Giving hit a record in 2025 and the number of donors fell anyway. That contradiction shapes everything below: the sector grew on fewer, larger gifts, while the small-donor base that funds most modest nonprofits shrank. This guide is written for organizations without a major-gifts officer, uses peer-reviewed evidence where it exists, and names the numbers that only exist in vendor marketing. For methods beyond the nonprofit context, see fundraising ideas that actually raise money.
Short version: build the recurring base, ask for matches from active donors only, and price sponsorship so the money arrives untaxed.
Show Donors Where Their Money Went
VISU turns a scan into a tracked, transparent action, so a first gift comes with a record instead of a promise.
Record Giving, Fewer Donors
Two numbers from 2025 tell opposite stories, and small nonprofits live inside the gap between them.
Giving USA: total US charitable giving reached $617.2 billion in 2025, up 5.7 percent, or 3.0 percent after inflation. The first year above $600 billion.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project: dollars raised grew 5.0 percent, the strongest in five years, while donor counts fell 3.6 percent. Growth came almost entirely from major and supersize donors.
The segment shrinking fastest is the one most small organizations run on. Donors giving between $1 and $100 made up 57 percent of all donors and declined 11.1 percent year over year.
Retention barely moved, from 43.1 to 43.3 percent. Repeat-donor retention improved; new-donor retention stayed flat. As the FEP puts it, the sector has yet to crack first-year conversion.
That is the strategic problem. Not finding donors, keeping the first-time ones long enough to become the second gift.
The Recurring Base
Monthly giving is 27 percent of all online revenue, and 22 percent for organizations raising under a million online. That second figure is the one that matters here and it rarely gets quoted.
Retention behaves differently from one-time giving. Around 10 percent of sustainers stop within two months of signing up, but 81 percent are still giving after seven months and 71 percent after a full year.
Sustainers also give extra. Monthly donors made roughly 0.2 additional one-time gifts in 2025, worth about $21 per donor per year on top of the subscription.
One honest correction to the usual pitch. In 2025 one-time online revenue grew 17 percent while monthly grew 12 percent, reversing the long-running pattern. M+R attributes it to donors responding to a run of disasters and wanting immediate impact.
So build the recurring base for stability, not because it is currently outgrowing everything else. It is not.
Timing still concentrates hard. December alone brings 37 percent of annual online revenue, the last week brings 10 percent and the final day brings 4 percent.
Matching Gifts, Honestly
Matching gifts get described as billions in free money left on the table. Worth knowing before you build a strategy on it: essentially every headline matching statistic in circulation originates from one company that sells matching-gift software.
Even the independent-looking citations lead back there. America's Charities publishes the "billions unclaimed" figure and footnotes that vendor as its source.
What the peer-reviewed evidence actually says is more useful, and it contradicts the common advice in two places.
Karlan and List, in the American Economic Review, mailed over 50,000 prior donors. A match offer increased both response rate and revenue per solicitation. But 3:1 and 2:1 matches performed no better than 1:1.
That is money and negotiating effort saved. Stop chasing a bigger multiplier from your matching donor; the ratio does not buy you anything.
The second finding is sharper. Karlan, List and Shafir found matches work on donors who are actively supporting the organization, while lapsed givers are either unaffected or adversely affected. Some presentations of a match do outright harm.
So target matches at your active base, not at a lapsed-donor reactivation appeal. And one non-vendor number worth holding: 65 percent of large companies match, against only 28 percent of small and midsize ones. If your donors work at small employers, the pool is thinner than the headlines suggest.
Sponsorship That Arrives Untaxed
Corporate sponsorship is the highest-margin money on this list, and one distinction decides whether it arrives clean or taxable.
The rule sits in the tax code at section 513(i). A qualified sponsorship payment is one where the sponsor expects no substantial return benefit beyond use or acknowledgement of their name or logo.
Acknowledgement is safe. Advertising is not, and what makes something advertising is qualitative or comparative language, price information, an endorsement, or an inducement to buy.
In practice: a banner reading "Joe's Hardware" is an acknowledgement. "Visit Joe's Hardware, 20% off this weekend" is advertising and creates unrelated business income exposure.
Two details worth knowing. Benefits worth up to 2 percent of the payment are disregarded entirely. And if you cannot establish that the payment exceeds the fair market value of what the sponsor received, no portion qualifies rather than just the excess.
Granting genuine exclusive-provider rights generally creates a substantial return benefit. Simply calling someone your exclusive sponsor generally does not.
Events the IRS Already Excepts
There is a shortcut to knowing which activities will not create a tax problem, published by the IRS and almost never read as a list of fundraiser ideas.
Volunteer labour. Where substantially all the work is done without compensation, the income is excepted. The IRS names volunteer operated bake sales directly.
Donated merchandise. Where substantially all the goods arrived as gifts, the sale is excepted. The IRS notes that many thrift shop operations qualify.
