Donor Retention Benchmarks 2026: the numbers every nonprofit should know

If you only track one fundraising metric in 2026, make it retention. The sector just posted a record year for dollars — Giving USA reported $592.5 billion given in 2024 — yet the number of donors has fallen for four consecutive years (Fundraising Effectiveness Project). Dollars up, donors down: the gap is being filled by fewer, larger gifts, which is a fragile place to stand.

Here are the benchmarks worth memorizing. Overall donor retention sits at roughly 31.9% (FEP). Online retention is about 48% — but split it open and it's brutal: only 24% of new online donors are retained into the next year, versus 66% of donors who'd given before (M+R Benchmarks 2026). The $1–$100 grassroots segment is 57% of all donors, and that base shrank 11% year over year.

The takeaway isn't 'acquire more donors.' Acquisition is where retention is worst. The cheapest, highest-return growth you have is keeping and reactivating the donors who already raised their hand — a prior donor is nearly 3x more likely to give again than a brand-new one.

That's also the work that quietly doesn't happen. The average nonprofit digital team is six people and most aren't growing (M+R), so the personalized follow-up that drives retention loses to the urgent. The fix is capacity, not strategy: the strategy is known.

This is exactly the gap Tongba closes. It finds your lapsed and at-risk donors, drafts a personal re-engagement email for each, and queues them for your one-click approval. You move retention without adding headcount.