Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to take a clear-eyed look at what happened in December and what that means for the year ahead.
Year-end 2025 reflected a fundraising environment that continues to evolve, but it also reinforced that donors are still showing up – even as where, when, and how they gave shifted. Unsurprisingly, organizations that spent the first eleven months of the year building momentum across channels and relationships with donors saw the greatest returns.
Many organizations saw year-over-year growth in digital revenue in November and December. The median change in revenue was +17% compared to the same period in 2024. At the same time, revenue was less concentrated on December 31 alone and more distributed across the final week, as well as earlier in the month. We saw the same pattern for Giving Tuesday (aka Giving Week).
Donors overall were selective. Organizations with clear value propositions, consistent presence across channels, and frictionless mobile experiences performed better than those relying on urgency spikes alone.
Looking channel by channel, paid media was the clear winner while other channels saw mixed results compared to the prior year. From a cross-section of nonprofit clients, we found that:
- Paid media accelerated after Giving Tuesday, delivering a 41% increase in revenue YOY in the final week and 44% on December 31 alone.
- Email response softened after Giving Tuesday, with revenue down 17% YOY despite only a 5% drop in volume, signaling limits to volume-driven urgency alone.
- SMS performance was more moderate late in the cycle, declining 11% YOY in the final days of the year and 16% YOY specifically on December 31, suggesting a channel that’s reached maturity following 2024’s breakout success.
- Organic web traffic declined sharply (-37% YoY), while revenue per session increased (+15%), indicating fewer but more intentional visitors reaching donation pages.
Paid media: Leading the pack
Paid media continued to be a primary growth engine – accounting for a larger share of year-end revenue and playing a central role. Google Performance Max emerged as a standout, and many organizations increased PMax revenue by shifting budget away from more constrained conversion channels such as traditional search or Meta.
Some may say PMax cannibalizes paid search, but this year-end, PMax and search worked better as an integrated strategy rather than separate channels. Analysis of search auction data showed each reached distinct audiences: PMax excelled at capturing general charitable interest, even among users not actively searching for a specific organization, while paid search captured the subsequent high-intent and branded demand. In one experiment, excluding branded search terms from PMax backfired, and daily revenue increased substantially when they were added back in.
But as more nonprofits increased investment in PMax, competition among organizations for donor attention increased. While broader charitable terms became more competitive as adoption increased, those campaigns also reached and converted donors who otherwise might not have engaged.
Meanwhile, direct ROAS on Meta declined in some cases — not just YOY but even from earlier in 2025. Still, Meta remains one of the strongest channels for new donor acquisition at scale. Increasingly, Meta may be used as a prospecting tool — one that fuels list growth, builds awareness, and creates future demand that shows up later in other channels, like email and search.
Brand awareness investments paid off for many organizations this year-end. Prioritizing top-of-funnel paid media earlier in the year resulted in positive downstream effects. In one example, a humanitarian organization running YouTube CTV and Demand Gen campaigns saw audiences exposed to video become nearly six times more likely to search for the brand during peak EOY fundraising moments.
Email: Key to a multi-channel strategy
Email continues to raise meaningful revenue, reach the most committed supporters, and anchor year-end programs. For many organizations, email still touches the majority of year-end donors in some way.
But here’s the nuanced lesson from 2025: Email can no longer carry year-end fundraising on its own. Across the final stretch of the year, we saw email revenue decline 17% YOY, even though volume was only down 5%. Donation rates fell 16% and revenue per thousand emails dropped 17%.
At the same time, we saw important signs of resilience. Email remains an essential part of your fundraising program and can influence subsequent giving, particularly with the highest-value donor segments. At the same time, its impact depends increasingly on content quality as well as reinforcement across other channels.
Email reminds donors why they care. Paid helps them rediscover you outside their inbox. SMS adds urgency when used thoughtfully. And frictionless donation experiences help convert intent into action.
SMS: Shift to a foundational channel
Last year, for many organizations, SMS was a breakout channel in year-end fundraising. This year, it continued to deliver impact and proved that SMS is not a novelty or a nice-to-have. It’s becoming a mature, trusted channel and audiences are increasingly comfortable engaging with it.
At the same time, maturity means that as adoption spreads, the SMS space becomes more crowded. This year-end, we saw that how SMS is used matters a good deal. When it was treated like a precision messaging tool, performance remained strong. This involved using SMS intentionally in high-priority moments and for targeted audiences, adding clear calls to action, and crafting distinct messages that offered a different perspective from what supporters got in their inboxes. When SMS is used with thought and care, it does exactly what it’s meant to do: convert existing intent into action.
Looking ahead to 2026, the opportunity with SMS isn’t about sending more messages (though your program may warrant it!); it’s about sending stronger messages to targeted audiences, deeply integrated with email, paid media, and web experiences, and during the moments that truly matter.
Organic Web: Fewer visitors, but more opportunities ahead
If 2025 felt like a tough year for organic web performance, you’re not alone.
Across the sector, organic traffic declined sharply — down 37% YOY. On paper, it’s easy to interpret that data as declining channel performance. But that would miss the more important story.
What’s changed is how people discover information about organizations. AI-powered search, summaries, and answer-first experiences are reshaping donor behavior. In our recent report, Brand discovery in the age of AI, our multi-year analysis of nonprofit websites found that visitors from organic search dropped 35% compared to the prior year, and visits from AI tools have increased 1,000%.
So donors coming from organic channels haven’t disappeared, but their donor journey has changed. Fortunately, those donors who came from organic search were more motivated, more intentional, and more valuable. Revenue per session increased 15%, a strong signal that committed supporters are still coming to nonprofit websites when they’re ready to act.
But AI tools are increasingly answering prospective donors’ basic questions before they ever click. By the time they reach a nonprofit’s website, they’re no longer browsing to learn more — they’re now deciding whether or not to donate. That means organic web has shifted from a brand discovery channel to one signaling high donation intent. Your website is increasingly where donors land when they are already considering a gift.
This trend will only accelerate – and it has major implications for how nonprofits optimize their content and site for AI discovery. Our report breaks down how nonprofits can begin to optimize for an AI future.
Key takeaways for 2026
In total, 2025’s year-end fundraising results showed that revenue growth doesn’t come from a single channel or moment. Donors are present, they’re paying attention, and they’re generous — but strong results require strong, holistic programs. Performance increasingly reflects how well channel strategies and creative are working together.
To prepare for a strong 2026, organizations should:
- Plan earlier and think in longer campaign arcs, treating year-end as a multi-week journey rather than a single moment
- Measure success across the full fundraising window, not just peak days or deadlines to reflect how donors prefer to give
- Optimize for how donors discover and decide to give in an AI-influenced world, where search, summaries, and recommendations increasingly happen before a click
- Invest in the infrastructure to orchestrate multi-channel journeys: data, platforms, and cross-channel coordination
- Refresh creative and messaging with intention, prioritizing clarity, relevance, and differentiation over volume or repeated urgency
Looking ahead, the opportunity is to build programs that are flexible, integrated, and grounded in how audiences are actually behaving. Organizations that respond and evolve quickly will be best positioned to capture attention, adapt quickly, and grow with confidence in a changing landscape.
Want to learn more about how your organization can prepare for a strong 2026 fundraising year? Blue State’s here to help! Feel free to contact us here.