Convenience of members. Activities run primarily for members, students or staff are excepted. A school cafeteria is the IRS example.
On silent auctions, a correction to what most guides say. The clean claim that auctions are legal everywhere with no permit needed comes from vendors selling auction software, not from any statute.
The defensible reasoning is that gambling requires consideration, chance and prize together. An auction lacks chance, since the highest bidder wins by bid rather than by draw, so it generally sits outside gambling law.
But the National Council of Nonprofits groups auctions with games of chance as regulated activity and warns about penalties. State charitable-auction rules, alcohol permits and sales tax can all still apply. Check your state rather than assuming.
Raffles are absent from this guide entirely: they have all three gambling elements, are illegal in several states, and generate taxable income plus withholding obligations where permitted.
The Grant Math Nobody Runs
Candid analyzed IRS filings from 112,733 private foundations. 71 percent checked the box saying they only fund preselected organizations and do not accept unsolicited requests.
Read narrowly, that leaves fewer than 33,000 foundations open to an organization they have never heard of.
And the common advice is backwards. Among foundations with assets above $100 million, 38 percent accept unsolicited requests, nine points higher than the overall rate. Bigger foundations are more approachable, not less.
Candid's own survey of 522 foundations found 55 percent willing, which is higher than the filing data suggests. Candid cautions that the sample skews toward larger active grantmakers. Treat the filing box as the conservative number and plan against it.
Registration, Receipts and 2026
Forty states require registration before you solicit their residents. Soliciting means asking, and it is regulated regardless of channel. The National Council of Nonprofits notes that most state laws predate websites, text messages and QR codes, so the statutes are outdated but still binding.
The practical read: the obligation follows the ask, not the medium. A QR campaign is a solicitation.
The $250 receipt rule. Any single contribution of $250 or more needs a written acknowledgment with your name, the amount, a description but not a value of non-cash gifts, and a statement about anything provided in return.
The $75 trap. Disclosure is triggered when the donor's payment exceeds $75, not when the deductible portion does. The IRS example: someone pays $100 and gets a $40 ticket, so only $60 is deductible, and disclosure is still required. Penalty is $10 per contribution up to $5,000 per event.
What changes in 2026. Legislation signed in July 2025 restores a deduction for people who do not itemise, worth up to $1,000 single and $2,000 filing jointly on cash gifts. Since only around one in ten households itemise, this reaches almost everyone.
That lands directly on the shrinking small-donor segment, and it is a real reason to run a campaign explaining it. Gifts to donor advised funds do not qualify.
Moving the other way, itemisers now face a floor: the first 0.5 percent of adjusted gross income does not count. Corporations must give at least 1 percent of taxable income before any deduction is available at all.
Make the First Gift Easier to Repeat
New-donor retention is the sector's unsolved problem. A donor who can see what their gift did has a reason to come back.
FAQ: Fundraising Ideas for Nonprofits
What is the best fundraising method for a small nonprofit?
A recurring giving programme, because it addresses the sector's actual problem. Donor counts fell 3.6 percent in 2025 while dollars rose, and retention sits at 43 percent. Monthly giving already accounts for 22 percent of online revenue at organizations raising under a million, and 71 percent of sustainers are still giving after a year.
Should we negotiate a bigger matching gift ratio?
No. A large field experiment published in the American Economic Review found that 2:1 and 3:1 matches produced no additional impact over 1:1. The match offer itself lifts response and revenue, but the multiplier does not. Spend that negotiating effort elsewhere.
Is corporate sponsorship money taxable?
Not if it qualifies as a sponsorship payment, meaning the sponsor receives no substantial return benefit beyond acknowledgement of their name or logo. Adding price claims, comparative language or a call to purchase turns it into advertising and creates unrelated business income exposure.
Can we run a silent auction?
Generally yes, because an auction lacks the element of chance that makes a raffle gambling. But the claim that auctions are legal in all fifty states with no permit comes from vendors, not statute. State charitable-auction rules, alcohol permits and sales tax can apply, and the $75 disclosure almost always does.
Are small foundations easier to approach than large ones?
The filing data says the opposite. Across 112,733 private foundations, 71 percent do not accept unsolicited requests, but among foundations with over $100 million in assets that figure improves to 38 percent accepting. Larger foundations are more open to new grantees, not less.
Do we have to register before asking for donations online?
In most cases yes. Forty states require charitable solicitation registration before soliciting residents, and an online campaign or QR code solicits everywhere at once. The National Council of Nonprofits notes most of these laws predate digital channels but still apply.
What changes for donors in 2026?
People who do not itemise can deduct cash gifts again, up to $1,000 single or $2,000 filing jointly, which covers roughly nine in ten households. Itemisers face a new floor where the first 0.5 percent of adjusted gross income does not count, and corporations must give at least 1 percent of taxable income before any deduction applies.