The 2025 Pulse of the Donor Report, produced by Fundraise Up and Stripe, is not another vague benchmarking survey. It draws from real transaction data processed at enormous scale. Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments globally. Fundraise Up serves thousands of nonprofit organizations. When you combine payment infrastructure data with platform-level donor behavior data, you get a ground-level picture of what donors actually do when they open their wallets. Not what they say they plan to do. What they actually do.
In this episode of the 501(c) Drop, Leya Simmons, Co-Founder and CEO of BetterUnite, walked through the report's key findings and connected them directly to the operational realities of development directors, executive directors, and board members. Here is what the data says and what you should do about it.
The question everyone wants answered first is whether giving is up or down. The honest answer, Leya explained, is that it is complicated. Overall charitable giving has remained relatively stable, but the distribution is shifting dramatically. Some organizations are raising more than ever. Others are watching their donor counts shrink, even if total dollars look steady on paper.
The pie might be a little bit bigger. But the slices are different sizes now. It is being cut differently.
The most important variable is donor retention. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project has been reporting for years that the sector loses roughly half of all donors every single year. The Pulse of the Donor reinforces that pattern. As a sector, we are very good at acquiring new donors. We are not nearly as good at keeping them.
Leya was clear-eyed about why. Donor retention is almost always on a development director's list. It competes with every emergency, every upcoming gala, every board report. The operational bandwidth to prioritize retention is often just not there. The data is not an indictment of development teams. It is a signal about where strategy and infrastructure need to go.
In 2018, when BetterUnite was founded, online giving represented about 16 percent of all donations. Today, a significant and growing portion of online donations are completed on mobile devices. Mobile is no longer a secondary channel. It is primary, and the experience donors have on mobile directly determines whether gifts are completed or abandoned.
Pages that load slowly, forms that were designed for desktop, checkout flows with too many fields: all of these create friction, and friction costs real money. Leya pointed to donation abandonment rates as one of the most undermonitored metrics in fundraising. If donors are arriving at your checkout page and not completing the transaction, you need to know that number and you need to understand what is stopping them.
Most fundraising platforms, including BetterUnite through integrations with Fundraise Up and Feather, can surface this data. The goal is simple: if someone raised their hand to give and didn't finish, you want to know what got in the way.
Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo. The ability to give without re-entering a credit card number is now an expectation, not a perk. The Pulse of the Donor data is clear: donors who can give in fewer clicks give at higher rates.
This applies beyond online giving as well. At events, guests are increasingly arriving without a physical wallet. They have their phone, and they expect to be able to use it. Enabling digital wallet preauthorization at events, including tap-to-authorize options, removes friction at exactly the moment when a donor is most ready to engage.
The principle is the same across all channels: every additional step between a donor's intent and the completed gift is a place where that gift can disappear.
Peer-to-peer giving, where donors fundraise on behalf of your mission, remains one of the highest ROI activities available to nonprofits. It is cost-effective, and donors who fundraise on your behalf develop deeper affinity for your organization. Donors who give to a peer fundraiser have a double connection: to the organization and to the person who asked them.
The gap the Pulse of the Donor identifies is in execution. Most organizations set up a peer campaign and then expect it to run on its own. They do not adequately support their fundraisers with tools, scripts, milestone celebrations, and ongoing encouragement. A fundraising page is not a strategy. The organizations that see strong peer-to-peer results are the ones that treat their fundraisers as partners and give them everything they need to be successful.
Text and SMS giving are growing, but they remain underutilized. Leya traced this partly to early bad experiences with expensive platforms that over-promised and under-delivered. QR codes have absorbed some of that functionality at events.
But the data is consistent: when text messaging is used strategically and not as a mass blast, it performs well. The key phrase is strategic and targeted. A text sent to event attendees while they are on-site is not spam. It is relevant and timely. Urgent-ask campaigns and event-day engagement are where SMS outperforms other channels most consistently.
This is the section of the Pulse of the Donor that Leya spent the most time on, and with good reason. Recurring giving is not just a revenue line. It is a stabilization mechanism.
What happens when your event rains out? What happens when your government grant is pulled? What happens when a global pandemic shuts everything down? The recurring giving pipeline is what keeps the lights on.
The data makes the math undeniable. A donor giving $25 per month for three years is worth $900. That same donor as a one-time giver is probably worth $75 at the outside. The lifetime value difference is not incremental. It is transformational.
Recurring donor retention is also significantly higher than one-time donor retention. Once someone sets up a recurring gift, the decision to give has been made. The passive nature of the giving works in your favor. The acquisition and retention problems that consume so much bandwidth simply do not apply to a recurring donor in the same way.
The channel for recurring giving is also shifting. Legacy recurring gifts often came as checks or ACH transfers. Today, credit card and digital wallet-based recurring giving is growing significantly. This makes your platform's ability to handle failed payment recovery, card updater logic, and mobile-friendly recurring enrollment a fundraising issue, not just a technology issue.
BetterUnite built recurring giving as a first-class feature from the beginning. The partnership with Stripe is meaningful here specifically because Stripe's infrastructure provides visibility into the failure modes in recurring giving: card declines, expired payment methods, and payment transitions. That visibility is what allows platforms to build real solutions.
Between $72 trillion and $113 trillion is expected to transfer from one generation to the next over the next 20 years. Best estimates suggest that around $13 trillion of that will come to nonprofit organizations. The sector talks about this constantly. What often gets lost is the actionable strategy underneath it.
