What the 2026 M+R Benchmarks Reveal About Nonprofit Fundraising

Every year, we look to the M+R Benchmarks for patterns. Where is donor behavior steady? Where is pressure building? What is the data signaling beneath the surface? The 2026 edition answered all three.

For the nonprofit sector, 2025 was defined by urgency. Federal funding disruption and growing community need created moments that prompted generous responses from donors. Online revenue for the average nonprofit rose 15% in 2025, following two relatively flat years. Nearly every sector saw double-digit growth. The increase was broad, but it was not evenly distributed, and it did not come from typical conditions.

The takeaway is not to optimize harder. It is to adapt with intention. The real question is not how to push more revenue from the same strategy, but how to understand what donors are telling you about their experience, their expectations, and their relationship to giving.

Where Donor Behavior Is Holding

Despite volatility, several donor behaviors remain remarkably stable across the sector.

1. Email and Direct Mail Still Drive Most Revenue

While new platforms continue to draw attention, the Benchmarks confirm that most revenue still comes through channels nonprofits have relied on for years. Email revenue grew 16% across the sector in 2025. The average nonprofit generated $54 for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent, a 4% increase from the prior year. Email accounted for 11% of total online revenue across all sectors.

Direct mail remains just as essential. For every $1 raised online, nonprofits in this study raised $0.66 through direct mail. That figure climbs to $0.87 for the Hunger and Poverty sector, the highest of any group in the study and a strong indicator that integrated programs outperform siloed ones.

This is not about channel competition. Email and direct mail reach donors at different moments and in different mindsets. Each channel has its own strengths in building a direct response program that supports your short- and long-term revenue goals. Nonprofits that treat them as complementary rather than interchangeable continue to see stronger results.

2. Donor Advised Fund Giving Is Accelerating

DAF giving is one of the fastest growing revenue sources tracked in the 2026 study. Across the sector, DAF revenue increased 44% year over year. Nonprofits received 23% more DAF gifts in 2025 than in 2024, with more consistent performance across sectors than in past years. The average DAF gift reached $1,430, more than 10 times the average one-time gift.

The differences between sectors are notable. For Hunger and Poverty organizations, DAF revenue doubled year over year. The average DAF gift rose from $2,105 to $2,510, the highest of any sector. This points to more donors using DAFs as a structured way to give. It suggests that a segment of donors is making deliberate decisions about how and where they contribute, not only responding to moments of crisis.

3. Monthly Giving Remains the Anchor of Stability

Across the sector, 2025 marked a shift in a long-running trend. One-time giving grew faster than monthly giving, with one-time revenue up 17% and monthly giving up 12%. Even so, monthly giving still made up 27% of all online revenue, and its importance is clear.

Retention tells the story. After one year, 71% of monthly donors across the sector remain active, compared to 24% of new one-time donors. Sustainers also tend to give beyond their recurring gifts. On average, monthly donors made 0.2 additional one-time gifts in 2025, generating about $21 in extra revenue per donor.

Monthly giving is more than a revenue stream. It is the foundation of a long-term donor relationship.

Where Pressure Is Building

The same forces that drove growth in 2025 also introduced new vulnerabilities. Four patterns deserve particular attention.

1. Giving Season Concentration

Across the sector, nonprofits raised 37% of their annual online revenue in December, with the final day of the year accounting for 4% on its own. For the Hunger and Poverty sector, that concentration is even higher. Forty-six percent of annual online revenue came in December, the highest share of any sector.

In 2025, a government shutdown and federal funding disruption took place just weeks before Giving Season, bringing increased public attention to hunger and food access. Many organizations saw a surge tied to that visibility. But giving driven by moments like these does not last. The challenge ahead is not just year-end execution. It is maintaining a clear, consistent narrative that carries beyond a single moment.

If crisis visibility drives giving, what happens when the national spotlight shifts?

How can nonprofits sustain a clear, compelling case for support outside of acute moments?

2. Donor Retention After an Emergency Surge

Online donor retention across the sector was 48% in 2025. For Hunger and Poverty organizations, retention was higher at 54%. Even so, 30% of their online revenue came from new donors, many of whom were responding to news about federal funding cuts. That creates a clear challenge. These donors showed up with strong emotional engagement, but that kind of engagement is often tied to a specific moment.

Across the sector, new donor retention was 24%. In simple terms, about three out of four donors who gave for the first time in 2024 did not give again in 2025. Prior donors were far more likely to return, with a retention rate of 66%. It is a clear reminder that the value of existing relationships builds over time.

What does stewardship look like for donors who arrived because of a specific moment, rather than long-term affinity?

How do organizations recognize and respond to that difference without assuming all new donors are motivated the same way?

3. Advocacy Email: The Highest-Engagement Channel Nonprofits Are Underusing

One of the clearest signals in the 2026 Benchmarks is easy to miss. Advocacy email outperforms fundraising email across every engagement metric, but many nonprofits still treat it as secondary.

Fundraising emails generated a click-through rate of 0.59% and a response rate of 0.05%. Advocacy emails performed far better, with a 2.3% click-through rate and a 1.4% response rate. That is 28 times higher than fundraising email. Advocacy also creates a path to giving. About 0.34% of subscribers who took an advocacy action went on to donate. Over the course of the year, nonprofits generated 0.14 advocacy actions per email subscriber, a 27% increase from the previous year.

For the Hunger and Poverty sector, the gap is even wider. These organizations generated just 0.03 advocacy actions per subscriber, compared to 0.14 across all sectors. Given the depth of advocacy topics available, from food insecurity policy to SNAP to community hunger, this stands out as one of the most underused opportunities in the sector.

How much of your email program is built around donor action, rather than donor asks?

What would it look like to design an advocacy-to-donate pathway for your most engaged subscribers?

4. AI Is Changing How Donors Find Nonprofits

AI-driven search and zero-click experiences are reshaping how people discover organizations online. The Benchmarks point to a clear decline in organic website traffic throughout 2025, driven in large part by AI summaries and chatbot-based search. Organic search still accounts for 39% of all nonprofit website traffic, but it declined month over month across the year, and the trend is continuing.

The stakes are significant. Across all nonprofits, 1.6% of website visitors made a donation, generating $1.33 per visitor. For Hunger and Poverty organizations, that same visitor was worth $5.58, more than four times the sector average. When a high-intent visitor never arrives, it is not just a missed click. It is a missed opportunity to build a relationship.

As organic search becomes less reliable, where is your organization investing to remain visible and trusted when donors are ready to act?

Paid media, earned media, and influencer relationships are no longer just awareness channels — they are increasingly the front door.

What the Data Is Quietly Signaling

The Benchmarks are most valuable not only for what they confirm but also for the questions they push organizations to answer.

• Is your organization treating the surge in one-time giving as a retention opportunity or simply as a revenue win? The difference between those approaches will likely shape your 2026 results.
• How are you designing the experience for sustainer prospects, and what happens after a donor converts? Are you continuing to build the relationship?
• Is your organization identifying donors who already hold DAF accounts and making it easy for them to give that way?
• Instead of asking which channel performs better, what changes when you design campaigns with the assumption that each channel reinforces the other?
• As organic discovery declines, where are you investing to remain visible and trusted when donors are ready to act?
• Are you using advocacy email to deepen engagement, or only for policy action? The data suggests there is meaningful revenue in that gap.

These patterns reflect the real decisions, donors, and programs of the organizations that contribute to the M+R Benchmarks Study each year. We are grateful to M+R and to every participating organization whose data makes this level of analysis possible. If you want to explore what these findings mean for your organization, we would welcome the conversation.