The 2026 State of Digital Fundraising

Every January, fundraising teams inherit a strategy built on last year's assumptions. This year, the gap between what teams think works and what the data shows is wider than we've ever measured.

We looked at campaign performance across messaging, events, and workplace giving programs running on momoGood — thousands of campaigns, millions of supporter interactions — to surface the patterns that separated growing programs from shrinking ones.

The findings echo broader industry data. M+R Benchmarks, the annual study of digital fundraising across hundreds of nonprofits, has documented a steady shift in where donor attention — and dollars — actually land. The organizations pulling ahead aren't just doing more; they're connecting channels in ways that compound engagement over time.

The headline: channels don't raise money, journeys do

The single strongest predictor of revenue growth wasn't channel mix, send volume, or even list size. It was cross-channel participation — the share of supporters who engaged in more than one program type during the year.

• Supporters active in one channel gave a median of $86/year.
• Supporters active in two channels gave a median of $312/year.
• Supporters active in three or more gave a median of $740/year.

That's not a small lift. It's the difference between a program that plateaus and one that compounds.

This pattern holds at every organization size we measured. Small nonprofits with under 5,000 contacts saw an even sharper multiplier effect, likely because each additional touchpoint carried more weight in a shorter relationship history. Mid-size organizations (5,000–50,000 contacts) saw the most consistent lift, while large organizations (50,000+) benefited most when the cross-channel journey was automated rather than manually orchestrated.

SMS emerged as the fastest-growing channel

Text messaging was the breakout channel of 2026. Organizations on momoGood that added SMS to their channel mix saw higher response rates and faster time-to-gift than any other digital channel. The mechanics are simple: a well-timed text with a clear ask and a mobile-optimized donation link removes every friction point between impulse and action. While email remains the volume leader for digital fundraising revenue, SMS consistently delivered the highest engagement rate per message sent.

The organizations seeing the best SMS results weren't treating text as a standalone broadcast channel. They were using it as the fast lane in a multi-channel journey — an SMS follow-up to an email non-opener, a text reminder the morning of an event, a thank-you message within an hour of a gift. When SMS is integrated into the broader journey rather than run as a separate program, its impact compounds with every other channel.

Mobile giving continued its rise

Mobile devices accounted for a growing share of digital donations again this year. The Blackbaud Institute has tracked this trajectory for years, and the trend is accelerating: mobile-originated gifts now represent a significant and growing portion of online giving revenue. On momoGood, mobile-first donation pages outperformed desktop-formatted pages by a measurable margin in both conversion rate and average gift size.

The implication is clear: if your donation page isn't optimized for a phone screen, you're leaving money on the table. That means short forms, large tap targets, mobile-friendly payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and page load times under three seconds. Organizations on momoGood that implemented mobile-optimized donation flows saw conversion improvements within the first month.

The convergence of SMS growth and mobile giving is not a coincidence. A text message lands on a mobile device, and the donation link opens a mobile browser. If the donation page is optimized for that screen, the entire journey — from message to gift — happens in under 60 seconds. Organizations that aligned their SMS strategy with mobile-optimized donation pages saw the strongest revenue lift of any channel combination we measured.

What stopped working

Batch-and-blast email appeals continued their slide: open rates held steady, but click-to-gift conversion fell 18% year over year. Generic year-end pushes without a behavioral trigger underperformed segmented sends by nearly 3x.

The decline was steepest among organizations that relied on a single annual spike — the November-December giving season — without building engagement touchpoints throughout the year. Year-round giving programs, by contrast, showed more stable revenue even when year-end performance softened. The Giving USA annual report has documented a broader diversification trend: individual giving continues to shift away from concentrated holiday appeals toward sustained, relationship-driven engagement throughout the calendar year.

Other tactics that lost ground in 2026:

• One-size-fits-all ask strings. Donation pages with a single set of suggested amounts underperformed pages that dynamically adjusted ask amounts based on the donor's giving history. Personalized ask strings produced higher average gifts and higher conversion rates.
• Delayed acknowledgment. Organizations that waited more than 24 hours to send a thank-you message after a gift saw measurably lower second-gift conversion rates than those with automated, immediate acknowledgment workflows.
• Channel silos. Teams that ran email, SMS, and events as separate programs with separate strategies saw flat or declining revenue, even when individual channel metrics looked healthy. The issue wasn't channel performance in isolation — it was the absence of a connected supporter journey.

