End-of-Year 2025 Digital Fundraising: Final Report

To our nonprofit partners, fellow fundraising practitioners, and larger community coming off of a packed December and a high-volume, high-impact end of year: Congratulations. Growth in a year like 2025 doesn’t come from easy gains – it’s earned through compelling stories, fearless strategies, and relentless attention to data.

At MissionWired, we’re inspired every day by the resilience and ingenuity of the nonprofits we get to partner with. In a year of uncertainties, nonprofits with missions to change the world for the better met the moment by growing their reach and impact in the face of increased need and limited resources. In powerful fundraising campaigns launched across the country at end of year, nonprofits connected with donors, told their stories, and inspired an incredible movement of giving. Across our nonprofit partners, this amounted to a staggering $43M raised to power critical missions in 2026. On average, revenue at the Final Stretch was up about 15% and total gifts were up about 30%.

There’s so much celebrating to do of this work, and so much strategy to dig into, but first we want to acknowledge: 2025 was an extremely challenging year for people who work in the nonprofit space. With impacts felt both personally and professionally, the past year was all too full of disheartening news and unnecessary obstacles preventing nonprofits from doing their crucial work. To those of you who faced resource cuts, who said goodbye to colleagues, who operated in unhealthy cultures and who were personally impacted by the events of the year: We see you, and we stand at your side, ready to help. In a year like this one, the benchmarks and metrics still matter a great deal, but they share space with the deeper value of hard work done to drive positive change in a year when positive change was made unnecessarily harder to achieve.

This year-end, here’s what the result of those efforts looked like across our nonprofit partners:

Here’s how revenue distribution broke down at end of year – across December, through the final stretch, and throughout Dec. 31 by hour:

Taken in sum, these powerful results will drive an incredible amount of support to our partners’ missions to defend rights, protect our planet, strengthen communities, expand access to care, and push progress forward every day.

As you look to 2026 and plan your next major campaigns, how can you maximize every opportunity for growth? To help you distill as many actionable takeaways as possible from all the results you’ll see coming out of 2025, we’ve spent the first few weeks of the year poring over the data to bring you the most telling trends and the strategies that helped nonprofits achieve growth in a highly competitive landscape. Our End-of-Year Report is here to offer you a look at results across the industry and the biggest takeaways in giving behavior, channel performance, growth strategies, and creative innovation.

For all the trends and takeaways, read on!

1. Across December, revenue growth year-over-year often balanced out between Giving Tuesday and end of year – and which campaign performed best varied.

Broadly across our nonprofit partners, results were up year-over-year both at Giving Tuesday and year-end and we saw the number of gifts up as well, but between the two giving campaigns, which moment performed best was a bit of a mixed bag. For many programs that saw big results on Giving Tuesday, end-of-year results were strong but less standout. For other programs, strong year-end results may have made up for a softer Giving Tuesday. Still others were up year-over-year in both campaigns.

Here’s how Giving Tuesday and end-of-year YOY revenue growth looked for three of our nonprofit partners:

Across our partners, we saw that only 7% of donors who gave at Giving Tuesday made another gift to the same organization at EOY, suggesting that giving was very split across the tentpole moments.

2. End-of-year giving patterns, day-by-day, shift depending on where Dec. 31 falls within the week.

In a traditional final stretch at end of year, we’re used to seeing step-by-step, incremental growth across the days leading up to Dec. 31. This year, for many of our nonprofit partners, results on Dec. 30 felt slow, and underperformed when compared with 2024.

In previous years, we’ve looked into the impact of where the weekend falls in day-by-day giving. With Saturday and Sunday softening results on nearly whichever day they fall (though Dec. 31 remains the least impacted when it falls on a weekend), we can gain a better perspective on which days are up or down from one year to the next. Here’s how revenue by day has looked over the past five years, with days of the week taken into account:

This view suggests that the step-by-step incremental growth we’re used to seeing in the final stretch of year-end is likely to flatten wherever the weekend lies – so be prepared to plan ahead for the Mondays and Fridays that surround those softer performance days.

3. Email performance held steady in 2025, recovering from 2024 vulnerability.

This time last year, all eyes were on email results, which saw unexpected softness. This year-end, we did not see that same decline in the powerhouse digital channel, and instead saw performance largely holding steady.

Across our nonprofit partners, we saw email drive 13% more revenue year-over-year in the final stretch of end of year, while volume remained nearly the same as in 2024, with only a 0.4% increase in volume. In many cases, this was thanks to strategic choices to optimize segmentation, increasing the precision of each email and its audience to drive growth in a competitive channel.

4. As the digital field gets more and more crowded, the role of SMS is changing.

We felt the difference this Giving Tuesday, and again through the rest of December to year-end. With volume only ticking further up over email, and more programs moving into SMS to break through, competition is growing over text. For many nonprofits, even strategic increases in volume made it difficult to drive growth in the channel. So what does it mean if a years-long trend, that SMS is an outlet for a crowded email field, may be coming to an end?

Texting has dramatically matured as a digital channel. In previous years, when peer-to-peer (P2P) texting was an emerging channel with fewer adopters, it offered nonprofits quick access to revenue gains. And, for nonprofits moving into P2P text for the first time at end of year, channel expansion can still offer a valuable bump in revenue: Launching SMS ahead of December, one nonprofit we partner with drove $61K in revenue from eight texts at Giving Tuesday and end of year – and utilizing The Digital Co-Op to grow their list, their investment has driven an 82% return from these campaigns alone.

