Small-Donor Counts Fell 11% in a Quarter When Fundraising Dollars Rose

In July 2025 the Association of Fundraising Professionals released its Q1 2025 Fundraising Effectiveness Project data, and the numbers tell a story the sector has been quietly telling itself for years. Dollars raised climbed 3.6% year over year while donor counts fell 1.3%. The group of donors giving between one dollar and one hundred dollars, which still represents 57% of all donors in the FEP data, fell by 11.1%. As of October 16, 2026, FEP's July 2026 release, built on a revised methodology, puts the Q1 2025 comparison at 5.4% dollar growth and a 2.3% donor decline, and reports that in Q1 2026 the $1 to $100 group was the only donor-size group still shrinking, down 2.5% from a year earlier while still 57.0% of all donors. It is tempting to call this an affordability crisis. The data does not say that.

Nothing in the data says the eleven percent stopped being able to give. What the data is consistent with is that they stopped being asked in a way that registered. Nonprofit acquisition strategy has migrated toward higher-value donors, and donor counts have fallen every year since 2021 while dollars rose, which means the operational systems that touched the smallest cohort have been thinning out the way local newsrooms thinned out, losing more than 60% of their reporting and editing positions since 2005. The first ask becomes an email, and the follow-up either disappears or arrives once a year as a recycled annual appeal. The eleven percent walks because no role inside the organization is structurally responsible for keeping them.

That is a design choice. The smallest group of donors is also the hardest to retain, because in the same report 9.8% of the donors who gave $1 to $100 in the prior year had been retained by the end of the first quarter, against 33.0% of donors who gave above $50,000. The sector has run on donor-pyramid modeling for roughly fifty years, meaning the practice of prioritizing donors at higher gift levels and de-prioritizing donors at lower ones, and it has rarely named the consequence. The people inside the pyramid who decided the pyramid was the right shape never wrote down that the base would erode. The base eroded on schedule.

For nonprofit and foundation professionals, the practical implication is sharp. A donor-acquisition program designed around average gift size will continue to produce the eleven percent erosion every year because its incentive structure rewards the loss. Lifetime value modeling, which projects total revenue per donor over time, tends to treat the small-gift donor as unprofitable. The organizations following the modeling are doing exactly what the modeling told them to do. The argument here is that the modeling is wrong, because the small-gift cohort is doing a job the modeling does not measure, which is recruiting the next cohort.

For digital and crypto-native giving leaders, the small-donor data is the bridge to a constituency that institutional fundraising has not built infrastructure for. For a crypto-native donor pool, the design problem is how to build a relationship that gets re-engaged dozens of times across a year rather than how to extract a major gift. The infrastructure that solves the institutional eleven percent problem is the same infrastructure that converts the crypto-native donor into a long-term giving relationship.

For donors and family-office advisors, the same finding changes how an advisor weighs a grantee that also runs grassroots campaigns, because treating that grantee's small-donor base as noise misses that the base is the recruitment engine for the major gifts the client eventually wants to see. Due diligence, meaning the background review an advisor runs before recommending a gift, should therefore ask whether the organization carries structural responsibility for its smallest donors, so that the advisor is funding a pipeline rather than a single tier of it.

For corporate giving and CSR leaders, the small-donor decline changes the math on workplace giving programs and employee engagement campaigns. The employees who participate in modest payroll-deduction giving are the volume layer of the entire institutional pipeline rather than minor donors, and they are exposed to the same acquisition thinning. A corporate giving program that has not been measuring whether its employee donors get re-asked in a way that lands is participating in the same erosion at a smaller scale.

For NGOs and international organizations, meaning nonprofits that run programs across country borders, the eleven percent number lands twice as hard. International causes have to work harder to acquire small donors in the first place, because the distance between the donor and the program is wider and the trust signals are harder to build. Once acquired, that small donor base is also a reliable counter-balance to depending on a small handful of large institutional funders, which means losing eleven percent of it every year is also losing the structural independence that diversified funding provides. The NGO that re-asks its smallest donors as if the relationship mattered most is the one with the room to disagree with its largest funder when it needs to.

The diagnostic question for any organization reading this number is whether it can name, by month, how many of its smallest donors received an ask tuned to the relationship that brought them in. If the answer is no, the eleven percent number will arrive at the door next year as well.

The fix is structural responsibility, assigned to a person and a calendar, for the cohort the rest of the pipeline has been built to neglect, rather than a bigger ask file or a smarter segmentation engine.

"We have been mistaking a design failure for an economic one, and the eleven percent paid for the confusion."EILEEN HERNANDEZ, THE STRATEGIC STEWARD

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This is the second post in the Community Isn't Broken series, and it sits inside the same architecture argument as the first. The design determines the result. The DIA Protocol pillar that travels through this finding is Participatory Ownership, because the eleven percent erosion is what happens when participation is treated as a one-time transaction rather than as an ongoing role.