✦ TL;DR
U.S. charitable giving reached $592.5 billion in 2024 (Giving USA 2025), but the number of donors fell 4.5% — the fourth straight year of decline (FEP Q4 2024). The drop is concentrated in microdonors: gifts of $100 or less fell nearly 9%. Repeat donors gave 60% of total funding, and 82.6% of the donor base gave only one or two gifts in the year. Our view: this is a participation problem, not a generosity problem, and the OBBBA's new $1,000 / $2,000 non-itemizer deduction is the first real tax-policy reason in a decade for small nonprofits to invest in small-donor experience.
"Dollars Up, Donors Down": What FEP Actually Shows
'Dollars Up, Donors Down' is the established sector shorthand for a measured, multi-year divergence between aggregate charitable giving and donor participation. It comes from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP), a partnership between the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday that tracks giving data across more than 12,000 nonprofits and 6.7 million donors.
Two things to take seriously about this data. First, the donor decline is real and persistent. 2024 was the fourth consecutive year of declining donor counts. New donor acquisition is the worst component: new donors fell 7% in 2024, and first-time donor retention is at its lowest level on record — less than one in five new donors gives a second time.
Second, the dollar growth is concentrated at the top. Repeat donors who gave in both 2023 and prior years contributed 60% of total 2024 funding. Microdonors ($100 or less) gave nearly 9% less than in 2023; donors at $101-$500 gave 4% less. The sector got bigger and narrower at the same time.
The structural reading
A nonprofit losing roughly 10% of its first-time small donors per year while concentrating revenue in 60% repeat retained donors isn't broken — it's well-optimized for one specific revenue model. The question is whether that model remains viable as OBBBA shifts the tax-policy ground under it.
The Composition of the Decline
Aggregate 'donors are leaving' headlines flatten what is actually a more specific picture. The FEP data lets us look at which donors are leaving, and the answer is consequential: the decline is concentrated in small-dollar and first-time donors. Larger and repeat donors are mostly retained.
FEP also reports that 82.6% of all donors in 2024 made only one or two donations during the year. This is the cohort we call the Quiet 82%: people who give, want to give, but never become repeat or recurring donors. Most are the same people who would benefit most from the new universal deduction in 2026 — they're standard-deduction filers who currently get no tax benefit for their giving.
The microdonor drop and the 82.6% one-or-two-gift cohort are the same population, viewed two different ways. They're the people the sector loses most easily and re-acquires most expensively. They're also the people whose numbers are most likely to grow under OBBBA's Section 70424.
Read the full briefing
The complete briefing covers our hypothesis on why small donors are leaving (with explicit labeling), what we think OBBBA's universal deduction actually opens up, three concrete operational changes we think have the highest leverage, and an honest section on what we can and can't tell you from our own data.
No credit card. The full briefing opens right away.
Why We Think Small Donors Are Leaving
The FEP data establishes that small donors are leaving. It does not, by itself, explain why. The honest answer is that the decline has multiple causes — inflation pressure on household budgets, declining religious affiliation, distrust of institutions broadly, competition from new digital giving destinations. All of these are real.
Our view, which we'll be explicit about: at least one underappreciated driver is the design of digital giving experiences themselves. We think the way most online giving pages are structured today actively discourages a meaningful share of small donors from completing a gift...
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OBBBA's Opening, and What Actually Has to Change
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is the first federal tax-policy change in roughly a decade that materially favors small-donor giving. Section 70424 establishes a permanent above-the-line charitable deduction of up to $1,000 / $2,000 for non-itemizers, beginning with the 2026 tax year...
Based on what FEP shows about where the donor decline is concentrated, and what Section 70424 changes about the small-donor opportunity, we think three operational changes have the highest practical leverage for small-to-medium nonprofits in 2026...
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