Here is what the data tells us. Your major gift pipeline is aging. The donors who move the needle on your annual numbers right now skew older. That is not today's problem. It is your problem in five to ten years, and the time to act is now.
Younger donors operate differently. They give smaller amounts, but they give earlier in their relationship with an organization. They often give first through a peer connection, whether that is an event a friend invited them to, a peer-to-peer campaign, or social media influence. And they pay attention to how they are treated after that first gift. What did you do with their money? How are you using their trust? Is the cause they care about actually being served?
Donors under 45 are finding organizations and making first gifts almost exclusively through digital channels. If your digital acquisition funnel is broken or nonexistent, you are not reaching this cohort at all.
The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are the ones whose leadership understands that donor acquisition is a part of their infrastructure, not just an expense or a line item.
This is a board-level conversation. If your board is not asking about the age distribution of your top donors and about your digital acquisition strategy, they should be.
The Pulse of the Donor tells us what donors want: less friction, mobile ease, digital options, and easy recurring enrollment. The supply-side question is whether your fundraising infrastructure is actually aligned with those needs, and what you are paying for it.
Leya was direct. Platform fees and subscription fees both matter. Some platforms marketed as free pass transaction fees of up to 22 percent directly to donors. A platform fee in the 1 to 3 percent range, paired with a reasonable subscription, is a healthy model. If you are paying above 5 percent per transaction for fundraising software, there is a disconnect between the service you are receiving and the experience your donors are having.
BetterUnite charges between 1 and 2.5 percent. That is a deliberate choice rooted in the same experience that drove the company's founding. The right platform is not just about fee percentage. It is about whether the platform actually handles recurring giving well, recovers failed payments, is mobile-optimized, and gives you the data you need to make decisions. The cost of a cheap platform that does not convert is higher than the cost of a well-priced platform that does.
Audit your recurring giving program this week. Pull your lapse rate, your failed payment rate, and your upgrade rate. If you do not have those numbers, find out why you do not. That gap in your data infrastructure is itself something you need to address.
Look at your mobile and checkout abandonment rate. Go into your fundraising platform analytics and find out how many donors started a donation and did not complete it. If the number is high, something needs to change on that page. Make one or two changes at a time, measure the impact, and adjust.
Build a recurring giving acquisition goal into your next plan. Decide what percentage of new donors you want to convert to recurring. Add a recurring giving invitation to your one-time gift acknowledgements. Sometimes donors simply need the right vehicle and the right invitation.
Have the generational giving conversation with your board. Ask: what is the average age of our top 50 donors? If your board is not asking that question, start asking it. Understand what percentage of your donor base is under 45 versus over 60. Those two groups want different communication styles and different content.
Make digital acquisition a strategic priority. If you do not have a digital acquisition strategy, this is the moment to build one. If you have one, this is the moment to audit it honestly.
Know what you are paying across your entire tech stack. Understand the subscription fees and transaction fees for every platform you use. This is a fiduciary responsibility, not a line item to delegate and forget.
Invest in your development director. Give them access to sector benchmark data, training, and the conferences where they can connect with peers. A development director making strategy decisions without access to what the data says is operating with a fraction of the information they need.
Transcript Recording:
Leya Simmons (00:00)
Hi everyone. My name is Leya Simmons and I am the CEO and co-founder of BetterUnite. Welcome to today's 501c drop. I am really going to start today off a little bit differently in that I'm actually going to talk about myself. First, before we do that though, I did want to let you know that you are always welcome to enter any questions that you might have into the chat bar. You are
Obviously welcome if you're watching the recording to email any other questions that you might have to support at betterunite.com. We will do our best to get back to you even if I don't get to questions that you might have today. ⁓ I would love to talk to you and chat with you so please do that. I want to bring to you today the pulse of the donor 2025, a report that is produced by Fundraise Up and Stripe, both very well respected partners of BetterUnite.
And they aggregate data. And what's unique about the Pulse of the Donor Report is the volume of data that they have. So I mentioned that I was going to start out talking about myself, a little bit of an uncomfortable space for me, but I did begin my career working with nonprofit organizations. I've been a development director, an executive director. I've been an events-based ⁓ development director.
communications director as well at some point, and then many times over and currently a board member for nonprofit organizations. All of that experience led to me being a co-founder or as my team lovingly likes to say, the person that complained loud and long enough that someone built software to shut her up. That experience though, drove the creation of BetterUnite. And you know, I've had the conversation
many, many times from every seat at the table around donor engagement, what are donor behavior and activity? What are our donors doing today? What are they doing differently from yesterday? And what do we think that they're going to do tomorrow? And the truth of that conversation is that it's typically very short-sighted because it's limited by data. What I always craved and wanted and knew
that the perspective would be different if I had it was some form of aggregate data across many, many organizations, many, many people and their behavior and what they actually were doing when it came to making a donation. I was always hungry for that. At the time it was pretty much Facebook alone and there were all these Facebook groups of nonprofit development directors and
and different fundraisers and it was like, well, what is your organization doing in this? How is your organization and your activity compared to what I'm doing? And that's really wonderful, it's great. It gives us a lot of context, we learn from each other so well. But the actual numbers tell us things that we cannot otherwise know. And that's what we're talking about, really benchmarks and reporting. I'm so proud, Better United as well, very proud to be a partner of Fundraise Up and Stripe.
