State of Good for August 3, 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’s data paints a picture worth studying carefully: giving dollars are up, donor counts are down, and retention has quietly become the most important number on your dashboard. We’ve also got fresh research from Stanford on attracting online donors, new insight into what motivates affluent givers, and a behavioral science finding that might change how you write your next appeal. Let’s get into it.
The Q1 Numbers: More Dollars, Fewer Hands
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s first-quarter data is in, and it confirms the pattern we’ve been tracking for several quarters. Donors increased their financial support of charities by 4.3% in Q1 2026 compared to the same period in 2025 but that growth barely outpaced inflation and decelerated from the 5.4% growth seen between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, according to The NonProfit Times.
Meanwhile, the number of contributors slipped by 0.8%. Translation: fewer people are giving, but the people who give are giving more.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out across thousands of campaigns, and here’s what it means in practice: your revenue line can look healthy while your donor file quietly shrinks underneath it. That’s a sustainable position right up until it isn’t. Organizations riding topline growth without watching donor counts often discover the fragility only when a handful of larger gifts don’t renew.
What This Means for You:
- Pull your own donor count trend for the last eight quarters, not just revenue. If your file is shrinking, name it now and build acquisition and retention goals into your fall plan.
- Segment your growth. Is your 4% coming from a broad base or from a small number of upgraded donors? The answer changes your strategy.
- Treat mid-level donors ($500–$5,000) as your stability layer. In a concentrating environment, this segment is where durability lives.
Retention Is Doing the Heavy Lifting & H2 Could Be Tougher
Closely related: new analysis from NonProfit PRO shows that repeat and recaptured donors are powering fundraising growth in 2026, on top of a shrinking donor base. In other words, the sector’s growth right now isn’t coming from new people walking in the door. It’s coming from the people you already know coming back, and from lapsed donors being won back.
There’s a caution flag in the data, too. Analysts warn the second half of 2026 could be tougher, particularly if year-end giving doesn’t stack on top of the accelerated gifts many organizations received in late 2025. If some of last year’s year-end surge was giving pulled forward, this December may feel harder than the calendar suggests.
What This Means for You:
- Start your year-end planning now with a conservative baseline. If 2025’s Q4 was unusually strong for you, don’t budget a simple repeat, build scenarios.
- Invest in recapture. Lapsed donors from the last 24 months are your highest-ROI audience. A dedicated win-back series in September and October positions you before the year-end noise.
- Audit your first-time donor journey. Retention-driven growth only works if the donors you acquired last year actually come back. What happens in the 90 days after a first gift is the single biggest lever you control.
Stanford’s 2-Million-User Experiment: Digital Acquisition at Scale
If retention is carrying growth, acquisition is the sector’s open question, and researchers at Stanford’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab have been working on it at remarkable scale. In a series of experiments involving more than 2 million PayPal users, researchers studied how nonprofits can attract online donors more effectively, according to Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Why this matters: most of what we “know” about digital donor acquisition comes from small tests and anecdote. Research at this scale (real users, real money, real platforms) gives the sector something closer to ground truth about what actually moves people to give online. For organizations trying to rebuild a shrinking donor base, evidence-based digital acquisition is exactly the tool the moment calls for.
What This Means for You:
- Read the research and mine it for testable hypotheses. Then run your own tests; your donor file behaves like your donor file, not like an average.
- If you’re on payment platforms with embedded giving features (PayPal, Venmo, checkout round-ups), treat them as acquisition channels, not just processing tools.
- Bring rigor to your digital program. Even one structured A/B test per campaign (subject line, ask string, landing page) compounds into real learning over a year.
What Affluent Donors Say Actually Drives Their Giving
The 2025 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy offers a clear signal on where major and mid-major cultivation should focus: 68% of affluent donors cite their values and beliefs as the top factor motivating where they choose to give, according to Giving USA. The study also emphasizes that motivations are personal and diverse there’s no single script that works across an affluent portfolio.
Having sat on both sides of major-gift conversations, I can tell you this finding matches lived experience. The organizations that win with affluent donors aren’t the ones with the slickest deck. They’re the ones that take time to understand what a donor cares about and show (credibly) how the mission connects to it.
What This Means for You:
- Lead cultivation conversations with discovery, not presentation. “What experiences shaped what you care about?” is a better opener than your program summary.
- Audit your major donor materials for values language. Are you describing what you do, or why it matters in terms your donor would use?
- Resist the one-size-fits-all case for support. Build modular messaging you can tailor to what each donor has told you matters to them.
Why Donors Give?
New research published in PNAS Nexus suggests the answer is yes, and the mechanism is one fundraisers rarely talk about openly: guilt avoidance. According to the study covered by Phys.org, avoiding guilt is a powerful motivator for charitable giving, and messages that convey social expectation are effective at motivating donations.
Here’s the psychology: humans are deeply attuned to what others expect of us. When a giving opportunity carries a visible social expectation, others are participating, others will know, the ask is made in a social context, declining creates anticipated guilt. Giving resolves that tension. This isn’t manipulation; it’s how social creatures make decisions. Peer-to-peer campaigns, giving days, and matching challenges all work partly because they make generosity socially visible.
The craft is using this insight with a light touch. Heavy-handed guilt appeals damage relationships and depress retention. Social expectation, framed positively, builds community around giving.
Try This:
- Add social proof to appeals: “Join 400 neighbors who have already given” makes participation the visible norm.
- Use peer-to-peer asks where the relationship is real, a friend’s invitation carries natural, healthy social expectation.
- Frame follow-ups around belonging, not shame: “We’re saving your spot among this year’s supporters” beats “You haven’t given yet.”
- Make giving visible where appropriate, donor walls, campaign thermometers, live counters during giving days.
Source: PNAS Nexus study via Phys.org
💡 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 sector is growing on the backs of fewer, more committed donors, which makes retention your growth engine and every existing relationship more valuable than it was a year ago. The organizations that will finish 2026 strong are the ones pairing disciplined donor retention with evidence-based acquisition and values-driven cultivation, rather than hoping a strong year-end bails out a shrinking file.
Three actions for this week:
- Run a file health check. Compare your donor count trend against your revenue trend for the past two years. If they’re moving in opposite directions, make retention and recapture explicit goals in your fall plan.
- Build your lapsed-donor win-back series now. September and October are your window before year-end noise. Even a simple three-touch sequence beats waiting for December.
- Rewrite one appeal through a values lens. Take your next scheduled communication and lead with why the work matters to your donors’ beliefs, not what your organization does.
💡 Pure Charity can support your 2026 Fundraising Strategies.
Stories of Good
Here’s what happens when a donor community fully believes in a mission. The PKD Foundation announced it is increasing its research investment by 50%, naming its 2026 research grant and fellowship recipients, and it credited the generosity of its donors directly for making the expansion possible, according to the PKD Foundation.
For families affected by polycystic kidney disease, that’s not an abstract budget line. It’s more scientists funded, more research questions pursued, and more momentum toward treatments and a cure. And notice how the foundation told the story: not “look what we did,” but “look what your generosity made possible.” The donors are the heroes; the foundation is the vehicle.
The Lesson: When you can draw a straight, specific line from donor generosity to expanded impact (a percentage, a program, named recipients) do it publicly and give donors the credit. Nothing fuels the next gift like unmistakable proof that the last one worked.