Name: 2025 Trends in Giving Insights
Uploaded: 2026-05-19T18:32:17.662Z
Duration: 57 min 52 s
Description: 2025 Trends in Giving Insights

Transcript for "2025 Trends in Giving Insights": Hello, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us. Before we get started, I just wanna say, I apologize for any background noise you may hear on my side. There goes a fire engine. And I want to send a thank you to the institution of public libraries where I am currently joining you because I live in rural Appalachia, and my Wi Fi is very unpredictable. So if I drop out at any point, my lovely co presenter, and a few friends are here to step in. But thank you again for joining. My name is Kate Averyt Anderson. I am joining you from the Blackbaud Institute. And today, we're gonna be talking about, some macro trends in giving from 2025. But more importantly, we're gonna be opening up conversation for you all to share your experience and your tips and tricks. So in a nutshell, we've seen that the sector's growing, but it's not growing evenly. So today, we wanna ground you in that data as a starting point for peer to peer problem solving. So this isn't really a story of growth and decline that we're talking about. We're looking at how organizations like yours are responding to changing pressures, economic environments, and evolving technologies. So to ground you a little bit here, in our housekeeping, this audio is coming through your computer speakers. If you don't hear anything, test to see if you have Bluetooth speakers that might be attached. Make sure everything is going well. We also have the chat open if there's any issues that you come across. Feel free to refresh your browser if you're having any technical issues. You are welcome to submit q and a, questions. But I will say the majority of the session will be in breakout rooms. We will have opportunity to talk. So I don't see much of the case for the q and a there, but we will be using the chat a bit. We have a few documents and helpful links, available in the document section. And feel free to use the cogwheel to adjust your settings. Of course, your feedback is really important. That's the main goal of today's session. And finally, just letting you know we are recording. So if you need to drop out at any point, it will be shared. Unfortunately, we will not be able to share out individual breakout room sessions, but the main session itself is recorded. So to, again, introduce myself for those who are just joining, my name is Katie Abern Anderson. I am the research and publications lead for the Blackbaud Institute. I will be joined shortly by Tiffany Crumpton, who is our VP of donor management and fundraising products here at Blackbaud. And then our third speaker is you. Many of you will be joining us, for breakout sessions, where we'll be talking about, what you're doing differently based on the trends of the last year, considering consider these peer to peer working sessions. Oh, thank you for flagging the document section. We'll we will do our best to connect you with those documents later. So Tiffany and I are here to give you some high level insights from the Blackbaud Institute's research, and then we're gonna hand the mic to you to discuss how your organizations are responding in real time. So by the end of today's session, we hope that you leave with a clear understanding of twenty twenty five's transform macro level, and that will help you to benchmark and provide context for your organization. And then we'll be moving on to some real examples from your peers, and that's where you can come in and have conversation. And then beyond that, we wanted you to leave here with two to three ideas that you feel you can act on now. So very briefly, I wanna walk you through the data here of what we found when we were looking at 2025 trends from the Blackbaud Institute. And to ground you on what what we're looking at here, we are looking at, what we would call the typical organization's experience. Your organization is might be typical, you might be atypical. How we determine this is we take about 8,000 organizations. We take the median of their, experience during the last year, and then we weight that based on IRS and GivingUSA data. And that gives us the typical organizational experience. So that's what when I talk about these data points, that's what I'm referring to in particular. So as far as what we found, we're seeing that timing matters more than ever, and all of these points I'll go into more in-depth. And we're seeing that giving really remains resilient in 2025, and that's despite any kind of macro, changes within the economy. But we're seeing opportunities across organization size for revenue stability, and that's a lot of what we'll be talking about today. And this is exactly the environment where focus, prioritization, and donor intelligence are separating resilient organizations from the rest. So I wanted to draw your attention to this chart in particular because it's it's small here, but you can see these are different organization sizes throughout, every month of 2025. Large organizations are in purple, medium sized organizations are in the middle and in blue, and small organizations are in green. And we're looking at those by, specifically revenue size. So if your organization brings in less than $1,000,000 in revenue, then you would be considered a small organization. One to 10 is medium sized organization, and large organizations are 10 plus. For some reason, my slides are no longer sharing, But let's keep going. So when we look at the trends themselves, as I said, we saw a lot of growth. We saw overall giving grew 4.3% year over year. But as you saw within the