They are the producers of the Pulse of the Donor 2025. And this report pulls from real data. We're going to like dig into it from starting out at that kind of 30,000 foot view, but then we'll get a lot more granular ⁓ and we'll jump into it from the perspective of people that I don't want to say care about the most, but that I understand the most, the development directors, the executive directors and the board members.
you all who are in the weeds tasked with creating strategy and then executing upon that strategy. So let's go. But before we get to the actual data and actually I've put a link. If you're watching a recording, you'll see a link to the pulse of the donor 2025 on the blog. But I've also got a link here in the chat. If you're joining me live, I want to give you some context around why, you know, not just my experience, but why I think this is really worth your time. And there's, you know,
Today, right here in 2026, we do have access to a lot more data. The problem that I had back then, pre 2018, 2020, that problem has really been solved. We've got GivingUSA, we have the fundraising effectiveness project, we have the M &R benchmarks, and by the way, GivingUSA and fundraising effective projects better unite partners with both of those organizations in both providing data.
and supporting the data that gets produced, the reports that get produced. All of these are very, very valuable. They're exceptionally well curated and cultivated and brought together. The smartest minds are out there on our side looking into these exact questions. But I would say that the pulse of the donor is just a little bit different because of what lives underneath it. Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments globally.
FundraiseUp is a leading donation or fundraising platform that serves thousands of nonprofits. And when you combine that kind of like payment infrastructure data with the platform level data and FundraiseUp works with BetterUnite customers, it works across many, many other ⁓ donor management and not so many event tools. Actually, I think BetterUnite might be one of their only event tools, but a lot of other platforms.
then you get this kind of like surface level, ground level view of what's actually happening, you know, at the time of the transaction. And so, you know, there are some parts of the data that both fundraise up and giving USA, I know for sure report on that are a little bit anecdotal. What, what a donor says that they're going to do, what they tell, you know, a surveyor that that's going to happen. But, you know, fewer of those. And of course both of both giving USA and fundraise.
fundraising effectiveness projects, those are the two I know best. They both have these components as well, but we want to know what do donors do when they actually open their wallets, right? And of course, why does BetterUnite care about this? Because we serve nonprofits on every level and across fundraising and events and donor management from a software side and our
Our whole reason for existing frankly is to help organizations raise more money, do it more effectively and find efficiencies in every capacity and always, always reducing friction. And that means that we need to understand the trends as well as you do. We are not a software company that happens to work with nonprofits. We are a team and we are built by practitioners like me. And that's, think a very distinguishing point.
And we built a platform specifically because what we saw that wasn't working from the inside, not from just the donor perspective, we've worn all of the hats. All right, let's actually talk about what the pulse of the donor says. And again, I want to start out at that 30,000 foot view that I mentioned before we go granular. The headline question that everyone wants answered is always is giving up or down and the
honest answer is, and it has been for the last several years, it's complicated. It's nuanced. There's, you know, I think actually more, what's more useful than a simple up or down, complicated is what donors are also experiencing as well. What the data would tell us is that overall charitable giving has remained relatively stable on the whole.
but the distribution is shifting rather dramatically. What that means in practice is that some organizations are raising more than ever, and some are also watching donor counts shrink, even if the total dollars raised looks the same, or even if it's grown on paper. So like to put it in the pie graph example, the pie graph is still there and it's still whole. If anything, it might've gotten a little bit bigger.
But the slices, they're different sizes now. So it's being cut differently. And the part that we should really pay attention to as a sector, and we've talked about this on the 501c drop before, is that donor retention is still the sector's most urgent and unsolved problem. The fundraising effectiveness project that I've mentioned, it's been telling us for years that we lose roughly half our donors every year. Like I have to read my paper.
to actually really say that out loud. It feels impossible. We lose half our donors every year. And this report, the Pulse of the Donor, it reinforces exactly that pattern. We are very good as a sector at acquiring new donors. We talk about that all the time. And I know that I've been in the meetings where that's exactly what your board has asked you to do. But we haven't done a good job
in figuring out how to keep our donors. even if we haven't, even if we have figured out some parts of it, I really believe that a lot of this is a bandwidth problem. We might know what we should be doing to steward those donors, but we might not believe or understand that we have the capacity or the time to do it in. So, you know, I want to say something that I don't think gets, I don't think that it gets said enough. ⁓
When I was a development director, donor retention was always on my list, like always there, always something that I knew I needed to pay attention to. But it was competing with every other situation that came along with every emergency, every house on fire, every upcoming, you know, event or gala, every board meeting for which I had to produce. And frankly, at that time, really go in and create reports.
it didn't always or almost never rise to the top of the pile. And I think that today still a lot of development directors are in that exact same place. You know that retention is the lever, right? But the operational bandwidth is just not there. So when I see this data from the pulse of the donor, I'm not looking at it and I'm thinking like, shame on you.
hey, you organization, you should go do this, you should go do that, right? As my friend would say, don't should all over yourself. I think what does this data tell us about where our focus is and where we could use to expand our bandwidth? And I truly believe that the answer is recurring giving. We're gonna come back around to that here in depth in a little bit in a few minutes because it's truly one of the most important segments in this report in my opinion. But.
