Every spring and summer, the nonprofit benchmarks pour in. I can barely keep up with all of the new reports and case studies in my inbox. I bet you can’t either!

But I try my darndest.

So I'm hoping to save you some time by highlighting the numbers I’ve seen recently that matter most for your online giving.

To start, what’s happening on nonprofit websites?

Starting with the big picture sadly means starting with two very small numbers:

Only 1.6% of nonprofit website visitors make a donation, averaging just $1.33 in revenue per visitor. These stats are from the latest M+R Benchmarks.

For that small number of people who reach the donation page, conversion rates are 11% for desktop users and 8% for mobile users. (Also from M+R 2026).

We have two problems to solve here: getting more people to your donation page, and getting more people who reach that page to convert.

To get more traffic to your Donate page, a few tips:

• Ensure “Give” and “Give Monthly” buttons are prominent sitewide
• Test pop-ups and announcement banners during fundraising campaigns, and get creative with the copy! I love NextAfter’s experiments for inspiration here. And for orgs using iDonate, the A/B testing function is built right into the product as a native feature. Use it! 
• Make sure your homepage clearly explains the problem you’re solving, how you’re solving it, and how donors are powering real change.

You can also embed donation forms directly on web pages that receive the most traffic, like your homepage, or embed Donate buttons that launch a pop-up modal, further reducing friction.

Then, to boost the conversion rate on your donation page(s), compelling copy can move the needle, but the most lucrative place to start is with your fundraising tech. iDonate customers regularly see double-digit conversion growth compared with their previous platforms without making any other changes to these pages.

The mobile gap is still very wide

Also from M+R’s 2026 benchmarks, mobile devices now account for 52% of all nonprofit website traffic, but only 43% of donation transactions and 28% of revenue.

And for small nonprofits specifically, mobile conversion rates on donation pages drop to just 4%—half the already-low sector average.

If your donation pages aren’t optimized for mobile, you're missing out on money every single day!

Mobile-first donation forms—especially pop-up formats that minimize page load time and scrolling—can significantly close this gap. And offering digital payment options like PayPal (used by 79% of nonprofits surveyed), Google Pay (58%), and Apple Pay (57%) boost conversions significantly with mobile users who don't want to type in their card number on a keyboard for ants.

One-time vs. monthly giving: the trend has spoken

Can you tell I’m still thinking about Survivor 50?

Neon recently launched their 2026 Recurring Giving Report based on transaction data from 4,107 nonprofits and a survey of 718 recurring donors. The highlights:

• While donor databases shrank 5.48% between 2023 and 2025, the number of recurring donors grew by 31.57%.
• The average donor lifetime value was $7,288 for recurring donors vs. $3,607 for non-recurring donors in 2025.
• Recurring donor retention held steady at 78–80%, compared to just 32.41% for non-recurring donors.

And here’s my personal favorite: 58.6% of monthly donors started their subscription without ever being asked by the nonprofit. They just decided on their own.

I have pinged nonprofits multiple times when an email update inspired me to launch a monthly gift, I went to their donate page, and there wasn’t even a monthly option. 😭

Not only should this option be available, it should often be the default. In many cases, monthly giving should be preselected and clearly highlighted with a callout explaining why recurring gifts matter. iDonate’s own data shows that when nonprofits enable the iDonate recurring gift prompt, 9% more donations become recurring.

In my campaigns with clients, simply setting “Monthly” as the default is resulting in more new monthly gifts than explicitly asking, and most of those monthly donors are sticking around.

The first gift should trigger stewardship

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project's assessment of 2025 data names converting a first one-time gift into a second as "the sector's most consequential unsolved challenge"

First-to-second gift conversion has dipped to around 25%. Roughly three out of four new donors aren't coming back.

In most cases, it's not because they stopped caring. It's because nobody gave them a reason to stay. As a donor, this has happened to me many times.

The window right after a first gift is the highest-attention moment you'll ever have with a donor. Welcome emails average an 80% open rate, and if you’ve captured a donor’s phone number, a welcome/gratitude text message will be read by virtually everyone you send it to.

At a minimum, I’d make sure to:

• Pre-populate the monthly giving option on your online donation forms
• Automate a personal or personalized thank you within 48 hours
• Follow up within 30 days with an impact update that ties their gift to an outcome
• Extend an invitation to join your monthly giving program

All of this can be automated, but written to feel like it’s live.

So where does your donation experience stand?

Here are four areas to assess:

• Your donation page conversion rate: If you're converting below 8% on mobile or 11% on desktop, it’s time to give your donation page(s) some design love.

• Your mobile experience: Pull up your donation page on your phone right now. Is it fast? Is the form easy to complete? Can someone donate in under 60 seconds without squinting? If your fundraising tech and web design are getting in the way, please prioritize the time and investment to solve this problem.
• Your monthly giving setup: Is monthly giving an obvious, and obviously celebrated option? Is it the default setting on your donation form, or at least clearly highlighted? Do you have a built-in prompt that nudges one-time donors to upgrade?

• Your new donor stewardship: If someone gave for the first time in the last six months, what have they received from you since? An automated email + text message journey? A personal thank you? Do they know what their gift accomplished? You know what the answers should be. 🙂

Benchmarks are a gift to us all. The nonprofits that will outperform the industry average aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets; they're the ones that take these numbers seriously and act on them.

Many thanks to the businesses and orgs conducting and sharing this research every year. It’s a huge undertaking, and we’d be lost without it!