State of Good for Aug 10, 2026

by Mike Rusch | Aug 11, 2026

Weekly insights on donor behavior, industry trends, and what’s shaping generosity
⏱️ 9 minutes | Once a week

This Week's State of Good

Welcome back. This week brought us the kind of data drop fundraisers wait all year for — the Giving USA topline numbers, fresh Fundraising Effectiveness Project findings, and new research on what actually builds donor trust. Taken together, these three stories tell one coherent story about where American philanthropy is heading. Let’s dig in.

The $617 Billion Headline and Why You Should Read Past It

The number everyone will quote at your next board meeting: charitable giving in the United States reached an estimated $617.20 billion in 2025, according to the Giving USA 2026 Report.

That’s a big number, and it deserves a moment of appreciation. Americans remain remarkably generous, and the overall pie continues to grow. But as the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy analysis suggests, the headline deserves a closer look — because a topline figure tells you almost nothing about how your organization is positioned within it.

Here’s what I’ve seen over the years: nonprofits that treat Giving USA as a talking point get less value from it than nonprofits that treat it as a benchmarking tool. The topline number is the weather report. Your job is to figure out what the weather means for your specific neighborhood — your sector, your donor base, your revenue mix.

What This Means for You:

Pull your own 2025 numbers and compare your growth rate against the national picture. If total giving grew and you didn’t, that’s a diagnostic signal worth investigating — not a reason for panic, but a prompt for questions.
Bring the $617.20 billion figure to your board with context: “Here’s the national trend, here’s ours, here’s the gap or the lead, and here’s our hypothesis about why.”
Use the sector-level breakdowns in the full report to understand whether your cause area is gaining or losing share of the total. Strategy follows position.

Fewer Donors, More Dollars: The Pattern Behind the Pattern

If Giving USA is the weather report, the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s latest data is the ground-level forecast — and it explains a lot about how that $617 billion is actually arriving.

The FEP’s newest release, covered by The NonProfit Times, confirms a dynamic that’s been building for several years: donor counts are declining while total dollars are increasing. Fewer people are giving, but those who give are giving more. The FEP has also updated its methodology, which is worth noting for anyone who tracks these benchmarks year over year — make sure you’re comparing apples to apples when you cite trend lines.

This concentration of giving isn’t inherently good or bad news — it’s structural information, and it creates strategic considerations for every development shop:

If your revenue model depends on broad-based acquisition, the math is getting harder. Acquisition costs rise when the pool of active donors shrinks, which means every donor you acquire becomes more valuable to keep.

If your revenue is influenced by a smaller number of larger donors, your relationship management practices matter more than ever. Concentration means individual donor decisions carry more weight in your budget — which argues for deeper stewardship, contingency planning, and pipeline development.

What This Means for You:

Run a simple concentration analysis: what percentage of your revenue comes from your top 10 donors? Top 50? Track this annually.
Shift some acquisition budget toward retention and upgrade strategies. In a fewer-donors environment, keeping and growing existing relationships typically outperforms replacing lost ones.
Don’t abandon acquisition entirely, today’s $25 donor is tomorrow’s major gift prospect. But be intentional about which acquisition channels produce donors who actually stick.

Retention Is an Operations Problem, Not Just a Communications Problem

Which brings us to the third piece of this week’s puzzle. An upcoming AFP session drawing on Momentive Software’s 2026 Nonprofit Trends Report makes an argument I’ve been making for years: if your donor retention strategy starts and ends with communications, you’re missing most of the picture.

The premise “Beyond Impact Reports: The Operational Truth Behind Donor Trust” is that donor trust isn’t built primarily through newsletters and annual reports. It’s built through operational reality: how quickly gifts are acknowledged, how accurately data is handled, how smoothly the giving experience works, and whether the organization actually functions the way its communications say it does.

I’ve sat on enough boards to know this is true. Donors rarely leave because your newsletter was boring. They leave because their gift wasn’t acknowledged, their name was misspelled twice, or the online giving form failed on their phone. Communications can’t paper over operational friction.

In a fewer-donors environment, this matters doubly. When each donor relationship carries more weight, the operational experience of giving is the retention strategy.

What This Means for You:

Audit your donor experience end-to-end. Make a gift to your own organization this week and time how long acknowledgment takes.
Bring operations and finance into your retention conversations. Retention is a whole-organization metric, not a development department metric.
Look at the trends research directly, third-party data on what drives donor trust is useful ammunition for internal conversations about investing in infrastructure.

Why Donors Give?

Why does “$50 feeds a family for a week” outperform “your gift fights hunger”?

Because abstract problems are hard to care about, while specific, tangible impacts are easy to visualize and emotionally engage with.

This is the “identifiable victim effect” in action, we respond more powerfully to a single, specific person than to statistics about millions. One child with a name and a story moves us more than “10,000 children need help.”

The same principle applies to impact statements. “Your gift fights hunger” is abstract. “$50 feeds a family for a week” is tangible. Donors can visualize a family eating dinner. They can feel the weight of their contribution.

Having reviewed thousands of campaigns, I can tell you this is one of the most consistent dividing lines between appeals that convert and appeals that don’t. The organizations that win aren’t necessarily the ones with the best causes — they’re the ones that close the specificity gap.

Try This:

Make impact specific: “$25 = 100 meals,” not “your gift helps feed the hungry”
Use individual stories alongside statistics, lead with the person, support with the data
Create giving levels tied to concrete outcomes so donors can choose the impact they can picture
Audit your current appeal: circle every abstract phrase and rewrite it as something a donor can visualize

The specificity gap (between vague appeals and tangible asks) is often the difference between a donation and a passed-over email. Close the gap.

Research: Small, Loewenstein & Slovic, “Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims”

💡 Pure Charity’s Fundraisers features can be used to track specific segments and campaigns to provide insight into differences in generational giving to your nonprofit.

Bottom Line

This week’s takeaway: The national giving picture is healthy at the top line, but the structure underneath is shifting, fewer people are giving, and those who give carry more weight. That makes retention, benchmarking, and operational excellence the three levers most worth pulling right now. The organizations that thrive in this environment won’t be the ones chasing the most new names; they’ll be the ones that know exactly where they stand relative to the market and treat every existing donor relationship as infrastructure worth maintaining.

Three actions for this week:

Benchmark yourself. Compare your organization’s growth rate and donor counts against national trends, and bring that comparison to your next leadership meeting.
Run a concentration check. Calculate what share of revenue comes from your top donors and stress-test your plan if one relationship changed.
Test your own donor experience. Make a gift to your organization and evaluate every touchpoint from form to acknowledgment. Fix the friction you find.

💡 Pure Charity can support your 2026 Fundraising Strategies.

Reach out, and we can discuss.

Stories of Good

When wildfires hit Washington state this month, the response wasn’t left to chance. Washington’s Secretary of State launched a coordinated fundraising campaign on August 3 to benefit response and recovery efforts, encouraging residents to give through a central Disaster Relief Center webpage with clear, vetted donation channels.

What stands out here isn’t just the generosity, it’s the infrastructure. Rather than leaving donors to navigate a confusing landscape of appeals in a moment of crisis, the state provided a trusted front door: coordinated public messaging, a single hub, and clear pathways connecting public generosity to the nonprofits doing the work on the ground.

Disasters compress the giving decision into hours, not weeks. The communities that respond best are the ones that built the plumbing before the fire started.

The Lesson: Emergency giving infrastructure is built before the emergency. Whether you’re a nonprofit or a government partner, the time to establish trusted channels, clear messaging, and coordination agreements is now, so when your community needs to give quickly, the path is already paved.