First, I do wanna talk about the different channels. And again, when I was fundraising, so think like, I'm dating myself, early 2000s, maybe like mid 2000s to mid 2010s. The channel conversation at that time, certainly towards the earlier parts of that time, was really binary, right? There was direct mail and events. Really, that was it. Online giving was just ramping up. I can remember even when BetterUnite very first began in 2018,
online giving was only like 16 % of all donations, a very, very small. And I thought frankly at the time, a surprisingly small segment of that pie. It was just really becoming a thing. And I remember that the first time I got a significant online gift and I was like genuinely surprised by it. We had a donate button on our website, frankly, I don't think that it always was working. So the channel landscape back then,
very different from the channel landscape in 2025 and now today in 2026. It's almost unrecognizable. The pulse of the donor is going to tell us today, donors are now giving on their devices. Mobile giving is not just a nice to have. And when I say mobile giving, you know, every website can be opened on a mobile device almost today, right? What I really mean is the mobile experience.
What do I, what does a donor see? Is the page optimized for mobile? It's a primary channel. A significant and growing portion of online donations are completed on mobile devices. And the critical nuance is that donors who encounter friction on mobile pages that are slow to load pages that made sense on a desktop, but don't really on a mobile device, you need to be able to choose a layout both on, you know, or create your, page layout.
both on a desktop view and then also on a mobile device. If you have that flow and it doesn't really feel good to the donor who's experienced it, it feels clunky, there's friction, they've had to fill out too many fields or things go slowly or it bounces them back, you are losing real money to the mobile experience. And most organizations don't even know it because
They're not looking at their drop-off analytics. I'm get around to that. One thing that I would love to flag for you here, actually we're get around to it right now, I've decided to say it, is that your abandonment rate for your donations is critical and important. If you're one of my BetterUnite users, we offer this through our integrations with both Fundraise Up and Feather. If people are coming to your checkout page or they've made it through the donation and they get to the checkout page and they are not completing or finalizing that gift,
You need to know about that. Every abandoned donation is a donor who like raised their hand and then they got stopped by some friction, some friction that you can stop, some friction you can change. Again, too many fields, page loading slowly. Some you can't. A kid walks in and talks to you, you leave your phone, you put it down, you go somewhere else to do another thing. But whatever the reason is, it matters. For...
Again, for my BetterUnite customers, we offer this through other integrations, and this is going to be true for most fundraising platforms. And if it's not, you need to consider this because it really is a place. And I can tell you and promise you that the for-profit companies that live in your world, that you're visiting their sites, they are paying attention to this number as well. It's very, very easy to set up these days to see what people are doing when they come.
when they opt in to coming to your website. Okay, another thing from our Pulse of the Donor report. Digital wallets. Digital wallets are growing. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo as well, the ability to give without reentering a credit card number. This is becoming, or has become, I would argue, an expectation, not a perk or a feature.
The report shows that donors who can give in fewer clicks give at higher rates. I would also argue this is true for, again, I said those checkout fields. Donations, as simple as possible. I know we want all of their information. It's not always something that we're going to get at that very first transaction. We're gonna come back around to that as well. It shouldn't really surprise anybody that's filled out a long pledge form and it took forever and you kind of glaze over halfway through. ⁓ I would even add that at your events,
Guests are becoming less likely to carry a handbag with their credit cards and maybe even bring a wallet, but they are absolutely going to bring their phone. Walking up to checkout, they've already got their phone in their hand and it's always almost even out and ready. And then what you want to be able to do is to preauthorize their credit card using that digital wallet and also, and or,
having allowed your guests to preauthorize their credit card before they ever even walked into your event, sometimes at that checkout screen, I can tick yes, save my credit card on file for use at the event. Some people catch that, some people don't. But even if I don't, having sent them some reminders prior to via text and email, let them sign up for the silent auction or the raffle, and give them the opportunity to get into that guest experience.
preauthorize their credit card as I like to joke with their face with the pre-populated fields and all of that is happening through a mobile device and a digital wallet. Stripe also has allowed BetterUnite, our platform, to provide ⁓ different ways to accept preauthorizations for credit cards at events. We have a tap to preauthorize so the person that's checking somebody in holds their phone out. I can lay my credit card on top of their phone and that preauthorizes the credit card.
I can also have a Stripe reader. I really should have pulled one out and shown it to you, but I can have a Stripe reader that I can use my digital wallet as I walk up to preauthorize my credit card. So nobody's having to type in anything or even ask me for my zip code. We can make all of that really fluid and very, very easy because the goal is to remove the friction both in the digital wallet setting, both and in the mobile giving and at your events. You know, I can't help it. I'm always going to mention our events.
Okay, another stat or data point from the fundraise up stripe pulse of the donor report is that peer to peer giving continues to strove to show strong potential, but execution remains inconsistent. So it's not that peer to peer giving has fallen by the wayside or even diminished at all. It is that a lot of the time, the way that a peer to peer campaign is run or
provided to the donors is lacking in some capacity. so what peer-to-peer, let me back up, peer-to-peer giving is where you ask your donors to fundraise on behalf of your mission. It's really, truly one of the highest ROI activities or strategies in the sector. And it's super cost effective. Those donors that do fundraise on your behalf, they have a far higher affinity for your organization because they
Typically the person that's fundraising on your behalf, they've got some strong relationship with you already or you've enticed them through the campaign. But then the person that donates to your your fundraisers campaign, the language here gets always very confusing. But I have my kind of ambassadors out there who have created fundraising pages on my behalf based on my campaign. The donors that those fundraising pages from my ambassadors attract, those folks have a higher affinity because
They gave to your organization, but they also gave to a friend, a personal acquaintance, some other unifying aspect happened with that donation. It's a personal relationship. that gap is, or the gap is that most organizations set up a peer campaign and then they kind of think or hope that it's gonna run on their own. So they don't end up supporting their fundraisers.
