So when we look at the Pulse of the Donor data, we are not thinking “shame on you, development directors.” We are asking: where can we expand our bandwidth for the most return? How can we streamline operations to maximize return? And the honest answer is to focus on automating and streamlining recurring giving as the engine that drives donations.
A recurring donor, on average, is worth multiples of a one-time donor, not just a little bit more. Here is the math. A donor who gives $25 a month for three years is worth $900. That same person, treated as a one-time giver, even with a larger ask of say three times their typical gift, would probably give you a $70 to $75 gift at the outside. So the comparison is roughly $75 against $900. This is not subtle math, and the magnitude is what should change how you plan. Rather than going for the slightly larger one-time donation, ask for a recurring monthly gift that the donor can set and forget.
The retention side of this data is just as striking as the donation size. Recurring donor retention is significantly higher than one-time donor retention. If you are asking for a yearly donation at a gala or an event, asking someone for $75 once a year, and you ask in March 2026 and again in March 2027, you are less likely to get that second gift. By contrast, once someone sets up a recurring gift, they are far less likely to lapse than someone who gives once.
The passive nature of the gift works in your favor; the donor can forget about it. You just have to keep giving them a reason not to cancel the $25 they see on their bank statement. That means timing your communications around their charge date: send them something about your mission three days before the charge, and again two days after. You are timing it to work in tandem with that donation date.
The decision was made one time, and the donations keep arriving. They have decided to give, and the gifts keep coming in, far more profitable in the long run than a one-time donation. That means your win-back work on lapsed donors, and the LYBUNT and SYBUNT scramble, shrinks for everyone you move into a recurring relationship. LYBUNT (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) refers to a donor who gave in the immediately preceding fiscal year but not the current one. SYBUNT (Some Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) refers to a donor who has given before, at some point, but not this year.
Recurring giving gives you far more predictability on the revenue coming in. When you can plan around certain marks you know you will hit, it changes your ability to purchase auction items, plan galas, pay your staff, and handle reporting, and everything becomes more predictable. Recurring donors are not just a revenue line; they are the engine moving your nonprofit forward, and they are the donors who provide reliable cash flow when it feels tenuous.
Think about what that protects you from. What happens when your event rains out? What happens when a government grant is pulled for reasons that have nothing to do with your work? What happens when a global pandemic shuts everything down? The recurring pipeline underneath your budget is a safeguard and an insurance plan, mission-saving at exactly those moments, and a foundation for long-term sustainability.
Recurring giving is moving to digital, away from checks and bank-to-bank transfers toward credit card and digital wallet gifts, and that shift changes what your platform has to do well. From 2012 to 2018, a surprising number of recurring gifts still came in as checks, and the digital ones were usually ACH, bank-to-bank. But now, as everything has changed, the nonprofit industry is seeing far more recurring giving via credit cards and digital wallets, even evolving into e-currency.
Practically speaking, that means your platform’s ability to handle card payments, recover failed payments, and support mobile-friendly recurring enrollment is a fundraising issue, not just a technology issue. A card expires, a payment method changes, a charge is declined, and if your tools cannot gracefully recover and alert your nonprofit team, you lose recurring revenue you've already earned. We don’t want to lose that effort.
BetterUnite built recurring giving as a first-class feature from the ground up, never an afterthought, because of exactly this data. We have a long-standing partnership with Stripe, the payment processor, and we work very closely with them because payment processors matter immensely. Processing at Stripe’s scale gives us visibility into the failure modes in recurring giving, such as card declines, expirations, and payment method transitions, so we can build solutions to them
Build it as a managed program with three parts: acquisition, retention, and a deliberate outreach cadence, and put one person on the team accountable for its health. A common mistake development directors make is treating monthly giving as a background machine. You create a program, give it a cute name, and you’re proud of it. But the acquisition flow only ran once; the retention work, maintenance, and optimization are minimal. Sending one upgrade appeal a year and calling it a day is not the complete job.
Here is the action plan. First, audit your recurring program this week. Pull your lapse rate, your failed payment rate, and your upgrade rate. If you do not have those numbers, finding out why is itself the first gap to close. Second, set a goal: what percentage of new donors do you want to convert into recurring donors? Third, put the invitation everywhere, including the acknowledgment of a one-time gift. A thank-you for a silent auction purchase can carry a single line, even a footer, that makes a bigger impact and can convert a one-time donor into a monthly donor today.
People often just need the invitation to become a monthly donor, and that is what matters. None of this should require reinventing the setup every time a donor arrives. Put the tools in place once, then gather, steward, and watch. Optimization for a mass audience beats spending every hour devising a retention strategy for a single donor, unless they are a very important donor
How often should I communicate with monthly donors?
Communicate with monthly donors on a deliberate, year-round cadence, not only when you are making another ask. At a minimum, send a recurring-donor-specific update, an annual upgrade invitation, and timely thank-yous tied to impact, so the relationship is more than a charge on a statement.
What is a good monthly donor retention rate?
Recurring donors retain far better than the roughly 50% one-time donor retention the sector sees every year, which is exactly why moving donors into recurring gifts solves part of the retention problem on its own.
How do I convert one-time donors into recurring donors?
Convert one-time donors by adding a clear, low-friction invitation to give monthly at the moments they are already engaged: the gift acknowledgment, the event receipt, the thank-you email. Sometimes, a donor simply did not have the right vehicle in front of them.
If you cannot pull your lapse rate, failed payment rate, and upgrade rate today, that is the first thing to fix. BetterUnite was built with recurring giving as a first-class feature, and we would love to show you around.
Click Here to book a demo, and read the Pulse of the Donor 2025 report so the data informs your plan, not just your reading list.
Leya Simmons
Co-founder & CEO | BetterUnite
The Co-founder and CEO of BetterUnite, a platform supporting thousands of nonprofits, she brings a unique lens to the sector, shaped by 10+ years as a front-line fundraiser, development director, and board leadership at organizations such as University High School, Anthropos Arts, Art Alliance Austin, Revolution Recovery, and many more. A yoga teacher, a female tech executive, and a mother of five, she is passionate about equipping nonprofits with the tools they need to do more with less.