last chart in this chart here, that was not spread evenly across organization sizes. And in this chart, we're looking at the ten year view. And you can see that organizations really started diverging based on this revenue group size about two years ago, but this divergence was really apparent when we look I'm gonna go back one slide. When we look at last year as a whole, and particularly when we look at q four, that December mark is really stark. And so we're seeing this correlation between revenue growth and diversified donor portfolios, and that's something I'll go into in a moment. But you can see here that the average gift size has nearly doubled in the last ten years, but organizations of different revenue groups have been at different levels of being able to track that growth over time. And this is a little bit of why. So when we look at 2025 giving and we break it down, by not only revenue group for organizations, but also giving patterns, we're seeing that growth is increasingly queuing organizations that are best positioned to secure and steward major gifts. Large organizations, those who are really setting that upward curve, are getting 84.5% of their gifts from major gifts. Meanwhile, small and mid sized organizations really have opportunities to strengthen their revenue through investment in mid level and major giving. Meanwhile, I would say these large organizations would also benefit from diversification and some mid level giving. So again, we're seeing a trend that you all are very familiar with, that revenue growth is increasingly dependent on fewer higher value relationships. This is not anything new for the sector by any means. But I also wanna draw attention to something else that seems kind of a given, but it's something that I think is really important to consider within this framework. That the disproportionate share of giving continues to arrive in q four. I think that we are all placing our bets on q four year over year. But we're also seeing that a lot of these major gifts, in these larger gift amounts are influencing that q four behavior. So December alone accounted for 18% of all giving in 2025, and that is despite the economic growth slowing within The US during that time period. So as a whole, we can see that charitable giving is in large part it's resilient despite the macroeconomic environment. Individuals are still giving, but what we're looking at is there's a widening gap between organizations built for major gifts and those who are reliant on smaller individual gifts. So that is really everything in a nutshell, but I think what it really comes down to is what do you do with this information? I think depending especially on what size organization you are, I'd love to hear, you know, how is this standing out to you? Hop in the chat. Let us know, is this resonating in your experience? Are you doing things differently, as part of this? So let us know in the chat while I welcome Tiffany Crumpton on to start sharing some strategies. Greg, I can see yeah. I do see a winding gap in my organization. Yeah. Let me go back for a second. We have a few questions here between the medium, large, and small organization sizes. So I think this might be what you're looking at here. This is this this is a ten year view. Let's go back and look at 2025 in particular. Hi, Tiffany. So I just wanna. Can you are you able to hear me okay? Quick audio check. am. Alright. So. I'm gonna, I know you were responding on this. It's not there. and yeah. And then I'll hand the mic right over to you. But I think in the large trends, what we're looking at here, we had a question about, the differences between organization sizes and how we're defining those. These large organizations that are really setting this upward curve, those are ones with the revenue group of, they are $1,010,000,000 dollars plus in fundraising revenue. These mid sized organizations are 1 to 10,000,000 in the annual revenue, and small organizations, the ones that we're really seeing this big bifurcation, are those that are that are up to 1,000,000. So our recommendations to start with, and I'll hand over to Tiffany for more specific strategies, are for large organizations looking at diversifying beyond those major gifts, they received close to 85 of all of their giving through major gifts last year. Medium organizations are really poised to start following that upward trajectory by investing in mid level giving and deepening major donor stewardship. And for small organizations, we really wanna encourage you to identify and steward major donors early. I wanna say I worked at a small nonprofit. I know that you are probably hearing that and going, of course, we are always trying to find major givers. But I will pass things over to Tiffany to give you a little bit more, of the nitty gritty when it comes to that strategy. Yeah. Thank you, Kate. So hi, everyone. I love seeing the chat. Keep those findings, what stands out to you, keep it coming. The reality is we are entering a new fundraising reality, so you are feeling it. I'm seeing it in chat. So, Kate talked through some of the core tensions that we're seeing today. You know, growth is real. We talked about there's some organizations or institutions that are seeing growth, but maybe not accessible to everyone or to, every segment within your constituent pop population. So major giving is rising, but we know major gifts don't just show up on your doorstep. So the capacity to unlock those major gifts is not rising, and we find that every organization institution that we talk with, teams are constrained, but the expectations of your board, of leadership, those expectations are increasing every day. So if that sounds