And with a lot of peer-to-peer tech these days, certainly within BetterUnite, there are so many settings at the outset from the beginning that you can opt into that communicate with your fundraising teams or your fundraisers all along the way. Setting milestones so that they get a celebration when they hit $1,000 raised or whatever those things are, communicating with them, providing materials, assets that they can use. ⁓
copy paste, email drafts, all of those things really matter. So the way that the peer to peer campaign itself is set up and executed and communicated to both funders or fundraisers and donors is super important. They need tools, they need scripts. And then I think honestly, most of all, they just need encouragement. ⁓ It's not gonna happen through some magical portal ⁓ just because you gave them a link.
All right, and a final point here on data within Pulse of the Donor Report. I've got actually many more, but for this section, text to give and SMS engagement are growing, but they are still underutilized. So this is an area that I do think probably is the result of previous bad experiences where an organization or a development director or a fundraiser has had a negative experience with mobile
texting, communications, SMS messaging. They've worked with older platforms in the past, way before. And the experience wasn't great and the cost was very high. This used to be very expensive tech. The platforms they over-promised and under-delivered and the campaigns just didn't end up doing what people had hoped that they would do. When this all came about, everybody was so excited about it and buy it. And now...
Today, it's a little bit less utilized. QR codes are somewhat to be blamed for this. We learned at events, we don't longer need to put a number and a short code ⁓ up onto a screen. We can just put a QR code, someone scans it, and hopefully you've got the kind of right tech that can take you straight to your guest experience page or your magic link and you can make your donation there. But when this Pulse of the Donor data is going to tell us that when text messaging is used
And let me really highlight this point strategically and not as a blast, everything and everyone with five, six, seven, 10 messages that you've ever had in your CRM. The ones that are used strategically and as point solutions really do overperform. They have strong response rates and particularly so in these kind of urgent ask.
or and obviously in event day giving, we're kind of encouraging our organizations to text folks while they're at your event, they're going to know it's not spam and it's useful and pertinent information to the donor. And then also, of course, there's the channel that in my opinion doesn't really get talked about quite enough, even in the context of the pulse of the donor, but I do think it deserves its own spotlight. And, you know, that is recurring giving.
The recurring giving story, monthly donors, sustainers, whatever you want to call them. It doesn't matter to me, but this is the segment of the pulse of the donor data that I really do think it's the most important to understand. And I'll tell you where my head was on this when I was a development director and kind of alluded to it already. We had a, and this is actually, I can say is kind of an aggregate story for several different organizations I worked for. We would have a monthly giving program.
It was probably called Monthly Giving. Maybe it even had a cute name. honestly, actually, I think the last one that I did had a cool name. We liked it. And we were proud of it. But if I'm really honest with myself, looking back, in hindsight, it's always 2020. And frankly, all of this is kind of the point of the 501c drop. We built it and then just let it run. And it was this background machine, sometimes bringing in things that would be very exciting.
⁓ but it wasn't really a focus, almost never. And the, you know, acquisition, it was built, right? We did it. We created it. And then we, when we let it run the, whatever we were going to do to acquire those recurring giving donors, we did it, but we did it once. So we did create a flow, but we didn't really like follow through the retention work on it was really minimal.
And we probably sent those donors maybe one, maybe two specific, I mean, I hope we didn't do this. I hope we didn't only send them appeals. I do believe that we would send them a specific communication around a newsletter type thing specifically for recurring donors. I can't completely remember that, but ⁓ we did send something to try to upgrade those donors maybe once a year.
And you know, honestly, at the time I felt like that was the thing. We were doing what we should have been doing. But what I didn't fully understand at the time, and this is what I believe the pulse of the donor really kind of crystallizes here, is that recurring donors, they're not just a revenue line. They can be, and particularly in an environment like we have today, they are really a means to stabilization, a stabilization mechanism. That's what I wrote here.
They are the donors who will give you predictable income and cashflow in the months where cashflow can feel a little bit tenuous. I mean, what happens when your event rains out? What happens when your government grants for whatever reason is pulled? The recurring donation kind of pipeline or underlay or whatever you want to call it, it really can be mission saving at different times.
I mean, what happens when a global pandemic shuts everything down? That's another one. So the pulse of the donor data on recurring giving is really striking. And here we go. Recurring donors have dramatically higher lifetime values than one-time donors. This, I know, maybe this feels like it shouldn't be news, but somehow it actually feels like it is. ⁓ Because I think that the magnitude is what's impressive here.
You know, we're not just talking about like a little bit higher. We're talking substantial multiples. A donor who gives $25 a month for three years is worth $900. That same donor as a one-time giver, so the $25 a month donor, we could probably rely on them for maybe a $70 to $5 one-time gift, maybe at the outside. So $75 versus $900. That's not subtle math.
Recurring donor retention, and this was what really surprised me as well, is significantly higher than one-time donor retention. So when we have this donor retention problem, if we can lead these folks into becoming recurring donors, we immediately solve some of our retention problems. Once somebody sets up a recurring gift, they are far less likely to lapse than someone who gave one time. So our LIBUND processes, all of those things,
They won't have to apply when we have them in that recurring giving flow. The passive nature of giving works in your favor. The decision to give, it was made one time. And yet the donations continue to come in. So your job has gotten a whole lot easier. And then the channel of recurring giving is also changing. It's changing to digital. It has shifted. Legacy, when I was a development director, almost all.
