Giving is up this year and the number of people giving is down. For a small development team, the second half of that sentence matters more than the first.
What the numbers say
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project published its 2026 second-quarter report on October 29. Dollars raised were up an estimated 6.6% for the year through June. The number of donors was down 1.6%. And of the donors an organization gained in 2025, only 11.3% had given again by the end of June. The report draws on 5.7 million donors at about 17,000 organizations.
Put plainly, by the middle of the year almost nine in ten of last year’s new donors had not come back. Some of them will give in December. Many won’t, and the organization will have paid for the event, the mailing or the campaign that found them without getting a second gift.
Why the second gift is the one to watch
A first gift often comes from a moment: a friend’s fundraiser, a news story, a table at an event. The second gift is the first one that comes from the relationship with your organization. That’s why it is worth planning for, and why it shouldn’t be left to whoever has a free afternoon.
None of what follows needs a bigger team. It needs each step to have an owner and a date, so it happens when the office is busy too.
First two days: a real thank‑you
Send the acknowledgment within two days of the gift. It should name the amount, the date, and what the gift supports, and it should carry the receipt language your auditor expects.
- What a system can do: record the gift, notice that this is a first gift, and draft the letter.
- What a person should do: read it, add a line if they know the donor, and sign it.
Keep a short weekly list of anyone who has given and not been thanked. If that list is ever longer than a few names, the process needs attention before the next appeal goes out.
First two weeks: show where it went
A new donor knows very little about you. Within two weeks, send one short message with something specific: a number from the program they gave to, a photo you have permission to share, or two sentences from a staff member about what happened this month.
This message has no ask in it. Its job is to make the donor glad they gave.
First three months: one personal touch
Pick a threshold your team can keep up with. For some organizations that is every new donor, and for others it is new donors above a certain gift size. For those people, plan one contact from a human being in the first three months: a phone call, a handwritten note, or an invitation to see the program.
Put a name and a date next to each one. A call that belongs to “the development team” tends not to get made.
Before the anniversary: ask again
A month or two before the anniversary of the first gift, ask for the second one. Refer to the first gift and what it did. People respond better to “last November you helped us do this” than to a general appeal.
If your year-end appeal falls in that window anyway, treat these donors as their own group. They get a different opening paragraph from the people who have given for ten years.
The one number to track
Once a quarter, count how many of last year’s first-time donors have given again, and divide by how many first-time donors you had last year. That is your own version of the 11.3% figure, and it tells you whether the steps above are working.
If producing that number takes an afternoon of exports and spreadsheet work, that is useful to know too. It usually means gifts and donor history live in different places. We wrote about cleaning that up in our post on messy donor data, and connecting those records is the kind of thing our custom automation work covers. If you’d like to talk it through, book a free call.
Do you know how many of last year’s new donors have given again so far this year?
Sources
- Fundraising Effectiveness Project, 2026 Q2 FEP Report. All figures in this post are from the report. It notes that it uses a new methodology this year, so compare it with other 2026 reports and not with older ones.
- Release date from the GivingTuesday press release, Donations Are Up, but Donors Are Down, October 29, 2026.