like you, just know that you are not alone. And today, we wanna talk a bit about some of the strategies and the emerging playbook and then have time for you all to interact with one another. So on our next slide, we'll talk about really the emerging playbook that we're seeing, as it relates to these strategies. So the organizations that are gaining ground, we find, first of all, are prioritizing their development. So, you know, fundraising hasn't changed a lot over the last couple of decades. About your major gifts, your direct this year. So, again, organizations that are having success are prioritizing each one of those segments within the fundraising pyramid, but they're looking to really find ways to have capacity multipliers as it relates to that. So new data, new AI, new process that allows you to really scale, again, a process that hasn't really changed a lot over the last couple decades, but new ways to address each part of the donor pyramid. Stewardship is hot and it's always been hot and it's not new, but our donors have new and different expectations around stewardship, So building repeatable systems, processes for stewarding, connecting with donors. Donors wanna know that you know them, you see them, you appreciate them, they need information about how their giving is being used to know that the impact that they desired when they made the gift was carried through. And, you know, lastly, fundraising we know is all about relationships. That is never going to change. And so scaling relationships, though, is really the new conversation. So how do we utilize technology, process, AI, which we, is something that I'm sure some groups will talk about in the breakouts. Like, how are you using that in new and different ways? Because replacing relationship management is not the answer, but scaling how, you are approaching that is what we're seeing organizations gaining ground are doing. So just a little bit of a tee up, and I think we're gonna head into breakouts, right, Kate, and talk a little bit about how this is gonna work, which we're super excited. about. We are. Alright. So let's see. We you will probably see there is a section, for rooms. We are going to ask that you when we go into these breakout rooms, you will move yourself with into your room, and you'll join a group, that is from your same kind of sector or vertical or industry. And so we'll have a facilitator and a note taker, and you'll also have one of your peers there to kind of share their experience. And then we'll open up the floor for discussion. So we wanna focus on sharing what's working, what's not, what's changing, and a few things to keep in mind while you do so is to be really specific, within strategies that are working for you. Try to be honest. I think knowing what's working and what's not is really valuable. And be action oriented, and that will help us to all provide strategies for one another that are really actionable. So let's see. I think now we can start breaking off into our rooms. And if you have questions, please let me know in the chat, and we can lend you a hand. So you'll see it, just for anyone who is still with us. Once you go into rooms, you'll have the selection here of your vertical. Go ahead and join that, and we will be there to join you. Hi, everyone. I think we're starting to reconvene. I will give everyone a minute to rejoin us in the main group. I'm seeing so much rich things in the chat. So just wanna thank everyone for being open to having these smaller group conversations. I know that our group on k through 12 had some really insightful things to share, but I think we will kind of open things up, to report back a little bit. So in the chat, kind of, as we as we all rejoin, if your facilitator or moderator wants to go in and share, you know, really any insights from from this, but to give you a little bit of guidance, you know, one pattern that you might be seeing, a strategy shift that you're seeing, and an open challenge. And I'll give some time for you all to pop in the chat with those. And if we have folks that are shy, we are happy to call on particular groups. So I know we have an arts and cultural group out there. Do we have someone from that group that would like to share some of your insights? Hi, Tiffany. If you want us to share on stage, sure. Yeah. Welcome. That'd be great. Right. Alright. Well, yes, I was in the arts and cultural group. So, we had a few different, kind of trends compared to some of the findings in the report. But one pattern that, our group was seeing, you did see the spike around urine giving, like we talked about in the reports. And as far as strategy shifts, you know, a couple of organizations made some changes to their large events at the end of the year to kind of recognize that and accommodate for that so that we're not making multiple asks at the end of the year from, our donors and supporters. Also, we had some strategy shifts around stewardship, you know, trying things like quick videos, to supporters, and we're trying to find ways to leverage and scale that outreach, so we can give it a on a larger scale. As far as challenges, you know, there's some concerns about, economic challenges and kind of finding that entry point for individual donors. Right? That's that's usually how, supporters become familiar with the organization. So when we're seeing a decline in those donors, that's that's a challenge and that's concerning overall. Yeah. Thank you, Jessica, for sharing from the arts and cultural group. We're happy to keep calling on, next groups. Looks like Laurie just came on stage. Yes. Laurie, what group? I'm happy to chime in from the, from the k twelve group. So, one thing that, that