They, a lot of the time came in as checks, which was always surprising, but they did come. So that's great. But a lot of the time, if they were digital, they were ⁓ EFTs, electronic fund transfers or ACH, right? So bank to bank. ⁓ Now what we see and you know, it's also and, so it's not but, it's and. We are really seeing a lot more credit card based and digital wallet based recurring giving. And what this means practically is that your
Donation fundraising platforms ability to handle card updater logic, failed payment recovery, and mobile friendly recurring enrollment is a fundraising issue. It is not something that you should ignore, and it's not just a technology issue. This is something that we need to really pay attention to. And I do want to be transparent because I think it matters. BetterUnite.
built our platform with recurring giving as a first class feature from the ground up. It was never an afterthought. The reason for that is exactly this kind of data. Everything we've seen in the sector data, including the pulse of the donor, reinforces this. And our partnership with Stripe on this report is meaningful, specifically because Stripe's payment infrastructure gives us visibility into the recurring giving patterns that most platforms can't see.
When you're processing at Stripe scale, hundreds of billions of dollars, you can see what failure modes exist in recurring giving, card declines, expiration dates, needing to be updated, payment method transitions, and then as platforms, as software platforms, we can begin to build solutions to solve to those issues or problems. So what I want you all, development directors, executive directors, board members,
to walk away from with is that if you do not have a formal recurring giving strategy and effort in place, you need to think about putting one in place. You also, it's not just a one-time gig. We're going to think through acquisition strategy, retention strategy, a cadence of outreach to those donors specifically and intentionally.
And we're going to make somebody on the team accountable for the health of the recurring giving effort. It's really one of the highest priority gaps that I see or that I hear about in a lot of nonprofit organizations. It can't be a new event every time. doesn't need, you don't need to think through the setup every time a donor comes in. You need to have the ability to
put the tools into place to both gather your recurring donors and then steward them and then make sure and know that that's going, it's running, and you're also watching it. All right, those are your action items. All right, here in the middle, I've already given them to you. All right, and then another thing that the pulse of the donor talks about, we keep talking about this ad nauseum, and I think we're going to keep talking about it because we are right here at the precipice of the greatest transfer of wealth that...
has ever happened in the history of the world. I think I've heard numbers between 113 and $75 million, excuse me, trillion, that's TR billion, trillion dollars, 113 to 72 trillion dollars is going to transfer from one generation to the next or to the below four, because we have five together all at one time right now. That transfer is going to happen over the course of the next 20 years. And best estimates that I've seen is that about
13 trillion of that will come to nonprofit organizations either directly from the boomer generation or from the folks that inherit the money. So let's talk about those generations for a minute because this is why it's very important. And I really like, you know, again, I've heard this a lot and I'm in a lot of rooms where this gets talked about a whole lot. ⁓ but I do think that there's, yeah, I'd like to frame this in an actually useful way because you know, the
The truth is a lot of times the sector talks about generational giving and there's either gross oversimplification or utter panic and there's nowhere in between. So the panic version goes, boomers are aging out of giving millennials, aren't replacing them. We're all in trouble. It's all about to fall apart. And then an oversimplified version goes, Gen Z gives, but in a different way. So get on TikTok. There's nuance and something in between.
And I mean, the other truth is that neither of those two statements are things that you can like, they're super actionable. I mean, there's one action. You can start a TikTok account, but like, let's pause, take a breath and look at what the data is actually going to tell us. First, your major pipeline is aging. This is something we can't get away from. And we actually know that it's happening and all the data tells us this is true. And our experience living in the world, being humans in America, we know this is true. It's real.
and it requires a strategy, it requires some attention. The donors who are giving at the highest levels right now, large single gifts, estate gifts, ⁓ stock donations, the donors who move the needle, those donors that really make an impact in your year in numbers, they're gonna skew older. That makes sense, that's really probably always been the case. And that's not the...
problem for today's budget, but it is a problem for your budget in five, maybe 10 years, maybe sooner. And the time to think about it is actually right now. And we have some suggestions and the data is telling us what to do. Younger donors give smaller amounts, but they give earlier in their relationship with the organizations. So,
The old model of donor cultivation where you reach out to a donor and you're talking to them for weeks and weeks, months, even years before they make any significant gift, that's not really occurring as much anymore. You wouldn't even think when I was beginning fundraising to make a significant ask or even a first ask.
until you had laid the groundwork with many, conversations. And I'm not saying that that's a bad idea today. I'm just saying that younger generations seem to be operating in a little bit of a different way. They will give a small gift quickly. That's like almost not even thinking about. And they'll often do that through some form of peer connection, whether they attended an event that a friend invited them to through a peer to peer campaign, because they were socially influenced on
a social media channel, and they'll do that. And then they're going to be paying attention to how you treat them. And they're also, and this isn't touched on as much in the Pulse of the Donor, but we also know of these younger generations that they are less inclined to give to an organization and much more inclined to give to either a person, their friend, whomever, an influencer, whatever that is, or a cause.