For existing SMS programs, as competition increases over SMS, we’re seeing that programs are struggling to achieve the same scale over peer-to-peer messaging that they’d come to expect in the final days of the year. Those that did drive growth year-over-year did so through sharp optimization and relentless attention to results. For one organization with a mature P2P texting program, remaining nimble and optimizing their strategy throughout the end-of-year final stretch was key to driving year-over-year growth. Seeing softness in a text featuring a 5X-match upgrade, they upgraded to an 8X match and saw fantastic results – in a full send to their donor audience, the text drove a more than 400% return. And, by testing and optimizing their creative as late as Dec. 31, this program was able to drive their highest return of the day: At the very end of texting hours, one final send of their two top performers drove a 145% return right at the end of texting hours.

5. Paid Advertising also saw a strong rebound.

While talk has been circulating around the demise of paid advertising, the results this year are proving the opposite: across our nonprofit partners, revenue from Paid Search was up 82% in the final stretch, and paid social also managed to drive 6% year-over-year growth, reflecting a positive swing overall in paid advertising this year.

Still, search and social channels are not without challenges – critical to driving both this year was a careful attention to targeting to most effectively leverage the massive reach of both platforms, as well as standout creative, tested and optimized to drive growth. Over Paid Social, one nonprofit we partner with drove more than 300% growth in revenue in December by scaling down on lead acquisition and breaking through the noise with direct-to-donate ads that paired an impact-driven appeal with compelling, relevant graphics, optimized with tested tactics to improve engagement.

6. Results aren’t showing significant impact from generative AI on the efficacy of core channels and strategies in 2025.

When asked by our clients about generative AI in nonprofit fundraising, our answer is primarily to look to the data. This year, we did not see evidence that generative AI has significantly compromised the efficacy of core channels and strategies. Web traffic and paid search continue to be very viable ways to bring supporters to your website and inspire them to make a gift.

At MissionWired, we’re deeply committed to helping our partners drive bold strategies, tell powerful stories, and help shape what’s next in nonprofit fundraising – always looking to the data to inform our strategies and maximize results.

7. Strategic acquisition ahead of year-end from sources like The Digital Co-Op drove returns and powerful revenue.

Nonprofits that used the summer and fall months to grow and prepare their lists ahead of year-end saw the strategy pay back at Giving Tuesday and end of year. This was especially the case in 2025, when a challenging economic landscape made it all the more essential for nonprofits to ensure they are turning to their largest, best audience in key moments.

The Digital Co-Op, MissionWired’s powerful suite of digital acquisition tools and data modeling solutions, helped its members achieve quick returns this end of year – with nine organizations that invested in acquisitions between August and November seeing full payback by year-end. In 2025, The Digital Co-Op helped its members drive nearly $30M in the final end-of-year stretch, and nearly $100M in revenue across the full end-of-year giving season.

8. For nonprofits responding to breaking-news issues in 2025, leaning into relevancy and impact drove sustained, powerful growth.

In a year saturated with breaking news, rapid response moments, increased need and restricted resources, many nonprofits saw their response work change dramatically. For some, this meant scaling up a rapid response effort for the first time. For others, it meant throwing out the content calendar altogether for back-to-back rapid response. (If your program faced new rapid response challenges this year, and you’re looking for resources, be sure to check out the Rapid Response Toolkit built by the fundraising experts on our Nonprofit Advisory Board!)

Organizations that saw their mission impacted by the events of this year drove much-needed revenue growth by remaining nimble, keeping their messages relevant and timely to current conflicts – and their results proved the impact of this messaging on donor response. Across December, from Giving Tuesday to end of year, we’ve seen sectors most impacted by urgent moments in the news, such as food banks and public society organizations, drive the highest year-over-year growth. Broadly, nonprofit sectors with missions getting less attention in this moment saw softer results.

9. Creative that centered trust and tried something unexpected drove top-performing results.

From email inboxes to text notifications to the scroll on social media, year-end was packed with competition from organizations making powerful fundraising appeals. To inspire folks to give to your mission and your organization, nonprofits built their creative strategies around the urgency of the moment we’re in. Programs that used creative strategies to tell a donor exactly what their gift can provide, explicitly ask for a moment of their audience’s time, and take supporters by surprise drove the highest results this year-end.

Here are a few strategies our partners leveraged in 2025 and what they looked like in action:

To build trust, make the impact of a donor’s matched gift crystal clear.
Our partners have taken email appeals to the next level with donation buttons that feature match math, eye-catching visuals, and equivalencies that tell donors the real tangible impact of their gifts. Optimized creative like this drove top-performing emails and ads for a few of our partners.

Break through a crowded field with innovative and unique graphic approaches.
This year-end, grabbing the attention of donors when so many others are vying for attention required the unexpected. Our partners leaned into innovation across channels – with dynamic progress bars over email, personalized GIFs over SMS, and approachable, slice-of-life ad graphics.

Try direct appeals that break the mold – asking for your attention and leaning into emotion.
For many nonprofits, the urgency of the events of the year have called for a different way of appealing to their audiences. Some of our partners broke from really tactics-heavy messaging at year-end to deliver direct appeals and prioritize the emotional stakes of their mission.

While we can’t predict what surprises 2026 will bring, we can take the most impactful strategies from a challenging year with us into a new one, ready to make the most of the next big moments for our missions. At MissionWired, we’re dedicated to bringing you the latest insights and data-informed trends to help guide and inspire bold, attention-grabbing campaigns. We hope this deep dive into data and strategy offers you something new to consider.

We’d love to keep the conversation going! There’s always more to say about end-of-year fundraising than we can fit into a single report, so if you’d like to share a trend or discuss how these strategies can apply to your unique program, we hope you’ll reach out to us at [email protected].

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