Online Fundraising for Nonprofits: A Development Director's Guide
Most development offices have an online fundraising program the way a house has a backyard shed. It exists. Somebody set it up years ago. Things get added to it now and then, and once a year in December everyone remembers it is there and hopes it holds up. The rest of the time it sits in the background collecting website visitors who never quite become donors, and nobody has a spare afternoon to go out and see what is actually in there.
I understand that completely, because attention in a development office goes to whatever has a deadline attached. Grants have deadlines. Events have deadlines. A donation page has no deadline, so it never gets the hour it needs. What I have learned is that this quiet, unattended corner of the program is where a surprising amount of money is either found or lost, and that a handful of small decisions there tend to matter more than another round of appeals.
What Online Giving Actually Looks Like Right Now
The recent numbers are more encouraging than most fundraisers expect. According to the 2026 M+R Benchmarks study, online revenue for the average nonprofit rose 15% in 2025, and that growth reached organizations of every size — small shops saw increases of at least 14%, right alongside the national brands. The Blackbaud Institute tracked a similar pattern, with digital fundraising up roughly 11% year over year. Individual donors showed up online in a hard year, and they showed up for small organizations too.
Two details in that data are worth pinning to the wall. The first is the calendar. Nonprofits received 37% of all their online revenue in December alone, with the last week of the year accounting for 10% and the final day accounting for 4%. Online giving is seasonal in a way that direct mail and grants are not, which means the work you do on your digital program in August is really preparation for a December appeal that will either land on a solid platform or a shaky one.
The second is who is giving. New donors accounted for 31% of online revenue in 2025, which sounds like good news until you look at what happens next. Retention for those first-time online donors was 24%, against 66% for donors who had given before. Roughly three out of four brand-new online donors do not come back. That gap is the single biggest reason online programs plateau, and it is also the most fixable — a first gift online is the start of a relationship, not the end of a transaction, and the organizations that treat it that way are the ones whose first-time donors stop disappearing.
Most of what makes an online program work is repeatable — the same follow-up, the same thank-you, the same audit, run reliably every time. That kind of steady rhythm is exactly what good tools are built to carry.
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Your Donation Page Is Where the Money Leaks
Here is the number that reframed this whole subject for me. Across all traffic sources, only 1.6% of nonprofit website visitors make a donation, generating an average of $1.33 per visitor. Even among people who make it all the way to the main donation page — people who have already decided to give — 11% of desktop visitors complete a gift, and just 8% of mobile visitors do. For small nonprofits, mobile conversion drops to 4%. Nearly everyone who intends to give you money online leaves before finishing.
The device gap underneath that is stark. Mobile users make up 52% of all nonprofit website traffic and 43% of donation transactions, but only 28% of revenue. The average gift completed on a desktop was $168; on a phone it was $88. Some of that is genuine — people do sit down at a desk for bigger decisions. But a good share of it is friction: a form built for a laptop, a keyboard fight over a credit card number, a page that takes too long to load while someone is standing in a grocery line. The payment menu matters here more than most of us assume. Among the nonprofits in that study, 79% offered PayPal, 58% offered Google Pay, and 57% offered Apple Pay, and donor surveys from Nonprofit Tech for Good show meaningful shares of donors preferring PayPal, Apple Pay, and Venmo over typing a card number at all. A wallet button turns a two-minute form into a thumbprint.
None of this is a failure of effort. The people running these pages are usually the same people writing the appeals, staffing the gala, and closing the grant report, and a donation form is the least glamorous thing on the list. The work is small and specific: fewer fields, an obvious default gift amount, a page that loads fast, a mobile view somebody has actually tested on a phone. If you want the full pass on that, it is worth fixing the donation page before spending another dollar driving traffic to it. [EXPERIENCE — a real note from C.J. would land hard here: an organization whose donation page you went through yourself as a donor, on your phone, and what you found — the number of clicks or fields, the thing that made you stop, or the small fix that changed their numbers. Keep it specific, or cut this bracket if nothing real fits.]
The Channels That Bring People to the Page
A donation page only converts the people who reach it, so the second half of an online program is traffic. Search is still the largest source, accounting for 39% of all visits to nonprofit websites, but that share declined steadily through 2025 as AI-generated summaries began answering questions that used to end in a click. That trend is worth watching closely, because a channel that has quietly carried two out of every five visitors for a decade is changing shape underneath us.
Email remains the most dependable channel a development office controls. M+R found nonprofits raising $2.40 per email subscriber in 2025, up from $1.87, with $54 in revenue for every thousand fundraising emails sent. Those are small numbers per message and substantial numbers per year, and they compound with list size and list health. Social media plays a different role than most boards imagine — organic reach has been shrinking for years, and its real value now is warming people up and moving them toward an email address or a donation form rather than closing gifts on the platform. Getting honest about that distinction is most of what makes social media fundraising worth your time.
The channel small shops underuse most is their own supporters. When a volunteer, board member, or grateful family asks their own network on your behalf, the ask carries a trust you cannot buy with ad spend, and it reaches people who have never heard of you. That is the whole premise behind peer-to-peer fundraising, and it tends to bring in exactly the kind of new donor the retention numbers say you should then work hard to keep.
The Two Streams Worth Building First
If you only have capacity to build two things online this year, the data points clearly at which two. The first is recurring giving. Monthly gifts made up 27% of all online revenue in 2025, rising from 22% at small organizations to 37% at the largest ones, and sustainers hold on in a way one-time donors do not — 71% are still giving a year in, and a little more than half are still active after two full years. That is the closest thing to predictable income a nonprofit gets, and starting a monthly giving program mostly comes down to putting the option in front of people with a suggested amount attached.
The second is donor-advised funds, which were the fastest-growing revenue source M+R tracked. DAF revenue rose 44% in 2025 and the number of DAF gifts rose 23%, with an average gift of $1,430 — against $120 for the average direct mail gift. These are donors who have already set money aside for charity and are deciding where it goes. Many of them are sitting on your list right now, and the practical step is simply making it easy and obvious to give that way, which starts with understanding how donor-advised funds work well enough to raise them in conversation.
The donors who give through vehicles like these are usually thinking in decades rather than fiscal years, and that longer horizon opens up giving structures that can support a mission well beyond any single December.
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Where to Start
You do not need a redesign or a new platform to make real progress here. Four steps will tell you more about your online program than another year of guessing.
1. Find your two numbers. What percentage of the people who land on your donation page complete a gift, and what percentage of your online revenue arrived in December? Those two figures locate almost every problem worth solving, and most CRMs and analytics tools will give them to you in an afternoon.
2. Give your own page $10 on your phone. Do it as a stranger would, from a link in an email, and count the taps and the fields. Whatever annoys you in that minute is annoying every mobile donor you have, and it is likely costing you more than any copy change would gain.
3. Turn on one more payment method. Adding a digital wallet is usually a settings toggle in your giving platform, and it removes the exact step where mobile donors quit.
4. Put a monthly option in front of every gift. A visible recurring choice with a suggested amount is the lowest-effort, highest-durability change available to you, and it compounds every year you leave it in place.
What I keep coming back to is that online fundraising rewards maintenance more than inspiration. The organizations quietly growing their digital revenue are not the ones with the most clever campaigns; they are the ones who fixed the form, kept the list healthy, asked for the second gift, and made the recurring option easy to find. Any development office can do the first of those this week, and the rest follow more naturally than you would expect.
C.J. Bergmen is a pastor, licensed counselor, and fundraising strategist who helps organizations and generous individuals approach giving with honesty and long-term vision.