more than a few folks said that they're finding, success in moving donors from multiple asks throughout the year to one annual ask. And by that, especially if you're familiar with how schools work, it could be instead of sponsoring a, b, c and going to the person three times, they're finding that working with the donor to create a cumulative annual ask while still leaving the door open for additional opportunities, is working well. One of the things that, we talked a little bit about AI and, there was a comment about how a, a customer who had previously worked in higher ed, had used it as far as prospecting and research. And it seems that, from the comments in the group that that's not quite being used, as well yet or as much as it could be in k 12. So certainly seems like some opportunities for everybody to get, you know, to understand how that can work at a different scale than higher education. Let's see. Yeah. I think that's, that's that's also that's it. One more quick challenge, how to reach, the younger donors in an educational institution of whether it's k 12, higher ed, how to, successfully keep contact information, text to give systems, that, of course, that involves a, you know, typically a financial outlay. So that might be a challenge that that came up is how do we keep our younger donors engaged and reach out to them and communicate in the way that they would like to be communicated and make it as easy as possible for them to give. If I can jump in quickly from, the k through 12 group two, I think one one pattern that I wanted to share, kind of one, one insight being shared, was changing messaging around the changing tax act. I think that that's something that, one of the schools, that was present was sharing out. It's been really helpful for them in in increasing their individual giving levels, and also framing a capital campaign, starting to develop that. That was something that two organizations are starting, to shift their strategy around and start looking towards. And finally, one thing that I wanted to share that I thought was, was really impactful, and this is my perspective. I am a board member, so I really love to hear this, is they're really engaging their boards to create a culture of philanthropy where those boards can create their own giving circles and start leading those relationships, which, of course, can really benefit from the major bidding pathways. Awesome. Well, I'm Dorothy, and I led one of the nonprofit, rooms, and facilitated it. And we had really interesting trends that were consistent, and one of them was investing in people. And I just love that leaning in. So adding planned giving officers, mid level giving officers, in one case, investing in a consultant. Other strategies were really some were traditional such as, doing more snail mail. Others that didn't work for, some really unique ones such as, selling sponsorships to individual donors. And sometimes they would have it in their own name, and sometimes they would have it in the corporation's name that they work for. So, I think, you know, it sounds if I were to sum it up, I would say leaning in, on strategies and really building out those donor relationships at a variety of different levels, is what I was hearing in that room. Hi, everybody. I'm Kathleen Riordan, and I was in the Higher Education room. And we've really talked a lot about the importance of cultivating the major donor program, and developing kind of the stewardship benefits, helping moving, groups, from the mid level to the major donor and what type of benefits that we could help, roll out to make it more enticing to those to those groups that those groups. And but we also talked a lot about the current struggle of getting the the young alumni engaged, this seemed to be a consistent struggle, and discussed some strategies of, you know, what's been working for for some folks, particular meeting them where they are. You know, meeting these young alums where they are by introducing lower giving tiers, and maybe adopting more modern ways to to give, you know, adopting the Venmo, the crypto, and and looking into things like that. So, boy, I felt like we that time went fast. We we got cut off. There was so much more I think we could have discussed, but they had some really great ideas in sharing. But, those were two major themes that that really came across that seemed pretty consistent across the board. Hey, everyone. I was also with a wonderful group of nonprofit leaders, and we talked about many things. But just to to piggyback on what Kathleen said, modern payments was a big discussion for us and how we can start moving in that direction and changing the way we think about things. And in particular, we talked about, making sure that we're using things like complete cover, and using and and doing giving people the option to cover the cost of their transaction. So whether it's through Blackbaud or whether it's through another product, it's it seemed like a great opportunity, for people to do that. And then and and and Jenny Marsh from Vancouver Public Library, I just wanted to shout out to her. She talked a lot about that. I also wanted to mention Henry, Latham, from Home from Little Wanderers. And he was had some really good ideas about how we might address the challenge of having this bifurcated big givers versus, you know, the mid tier small givers. He is using AI. He has started using a development agent through Blackbaud to start to to address some of that, which is pretty exciting. This was a newer move for some of the people in our room, but he had some really interesting things, to say about how he was approaching people that were sort of at that thousand to $1,500 