“Nonprofits are not in the business of raising money. They are in a competition for connection.”
I wrote that in The Generosity Crisis in 2022, and I believed it then. But I will be honest: I did not expect the data to confirm it this quickly, or this clearly.
We recently published the 2026 Virtuous Nonprofit Benchmark Report, and it backs up that belief with well-grounded data.
Why The 2026 Virtuous Nonprofit Benchmark Report Exists
Before I walk through the numbers, I want to say something about why this report exists. I spent twenty years leading nonprofits. Every year, the reports I valued most were the ones that showed me where my organization actually stood. Not where I hoped we stood, or where our board assumed we stood, but where the data placed us against the rest of the sector. That clarity was what allowed me to set honest goals and measure real progress and consistently hit new fundraising levels for the organizations I served.
This is the driving reason Virtuous produces the Nonprofit Benchmark Report at considerable investment of time and resources. Not as a marketing exercise, but as a tool built for the leaders who need it.
That commitment to honest data runs deeper than any single report. This is precisely why Virtuous CEO and Founder, Gabe Cooper, volunteers as the incoming chair of the Giving USA Foundation, which has published the definitive annual report on charitable giving in America for 70 years. He is not stepping into that role to expand Virtuous’s market share. He is there because the sector needs long-term, reputable data it can trust.
That posture is one of the reasons I joined this company. And it is the lens through which I would ask you to read everything that follows.
If you haven’t yet, you can download your own copy of the 2026 Virtuous Nonprofit Benchmark Report here.
What the 2026 Data Tells Us
The 2026 report, the third iteration of this report, is built on giving data from 771 US-based nonprofits, all of whom are Virtuous customers. The story it tells is perhaps less about fundraising and more about connection.
Retention is essentially flat. First-to-second gift conversion dropped to 25.84%, meaning three out of four new donors never came back. Acquisition barely moved. These are not the metrics of a sector struggling to ask for money. They are the metrics of a sector struggling to build relationships that compel people to stay.
And yet: donor lifetime value jumped nearly 18%. Gift frequency is up. The median gift grew almost 20%. The organizations that are winning are not winning the acquisition competition. They are winning the connection competition. Their donors stay longer, give more often, and give more generously.
Comparing the Virtuous Benchmark Report to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project
The broader sector data makes the case even more clearly. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP), which tracks giving data across more than 15,000 nonprofits, reported full-year 2024 retention at 42.9%, the fifth consecutive year of decline. New donor retention stood at just 19%. Through Q3 2025, total donors were down another 3%, even as dollars raised ticked up 3.7%. The sector continues to raise more money from fewer people, and the base continues to erode. [1]
Against that backdrop, the Virtuous benchmark numbers tell a different story. Overall retention among the Virtuous customers in our study sits at 54.73%, nearly 12 points above the FEP average donor retention figure.
Virtuous’s first-to-second gift conversion, while still sobering at 25.84%, runs well ahead of the FEP’s 19%. These are not organizations doing fundamentally different work. They are organizations that have invested in responsive, relationship-first fundraising, and the data shows it. [1]
But let me be clear. While the Virtuous Benchmark Report shows that Virtuous nonprofit customers greatly outperform the broader industry standards, I don’t view every metric in this report as a cause for celebration.
A 54.73% retention rate still means nearly half of all donors leave every year. Three out of four new donors still disappear after their first gift. There is real, urgent work to do. What follows are five ways AI can help you do it, not to automate your fundraising, but to deepen the connections that make fundraising work in the first place. Your organization deserves it. The sector needs it. Humanity deserves it.
5 Ways the 2026 Nonprofit Benchmark Report Can Increase Fundraising Results
1. Identify Donors About to Lapse Before They Actually Leave
Retention is the clearest measure of how well you are winning the competition for connection. The FEP data paints a stark picture: sector-wide retention at 42.9%, with lapsed donor recapture hovering at just 2%. Once a donor is gone, they are almost certainly gone for good. [1]
Virtuous customers in our study retain donors at 54.73%, with top-quartile organizations reaching nearly 70%. That 12-point gap over the sector average is not a gap in strategy. It is almost always a gap in execution: knowing which donors are quietly disengaging before they have already gone. The warning signs are consistent: declining email open rates, longer gaps between gifts, and smaller gift amounts. By the time a donor skips a year, the window to re-engage them has largely closed.
This is where Virtuous Insights, our donor prospecting tool, earns its keep. It surfaces donors showing early signs of donor churn before they lapse, so your team can step in with a personal touchpoint while the relationship is still intact. The donors drifting toward the exit are flagged. The donors most likely to respond to re-engagement are scored accordingly. Your team moves from reacting to anticipating.
Get a demo of Virtuous Insights.
