The 2026 State of Digital Fundraising
We analyzed engagement across thousands of campaigns to find what actually moved revenue this year — and what quietly stopped working.
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 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.
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 3×.
The era of treating every supporter the same is over. The data advantage now belongs to teams who can see the whole journey.
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 2–4× 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.
The full benchmark report — with breakdowns by organization size and vertical — is available to momoGood customers in Insights.