level. So yeah, great conversation. I might have been the last nonprofit group, so I'll add in here. In our group, we had a lot of folks who have a large donor base, but not necessarily deep cultivation or stewardship. And then one of the other points that I really appreciated hearing was that people are seeing a decrease in the percentage of major donors as donors age. So really thinking about expanding the relationship, not just with the donor, but actually expanding it to the entire family and looking to engage family members. Our team was all about keeping things personal. Right? Handwritten thank you notes no matter what level, personalizing outreach and building goodwill and community with videos, without asking for money, doing coffee meetups from a cultivation standpoint, inviting, supporters to committee committees. So building their investment engagement. And one of the things that I loved was this idea of little micro events. So doing things that might already be in the works. Right? You're having an event. You're having a meetup. Maybe it's small, but inviting a set of donors to come early, for a special reception or, as Marie Claire said, some of the fancy champagne, or meeting with the CEO. So keeping it personal to build that investment. So as you're building for those larger ads and bigger campaign or bigger appeals, people are invested in your organization and wanna see you succeed. And I'll, bring us home with the health care breakout session. And the I think we have more questions than we had answers for, but it seems like a lot of the health care organizations represented here today represent annual giving, digital and direct mail marketing. And they're finding that it's really slow to get to the growth that they want in their mid tier donors. And so they're striving to add more personalization. Direct mail still rules the roost as it pertains to securing revenue, and they're finding a slow churn or not maybe not churn, a slow conversion from a direct mail donor to a digital donor. And they're looking for more playbooks, I guess, in how to do that and what has been tried and true. So maybe that's a future webinar in our midst. But for the most part, also staffing, a lot of folks are being asked to do more with less, and I know that's a general trend overall that we're seeing across many in industries, not just health care. But I think our customers are really looking for ways where they can do more with less and using tools like AI and and conferring with colleagues is a great first step, I think. Tiffany, Do we have any groups? open it with you? Do we have any groups that have not shared out yet? I think that's everyone, and that's there's so much to share here. I think we are interested in kind of compiling a lot of these strategies into something that we can then send out to you all so that you can have something to look back at. And I know there's some questions around, the slides being available, and we can do the same there. Moving to the next slide, you know, I think that we've seen a lot about, like, what will you do differently next quarter? I think that there's a lot here about saving capacity, being able to make those relationships a lot deeper, being able to heighten, the personalization there. And I love I love hearing kind of the the two sides of this. We have organizations talking about how there's opportunity to engage more deeply with donor intelligence and analytics, and predictive modeling through the use of AI, and at the same time, then being able to follow that up with a handwritten note, being able to deepen those personal relationships, take things to that next level. So I wanted to share before we start wrapping up. Blackbaud is convening with a group of dozens of leaders across the social impact space, the AI Coalition for Social Impact. And the first initiative of that, will be this completely free certification and responsible AI for social impact. So and we've seen some questions around, of course, in being able to move beyond generative AI, being able to make sure that you're retaining your donors' trust when you're using AI, and that's what a lot of this is focused on. And it also offers CFRE credits, and, again, it's completely free. It's open to Blackhawk customers and non customers alike. I dropped the link in the chat. If you're interested in joining our wait list, this is gonna launch in July, and there's also a QR code for anyone who might be interested there. So before we wrap up, Tiffany, do you have any final thoughts? No. I was gonna say I'm loving the chat. I'm scrolling through, great conversations, and and I I love that there's many different viewpoints. You know, we've talked about I love how some of the chat has been tried and true fundraising techniques we've used for decades that are maybe new or fresh. If y'all are looking through the chat, there's a great conversation about a consolidated annual gift ask, which I know is I'm very familiar with that. It's just in, some of the board service that I do. Lot of AI chat. Right? Folks that are all in, others that are like, we're not we're not ready for that, or we're ready to use it in in different ways. So I just appreciate the dialogue and everyone being willing to share and keep the conversation going, because it's exciting times for fundraising, but challenge that everyone I know is, addressing, Absolutely. And so thank you to everybody for sharing. it's you for all of our facilitators for sharing. Because. the chat is still active, I think Tiffany and I will go off stage, but we have another five minutes. Please keep it going in the chat, and we look forward to connecting with you all again soon. Thank you again.