2. Close the Gap Between a Donor’s First Gift and Their Second
This is the metric I keep coming back to. First-to-second gift conversion dropped to 25.84% in this year’s data. Three out of four new donors never came back. FEP puts that number at 19%, with the most recent quarterly data showing it as low as 14% year to date. The entire nonprofit sector is struggling to convert first-time generosity into lasting relationships. [1]
The average time between a first and second gift, for the donors who do return, is 108.5 days. Top-quartile organizations close that gap to 68 days. The difference is almost always follow-up speed and personalization.
A first gift is not a transaction. It is an opening bid in a competition for connection. How you respond in the hours and days that follow determines whether that donor stays or disappears. The old standard was 48 hours for a personal follow-up. With the right tools, there is no reason to wait that long. Virtuous Momentum, our AI fundraising assistant, alerts gift officers the moment someone in their caseload gives, drafts a personalized follow-up in the gift officer’s voice, and pulls everything your team already knows about that donor into one place. The second gift happens not because you asked for it, but because the first gift was acknowledged in a way that made the donor feel genuinely seen through strong donor stewardship.
Get a demo of Virtuous Momentum.
3. Make Recurring Giving the First Option, Not the Upgrade
Recurring giving as a share of revenue stands at 20.96% across the organizations in this report. Top-quartile organizations generate 44% of their revenue from recurring giving. Nearly half their annual revenue is committed before January 1st.
Most organizations treat monthly giving as something you offer after a donor has proven their commitment. The data suggests the opposite approach works better. When recurring giving is the default, framed not as a transaction but as an ongoing relationship with the mission, more donors choose it. A $30 monthly gift lands differently when a donor understands exactly what it means for the people your organization serves.
AI can identify which donors are most likely to convert to recurring and suggest the right amount based on actual giving history. Virtuous Raise, our online giving platform, puts recurring giving front and center on your donation forms, with suggested monthly amounts calibrated to each donor’s capacity rather than a one-size-fits-all grid. The conversion happens in the moment of generosity, when a donor is already saying yes to your mission.
4. Give Every Mid-Level Donor a Gift Officer
Here is a number worth sitting with: 67.09% of donor revenue in this report comes from major donors. Two-thirds. The FEP expounds on this story: donors giving $5,000 or more represent just 3% of all donors but account for 78% of total dollars raised. The sector’s financial health increasingly depends on a very small number of relationships. [1]
That concentration is a strength when those relationships are deep. It is a fragility when even just a few donors shift unexpectedly.
The donors most organizations consistently underinvest in are the ones in the $1,000 to $9,999 range. Mid-level donors rarely receive major-gift-caliber attention. They do not respond well to mass communications. They sit in the middle, waiting to feel seen.
Virtuous Momentum changes the math. A single gift officer can manage this entire segment with daily prioritized outreach, AI-drafted personalized emails, and automated CRM logging. Every relationship gets cultivation-level attention without requiring a dedicated donor pipeline for each one. That is how you reduce concentration risk and build real resilience into your fundraising model.
5. Turn Benchmark Numbers Into Dashboards Your Board Can Act On
Agape International Missions had the same problem most development teams quietly live with: metrics scattered across spreadsheets, limited visibility for leadership, and no consistent way to track performance month over month. They used last year’s report, the 2025 Virtuous Benchmark Report, as a reference point and built executive dashboards inside Virtuous Analytics tracking all seven core fundraising KPIs. Retention, recurring giving, donor expansion, lifetime value. Real-time. Board-ready. In one place.
“[The Virtuous Benchmark Report] gave us a temperature gauge to see where we’re doing well and where we can improve.” — Michelle Lundberg, CRM Administrator, Agape International Missions
The outcome was not just better reporting. It was renewed board confidence in the organization’s financial health and strategic direction. When your leadership can see exactly where you stand against both sector benchmarks and top-quartile performance, the conversation shifts from anecdote to evidence. Read the full AIM story here.
Find out what steps you can take to make this happen at your org when you read the blog How to Build a Fundraising Dashboard Your Board Actually Trusts (In 6 Steps).
Virtuous Analytics is what makes that kind of visibility repeatable. It turns your benchmark metrics into live, board-ready dashboards your team can build and refresh in minutes instead of weeks, using filters that mirror the sectors and revenue bands in this report. Instead of manually stitching together exports every quarter, your leadership can see retention, recurring revenue, donor expansion, and lifetime value in one place and spot risks before they become crises.
Get a demo of Virtuous Analytics.
Where to Start
If you have downloaded the 2026 Benchmark Report and are not sure which metric to focus on first, the Benchmark Health Check lets you plug in your own numbers and see exactly where your organization stands across 3 metrics: retention rate, average gift size, and recurring giving rate.
If you are ready to pair that diagnosis with action, Virtuous Insights surfaces the donor-level intelligence your team needs to prioritize the right relationships, and Virtuous Momentum puts that intelligence into your gift officers’ daily workflow so it becomes outreach, not just analysis.
The competition for connection is not won with a single campaign or a better ask amount. It is won through consistent, personal, timely relationships at a scale that most teams cannot reach on their own. The data, both ours and the sector’s, is telling you what works. The question is whether you are set up to act on it.
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