The era of treating every supporter the same is over. The data advantage now belongs to teams who can see the whole journey.

The rise of AI in fundraising operations

2026 marked the first year that AI-assisted fundraising tools moved from experimental pilots to core operations at a meaningful number of organizations. The most common use cases we observed on momoGood were:

• Message variant generation. AI tools that drafted multiple versions of a fundraising appeal — varying tone, length, urgency, and emotional framing — so teams could A/B test without the time cost of writing every variant from scratch.
• Send-time optimization. Algorithms that analyzed individual supporter engagement patterns to deliver messages at the time each person was most likely to open and act, rather than sending the entire list at a single scheduled time.
• Donor scoring and segmentation. Machine learning models that scored supporters based on recency, frequency, and monetary value — plus behavioral signals like event attendance and volunteer activity — to predict who was most likely to give, upgrade, or lapse.

These aren't futuristic concepts; they're operational tools that dozens of momoGood customers used in production this year. The organizations that adopted them earliest saw measurable improvements in both revenue per send and staff time per campaign.

Workplace giving emerged as a growth channel

While traditional individual giving faced headwinds, workplace giving programs grew steadily. Employer matching gift programs, payroll deductions, and corporate volunteer grants all expanded their share of total fundraising revenue on the momoGood platform.

The driver was accessibility. As more employers adopted modern CSR platforms that simplified the matching gift process, employees followed through at higher rates. Organizations that actively promoted matching gift eligibility in their donation flows — reminding donors to check whether their employer would match — captured incremental revenue that would otherwise have gone unclaimed. Industry estimates suggest that billions of dollars in matching gift funds go unclaimed every year simply because donors don't know to ask.

What to do with this

Three moves separated the top quartile of programs:

• Invite cross-over deliberately. Gala attendees got volunteer invitations; SMS donors got event tickets. Cross-channel invitations converted at 2–4x cold acquisition.
• Trigger on behavior, not calendar. The best-performing appeals fired within 48 hours of a supporter action — a bid, a reply, a logged hour.
• Measure retention, not just revenue. Programs that reviewed retention monthly grew 22% faster than those that only tracked annual totals.

Two additional practices showed up consistently among the highest-performing programs:

• Invest in mobile-first donation experiences. Every element of the donor journey — from the initial appeal to the confirmation page — should be built for a phone screen first and adapted for desktop second, not the other way around.
• Close the feedback loop. The top-performing organizations didn't just ask for gifts; they reported back on impact. Donors who received a mid-year impact update were significantly more likely to give again at year-end than those who only heard from the organization when it was asking for money.

Donor retention: the metric that matters most

Revenue growth is the headline, but retention is the story underneath. The most striking pattern in our 2026 data was the gap between organizations that tracked retention monthly and those that only measured it annually. Monthly retention reviewers grew 22% faster — not because the metric itself is magic, but because reviewing it regularly forces teams to notice problems early and act on them.

When you only check retention at year-end, a donor who lapsed in March has been gone for nine months before anyone notices. When you check monthly, that same lapse triggers a re-engagement sequence in April. The earlier you intervene, the more likely you are to win the donor back. On momoGood, automated lapsed-donor workflows — triggered when a supporter's giving pattern breaks — recovered a meaningful share of at-risk donors before they fully lapsed.

Retention also connects directly to the cross-channel story. Supporters who engaged across multiple channels had significantly higher retention rates than single-channel supporters. The journey itself creates stickiness: a donor who also volunteers and attends events has a deeper relationship with the organization than one who only gives once a year in response to an email appeal.

Looking ahead

The trajectory is clear: the organizations that will grow in 2027 and beyond are the ones building connected, data-informed supporter journeys across every channel — not the ones sending more messages through more channels in isolation. The infrastructure advantage belongs to teams that can see a single supporter's engagement across email, SMS, events, workplace giving, and volunteering, and act on that picture in real time.

Three areas to watch in the year ahead: the continued expansion of AI from message drafting into donor journey orchestration; the maturation of workplace giving as a reliable, recurring revenue channel; and the growing expectation among supporters for real-time impact reporting — not just annual reports, but immediate confirmation that their gift made a difference. The organizations that invest in these capabilities now will have a compounding advantage as the landscape continues to shift.

The full benchmark report — with breakdowns by organization size and vertical — is available to momoGood customers in Insights.