2025 Digital Fundraising Report

Individual giving has never been more important for charities – especially with government funding in flux.

Individual donors provide a sustainable, reliable revenue stream that mission-driven organizations can rely on over the long term – regardless of government funding changes –diversifying their revenue streams.

But over the next several years, established charities face a profound challenge: the collapse of the Giving Pyramid. As existing Baby Boomer donors increasingly age out, fewer young people are donating to causes – ultimately resulting in the deterioration of individual giving revenue, particularly from digital channels.

Delve Deeper’s 2025 Digital Fundraising Report includes 130 pages of critical insights that enable charities to stabilize, expand, and grow their digital fundraising programs across the Giving Pyramid.

Insights include:

1. Short-term actions, wherein charities will learn how to achieve digital fundraising goals and drive more revenue from existing digital advertising investments, with 2x+ higher returns.
2. Long-term advice that helps nonprofits introduce new Millennial and Gen Z donors to their mission. We’ll introduce you to our Audience First Giving Pyramid, a proven framework that makes one-time donors into lifelong donors, maximizes donor lifetime value, and helps charities net further gains in online advertising investments.

What’s inside the Digital Fundraising Report?

Trends

• Individual Giving is under threat.
• All donors are aging out. Yes, Digital Fundraising revenues is flat for many Charities, but only because a decreasing pool of donors, give more.
• Younger Gen Z and Millennial donors are the future, however, they are expensive to acquire, and it takes years for them to become profitable.
• However, up to 30% of the younger Mass donors of today, have the potential to become Mid or Major donors of tomorrow.
• To engage, acquire and grow younger Mass donors, Charities are leaning into Personalization across the whole donor journey, starting with the top of the funnel, in Digital Advertising. Moreover, younger donors are only willing to tolerate raw and authentic creative, that reflects their values and ‘micro-affinities.’
• Yet, the Digital Advertising landscape is complex and cost of media is increasing, Personalization requires significant OpEx investments in Tech and Data, Internal silos stand in the way of a comprehensive “go to market” strategy, and lack of shared KPIs and reporting means that Charities “cannot manage what they cannot measure.”

Challenges

Advertising Management:

• Charities often experience negative returns from digital fundraising (as low as 20 to 80 cents on a dollar invested) – and instead of expecting higher returns, they accept the seeming inevitability of such low returns.
• Low revenue and returns are driven by lack of aggressive testing, over-reliance on algorithms and lack of 1st-party data strategies, and lack of a ‘performance mindset’ – yet Charities lack the depth of experience to ask their partner the ‘right questions’ to reach higher performance targets from digital fundraising.

Advertising Platforms:

• Charities struggle to adapt to the fast moving changes in how donors consume online content, and how ad platforms adopt to those changing preferences. For instance:
  • Gen Z and Millenials are increasingly finding inspiration not just in Social media, but also in Streaming and Podcasts – yet Charities don’t have strategies to reach donors there.
  • Google is no longer the biggest search platform and paid search is being redefined – yet Charities often aren’t adopting their media mix beyond Google.
  • Amazon Ads, surprisingly, is a high-quality source of precise intent targeting data – yet Charities most often don’t include Amazon Ads in their media mix.

Personalization:

• Donors’ values and wants have to reflected back to them through Personalization, across the whole Giving Pyramid – yet Charities don’t view their revenue through the lens of the Giving Pyramid, and they lack an approach to justifying OpEx investments in Tech and Data infrastructure.

Creative:

• Creative has to be Personalized at scale, and at a low price point, while evoking emotion at “micro-affinity” to “micro-audience” segment level – yet Charities continue to maintain siloes between spreadsheet-driven Performance and storytelling-heavy Brand advertising.

Approach

In this 130-page report, we lay out an approach to meeting the above Trends and addressing the Challenges. As an outcome, we propose a two-pronged approach:

• Short-term: How to crush results and increase digital fundraising revenue by 2x+ over a 12-month period, with the same advertising investments.
• Long-term: How to build a lasting legacy with an “Audience First Giving Pyramid” framework, that focuses on maximizing long term donor value, moving them overtime from Mass, to Mid and Major status, while also broadening the base of the Giving Pyramid.