State of Good for July 13, 2026

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

The Giving USA Numbers Are In, and They Tell Two Stories

The sector’s most anticipated annual dataset dropped, and the headline is a good one: U.S. charitable giving reached $617.20 billion in 2025, according to the Giving USA report released by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. That’s a record high, and it’s the benchmark number your board will be asking about at your next meeting.

The full 2026 Key Findings from Giving USA go deeper than the topline, offering the donor behavior trends and sector-wide analysis that development teams use for goal setting and performance evaluation. If you set fundraising targets against sector benchmarks (and you should) this is the reference document for the next twelve months.

But here’s the second story, and it’s the one that deserves your attention. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s analysis of the report makes a sharp observation: total dollars hit a high-water mark while the donor base keeps shrinking. As one observer put it, “We’re measuring vinyl in a Spotify world.” The metric we celebrate, total giving, may not capture the health of the donor ecosystem underneath it.

I’ve seen this dynamic play out in thousands of campaigns. An organization posts its best revenue year ever, then discovers two years later that the growth came from a handful of larger gifts while the file of everyday donors quietly eroded. Both things were true at the same time. Record revenue masked declining resilience.

What This Means for You:

• Report two numbers to your board this year: total revenue AND total donor count. Revenue tells you where you are; donor count tells you where you’re headed.
• Use the Giving USA benchmarks for goal setting, but pair them with your own retention rate. A record sector year doesn’t mean your file is healthy.
• Audit your acquisition pipeline. If your growth is concentrated in fewer, larger gifts, build a deliberate strategy for broadening the base – monthly giving programs are the most reliable tool here.

💡 Pure Charity’s Fundraisers & Sponsorship Program features make it easy to start, maintain, and grow monthly giving programs.

2026 Fundraising: Mixed Signals, Real Planning Implications

Midway through the year, the picture on the ground is genuinely mixed. The Chronicle reports that some nonprofits are seeing strong, continued giving while many others express concern about inflation, economic uncertainty, and the potential impact of the midterm elections on donor attention and behavior.

This is worth sitting with, because “mixed” is actually useful intelligence. It tells us donor behavior right now is highly variable across organizations, which means your results are more likely being shaped by your strategy and your relationships than by a uniform economic tide. When the environment is uneven, execution matters more, not less.

Election years also bring a predictable dynamic: donor attention and dollars shift toward political giving in the fall, and inboxes get crowded. Organizations that plan around that calendar, rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, tend to fare better.

What This Means for You:

• Build two budget scenarios for the back half of 2026: one at plan, one at 90% of plan. Know now which expenses flex.
• Front-load donor communication before the fall election cycle crowds the channel. September stewardship beats October solicitation.
• Watch your own leading indicators, email engagement, event attendance, mid-level gift frequency, rather than waiting for year-end totals to tell you what happened.

What Nonprofit Leaders Wish Their Funders Knew

The James Irvine Foundation did something refreshingly simple: it asked five veteran nonprofit leaders what philanthropy gets wrong, and published the unvarnished answers. Candid feedback from experienced practitioners about the funder-nonprofit relationship is rarer than it should be, and this piece is worth forwarding to your program officers, and reading yourself before your next foundation meeting.

Having sat on both sides of this table as an executive director and a board chair, I’ll say this: the gap between what funders think grantees need and what grantees actually need is one of the most persistent inefficiencies in our sector. Articles like this one give you language and third-party cover to raise these topics with your own funders.

What This Means for You:

• Use this piece as a conversation starter with your closest institutional funders. “I read this and it made me curious, how can we give you more honest feedback?” is a relationship-deepening question.
• Document your own funder friction points internally. Patterns across funders become advocacy opportunities; one-off complaints don’t.

AI Pays Off, but only for the Coordinated Few

A new study covered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy finds that the small percentage of nonprofits taking a systemic, organization-wide approach to AI are reaping significantly larger benefits than those adopting it in fragmented, tool-by-tool fashion.

This matches what I’m seeing in the field. The organizations getting real value from AI aren’t the ones where the development director quietly uses a chatbot to draft appeals. They’re the ones that asked: where does this fit across our whole operation (donor communications, data hygiene, prospect research, program reporting) and how do we coordinate it?

The good news buried in this finding: since only a small percentage of nonprofits are taking the systemic approach, the bar for competitive advantage is still low. You don’t need to be cutting-edge. You need to be coordinated.

What This Means for You:

• Inventory who’s already using AI tools in your organization and for what. Most leaders are surprised by the answer.
• Move from individual experimentation to a simple shared playbook: approved tools, use cases, and data guidelines. One page is enough to start.
• Pick two or three high-value use cases and standardize them across the team rather than letting a dozen bloom in isolation.

This week’s takeaway: Record topline numbers and a narrowing base of supporters can coexist and this year, they do. The organizations best positioned for the next few years won’t be the ones celebrating the biggest revenue headlines; they’ll be the ones tracking the health of their donor relationships, coordinating their tools and teams intentionally, and planning around a variable environment instead of hoping it smooths out.

Three actions for this week:

1. Add donor count to your board dashboard. Revenue and retention together tell the real story; either one alone can mislead.
2. Draft your fall calendar now. Get stewardship touches scheduled before the election-season noise arrives, and build a flexible budget scenario alongside your plan.
3. Convene a 30-minute AI conversation with your team. Find out what’s already in use, agree on two shared use cases, and write the one-page playbook.

💡 Pure Charity can support your 2026 Fundraising Strategies.

 Reach out, and we can discuss.

When FoodCorps lost its federal funding, the story could have ended the way these stories too often do – program cuts, layoffs, a slow retreat. Instead, the Healy Foundation made a bold bet, stepping in with the kind of decisive support that kept the organization not just alive but thriving.

What makes this story worth your attention isn’t just the rescue, it’s what the leaders of both organizations describe: a partnership that actually deepened during the crisis. The moment of greatest vulnerability became the moment of greatest trust. The foundation didn’t retreat to caution when the risk increased; it leaned in, and the nonprofit was transparent enough to make that possible.

The Lesson: Your strongest funder relationships aren’t built in the good years, they’re forged when you’re honest about the hard ones. Don’t hide a funding crisis from your closest partners. Invite them into it. The funders who stay are the ones worth building the next decade with.