Big-Donor Giving Slows; What It Means for Year-End Campaigns

Giving to nonprofits increased by a modest 2.9 percent in the second quarter of 2025, according to new data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

“It looks like we’re seeing some softening at the higher end, so from the larger donors,” says Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer for GivingTuesday, who works on the report. “That’s concerning because we are overreliant on those donors, having put so much of our strategy around major gifts at the expense of broad engagement. So that’s a worrying indicator.”

FEP is a collaboration between the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday that examines trends in giving, based on data from a wide pool of charities. The project’s reports have long noted that charities are increasingly relying on major donors as the number of small-dollar donors shrinks.

While reduced giving by bigger donors is worrying, Rosenbaum says it’s not clear how it will impact year-end giving. This is because tax law changes could spur large donors to make gifts this year, before the law takes effect in 2026.

One piece of good news from the report: Donor engagement and retention have stabilized at roughly the same rate as the previous year.

“This stabilization in retention, along with the increase in dollars raised, shows that fundraisers are looking at the data and adjusting their donor engagement strategies accordingly,” Art Taylor, AFP president, said in a press release.

Taylor and Rosenbaum both think nonprofits should reach out more to all tiers of donors during year-end, rather than just focus on major donors. They say that will allow organizations to reach everyday donors, who will get tax advantages for their gifts starting next year, and increase the amount they contribute in case giving from big donors continues to soften.

“It is extra critical right now for organizations to engage everyday givers and to build a strategy for that that is not just episodic,” Rosenbaum says. “It has to be a consistent strategy of engaging and inviting everyday givers because there is the opportunity there for those folks to fill in this gap, and we’re going to need that diversity of donor base in years to come.”

More data from the FEP report:

• Retained donors accounted for 60 percent of all dollars in the second quarter.
• Donors who gave $100 or less had the lowest retention rate at just 16.8 percent year-to-date. These donors contributed less than 2 percent of total dollars raised, but they account for half of all donors.·      
• The largest organizations, whose fundraising was $5 million to $25 million, saw the sharpest decrease in dollars given, at a 12.2 percent decrease year over year. Smaller organizations, raising less than $250,000, saw a more than 4 percent increase in giving.

Image by Getty Images/iStockphoto

Image by Getty Images/iStockphoto