Understanding Donor Behavior: Key Insights from The Generosity Report 2025

It’s Day 4 of Research Roundup week, and today’s another report about donor behavior and donation patterns. (I’m working on the second draft of my book about fundraising (co-authored with Jackson Cooper), so you’re coming along for the ride.)

Today’s report is the annual Generosity Report by Neon One. It’s particularly relevant for our book because it focuses on donors who give less than $5,000 annually (which Neon One says makes up 97% of all giving!), and mid-level and small gift donors are the focus of our book. Neon One’s study comes from 99,522 donors that made donations between 2020 and 2024, a hefty sample size.

Here are some takeaways:

Work hard to keep your donors

Worry less about getting a big gift to start, put all you can into keeping a donor giving over the years. Most donors do give only once, but the more years a donor gives, the more likely they are to increase their annual giving. The report shows that one time donor gave an average donation of $187, rising to an average gift of $365 if they gave for 4 years, and a whopping $606 if they gave for 5 years. That’s a really big difference, so put lots of effort into keeping donors giving year after year.

Recurring donors who set up something like monthly giving, tend to increase their giving after about three years. So don’t neglect those “set it and forget it” donors – keep reaching out to them, inviting them to events, communicating your impact and they just might up their monthly giving.

Collaborate, don’t compete, with other charities

People who give to more than one organization give more overall, and give more over time. While it’s true that they give less per organization, they give more overall. So maybe you’ll be the organization in their portfolio that’s their primary focus, maybe not. But in the grand scheme of things, having more people giving more money to nonprofits advancing good in the world is a good thing. Even if you are solely focused on the success of your organization, this data points towards an “all boats rise” outcome for nonprofits, so lifting up other nonprofits can increase the total level of giving.

More involvement, more donations

People who attend events give more. Volunteers give more. Donors who click on links in emails give more. All around, the more that an organization can inspire a donor to be more involved – whether that’s as quick as reading an email or as involved as becoming a regular volunteer – being more involved is correlated with a higher level of giving over time.

However, those engagements need to be high quality. Just sending more emails to try to get a donor to click won’t work. Membership benefits, volunteer opportunities, and event programs need not be elaborate, but need to be meaningful.

(I’ll repeat my note from yesterday’s post that this report shows correlation, not causation, but I don’t think that we need to worry about that overly much – who cares whether donations cause engagement or the other way around, they go together.)

Love ALL your donors

What I took away from this report was the wide range of ways that donors give and participate – and how ALL of them are needed. I think those of us working in the nonprofit sector can get so focused on trying to get donors to give more and more, and we can lose sight of valuing the diversity of donors that we have that together provide the support for our organizations and important ways the nonprofit sector holds up our society.

That’s why I appreciate the lens through which this report is framed: generosity.