Ask most nonprofit fundraisers and development directors what keeps them up at night, and they won't say "we don't have enough donors." They'll say, "we don't have enough new donors." And the data backs them up.
In 2025, total giving in the U.S. went up 5%. Sounds great, right? Except the number of people actually giving went down by 3.6%. That's not a one-year blip. It's the fifth year in a row that donor counts have dropped, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's full-year 2025 data, which tracked over 15,000 nonprofits. Fewer people are giving. The ones who still are, are giving more. That's a sign of a shrinking base, not a growing one. Like a store with rising sales because its remaining loyal customers are spending more, while foot traffic quietly dries up.
It gets more specific. Small donors (e.g. people giving between $1 and $100) still make up 57% of everyone who donates. But that group shrank 11.1% in just one year. Overall donor retention sits at 43.3%. How did new donor retention do? Just 18.9%. That means about 4 out of 5 first-time donors never give again.
Here's the part that should change how nonprofits think about all this: while cash giving struggles to bring in new donors, item giving is quietly doing the opposite. In 2025, 40.6% of Americans donated an item or good, beating the 39.2% who gave money. For the first time, giving stuff edged out giving cash. Among Gen Z, the gap is even wider: 45% gave items versus 43% who gave money.
Why does this matter? Because item giving isn't just "donating differently." It's reaching people who weren't giving at all. A large field study (Fuchs, de Jong & Schreier, published in Management Science, 2020) followed over 7,300 potential donors across 25 countries and found that letting people earmark a specific gift mostly worked by pulling in people who otherwise wouldn't have given at all. Not people switching from cash to items. New people, period.
That's the story nonprofits should be telling right now: item giving (also known as in-kind giving) isn't a side program. It's one of the only channels still bringing in new donors while the rest of the sector shrinks.
Here's the takeaway for your organization:
If your donor acquisition strategy is 100% cash asks, you're fishing in a shrinking pond while ignoring a growing one right next to it. Mindful Giving exists because we believe the answer to donor decline isn't "ask harder." Instead, it's "give people a way to donate that meets them where they already are."
Sources: Fundraising Effectiveness Project, FY2025 (April 2026); GivingTuesday GivingPulse 2025; Fuchs, de Jong & Schreier, Management Science (2020).
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