So touting your, putting your reports in front of them and your, everything that you have, your 990s and all of that data, that's great. And they might appreciate it and they certainly want to be communicated with, but that's not typically going to inspire them or cause them to make the gift. And so what they want to know though, is how did you use
their funds, how are you leveraging their trust? Is their investment in your organization making an impact on the cause that they care about? These are the things that our younger donors really, really want to know. And the data on digital nativity also matters for your acquisition strategy. That's a really weird sentence that I wrote. But donors under 45 are overwhelmingly finding organizations
and making first gifts through digital channels. That could be search, social, peer fundraising, whatever, any one of those. And if your digital acquisition funnel is broken, then, or maybe it's even non-existent, you are not even reaching this cohort at all. So my takeaway for this, for all of my nonprofit folks, is that honestly, this is a board-level conversation.
The generational shift in your donor base is not an exclusively development department problem. It is an organizational sustainability problem that belongs at the highest level of leadership. If your board is not asking about the age distribution of all of your donors, they really should be. So board members hear me, ask these questions. And if they're also not asking about digital acquisition strategy,
and making that strategy a top priority and the, even maybe the actual, know, revolution of that strategy, but just taking a really strong and hard look at it, that's also something that a board should be asking of the executive staff. And I, trust me, I know that board conversations around fundraising and fundraising, even fundraising data, they can be unpleasant and hard.
But I, you know, I've also been on every side of that table, board member and staff side, and frankly, the fundraiser that everybody was just staring at and looking at and hoping that I hit numbers that they had come up with that I didn't really have any influence on. But I do believe that the organizations that will thrive in the next decade are the ones whose leadership understands that donor acquisition is a part of their infrastructure.
and it's not just an expense or a line item. All right, I would like to spend a few minutes on something that is kind of adjacent to the pulse of the donor data, but I really do think that it's critical context and it's again, also something that doesn't get talked about in fundraising circles. We at BetterUnite talk about it with our clients and our prospects all day long. And I know that other platforms are as well.
The report's going to tell you, again, what do the donors want? They want less friction. They want more mobile ease. They want digital opportunities for donations. ⁓ They want recurring giving that is easy to opt into, and it just works that they don't have to think about it. That's the demand side. The supply side question, however, is what are you paying for your fundraising infrastructure, and is it aligned with the needs of your donors?
And I'm like have no other speed here than rather direct. So, cause like I said, I do think that our sector kind of dances around this. And the question is around how you pay for your fundraising software. Platform fees matter and your subscription fees. A lot of times organizations are exclusively looking at subscription fees. And those are important because they can be very hefty.
And you are typically paying for multiple different tools and each one of those has a subscription fee. I know a really good platform if you want to solve that problem. But these are the truths of the organizations of most people. There's a tech stack and every piece of that tech stack or every layer of that tech stack has a subscription fee. And a way that software for nonprofits has been able to lower that subscription fee
is by offering the opportunity for a transaction fee to be applied or a platform fee to be applied to every transaction. And this is the way BetterUnite works. It's the way many nonprofit serving software companies work, frankly, for-profit software companies work as well. But the dollar amount of that fee matters. If you're paying above 5 % per transaction for your fundraising software, your ticketing software, any of that,
And some of these quote unquote free tools will offer again air quotes your donors the opportunity all air quotes to pay up to 22 % per transaction to the software platform.
then there is a disconnect between the service that's being provided to you by that software and the way that you're showing up in front of your donors. The difference between the numbers here is really staggering. A platform fee in the 1 % to 3 % range is a healthy way to lower a subscription price.
Having the opportunity to pay a higher subscription price and then you don't have as big of a transaction fee or a platform fee. That's also a really important feature. And BetterUnite charges 2.5 % to 1%. And we have landed on those numbers after so much internal speaking and strife and all of the things. And I'm telling you all of this not as a sales pitch, but as a value statement. When I was a development director, I watched our organization
pay fees. is literally the campaign that drove me to becoming a founder of BetterUnite. I didn't understand the platforms. I didn't understand the data collection processes of these platforms and they didn't service very well. And the platform fees were at that time that I was using exorbitant well into the well above 5 % per transaction. And it was honestly, it is honestly one of the primary reasons that I became involved with BetterUnite. And again,
someone built software to solve my problems ⁓ because I knew that those fees were ⁓ going to organizations that were operating on really thin margins. ⁓ Again, it is a very good way to offset a subscription price, but it should not be the only thing. And our partnership with Stripe on Pulse of the, or the partnership with Stripe and Stripe's influence on the Pulse of the Donor is meaningful in part because Stripe's infrastructure
is what allows us to maintain that fee structure. Stripes payment processing costs, the underlying economics matter to what we can offer nonprofits, very direct. And now I also really want to say that the right platform for your organization isn't just about fee percentage or the subscription fee, it really isn't. It's really about whether or not it meets the needs that are being surfaced here in the pulse of the donor. Does it handle recurring giving well?
Is it mobile optimized? Does it recover failed payments? Does it give you the data you need to make decisions? Does it provide a path for you to cultivate and then steward your recurring donors, your event attendees, and your one-time donors, all of them in their own and unique ways and places. The cost of a cheap platform that doesn't convert is higher than the cost of a well-priced platform that does.
And, but you should really know what you're paying. Honestly, that's what it boils down to. You should pay attention. You should understand fee structure. You should be judicious. Decide when is it appropriate to pass fees on? When should you take them on yourselves? And you should be asking platform vendors the same questions this report raises about donor experiences that should very much and always be central to the way that you're looking at your software providers all across the board.
Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground and if you're a development director, I've got three key takeaways for you. One, audit your recurring giving program, do it as soon as you can, maybe even this week. Pull your lapse rate, your failed payment rate, your upgrade rate, and if you don't have those numbers, find out why you don't. That's a real gap in the data and the infrastructure that you need. Two,
look at your mobile abandonment rate or even your checkout page abandonment rate. Go into your fundraising platform analytics and again, sometimes this requires setting up an integration or connecting different tools, but you can get there and you'll want to start finding out how many people started a donation and then didn't finish it. And if that number is really high, then there's something that you need to do with that page.
Even better, if you can understand and know which ones were made on a desktop versus mobile, which you can, and then make adjustments that are separate and different to each. And key with some of these adjustments is not changing everything all at once. It's to change one to two things, see how it works, and then try something else if things don't change. And then number three, build a recurring giving acquisition goal into your next fundraising plan or strategic annual plan.
It's really not a nice to have. is really key. It's very essential. is honestly, it's a primary number that you need to base many of your decisions on. And what percentage of new donors do you want to convert to recurring? One of the things that I've grown, you know, I've started advising nonprofits to talk to us is to put an opportunity to convert to a recurring donor in your acknowledgement to people that make a one-time gift.
Sometimes they just didn't have the right vehicle. Maybe you're sending a thank you for their silent auction purchase and you can put in that one small line. Maybe it's even a footer, know, make a bigger impact, become a monthly donor today. People sometimes just really need the invitation. I don't need to tell my development directors that, but for my board members and executive directors, sometimes that's what we need. And if you're, you know,
If you're thinking about a couple of, if you're at the more like executive director and board member level, I've got a couple of suggestions for you. First of all, have that generational giving conversation with your board. If you're already a board member, become the squeaky wheel on that topic. If you're an executive director, bring it to your board. Bring this data, bring this pulse. I've got the link in our chat. You can bring the data to them.
Ask your board, what is the average age of our top 50 donors? That's something that you should be able to get. And if that's, here I am convincing you or making the argument for making your checkout forms really short, great, I absolutely think you should do that. So how do you get somebody's age? Well, that's where our cultivation and our stewardship and all of the work that we can do on the back end, that's where that occurs. If you've got a much smaller donor acquisition list, don't be afraid to look them up on social media and you can get a,
and age range, that's really all we're looking for, not their exact age. We just need to know who's under 45 and who's above 60. And that's going to give you so much data. Those two groups alone, there's far, far, far more segmentation you can do, but those two groups alone really do want different styles of communication. They want the content to be different and they want the way that you reach out to them to be different. So start having these kind of conversations and
I really think that these are governance level fiduciary responsibility conversations or questions to ask. And another thing you can do is understand what you're paying in fees and subscriptions all across the board. For your entire tech stack, it's just a good thing for you to know and be accountable to. It's the responsibility that should be taken. And then another thing is that you should invest in your development director.
the tools, the data, the training, the conferences where they can connect with other people working in this space. The development director is making strategy decisions all day, every day. And if they are doing that without access to what the sector benchmarks are saying and what the data is telling us, then you're operating with a tiny
view or a small view of your smaller subset, whereas all of this information, all of this data is looking vastly across every donation and all of the transactions made within the U.S. And honestly, for everyone, I encourage you to read the report. Fundraise up and Stripe have done an incredible job. They've ⁓ aggregated all of this report. We have other reports coming out as well, which are exciting. In June, I believe, we'll get the GivingUSA report.
on 2025 data and the fundraising effectiveness project. That data will come out later in the year as well, talking to us about how donations have gone all the way across the board. All of this is really important information. I really encourage you to take a look at it and let, like don't just let it be a report that you read, let it inform the decisions you make and the actions that you take. All right.
I started on this episode talking about being in the room and at the table and all the things. you know, I spent a really long time on the your side of the conversation and trying to translate the small amount of data that I could get my hands on, which again was usually my organization's own data. I tried to convert that into real resources under constraints. And I really do know how hard that is.
And I know what it feels like to want better tools. Trust me, I know what it feels like. And also not have the budget for them. That's a huge caveat. And I know the exhaustion of being asked to do more with less over and over and over. It is such a ⁓ hardship for our nonprofit organizations. And that's why BetterUnite exists because of that experience. The Pulse of the Donor Partnership also exists because of that experience.
Everything that we do is built around the idea that the people who are doing this work deserve real data, real tools, and real support. Thank you so much for being here, for coming and watching this episode of the 501c drop. Again, my name is Leya Simmons. I will put in the notes our next ⁓ 501c drop, which is next Tuesday.
April, let's see, what is it? April 20. Can I do that? One, April 21st at 1 30 central. It is called, this is one of my favorite titles, the run of show that raises more dough. Matt Newsome, a benefit auctioneer specialist will be here joining me. He has some magic that he has put together over the years to help all of you create your fundraising events, flow the script, the cadence in a way that will ensure
that you are going to raise more money at your next event. You don't want to miss it. I don't have my QR code that I usually do pulled up, so I apologize for that, but we will link all of it. if you are already on our list, then you should have gotten an email earlier today telling you about it. If not, follow me on social media. I'm Leya Simmons, L-E-Y-A, spelled weird like you can see here, or follow BetterUnite. On any of the channels that you choose, we'll...
post a lot of information about it. Really, you don't want to miss Matt's information. And if you've got any further questions, as I mentioned, support at betterunite.com. If you'd like to take a look at BetterUnite after all of this, we would love to show you around. Send those emails over and we can get a demo on the books for you. Thank you for all that you're doing. Thank you for being here today. I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day. Let's go do some good. Bye bye.