Giving Tuesday 2025 Final Report : How Nonprofits Stayed Nimble, Scaled Up & Leaned into Relevancy

In 2025, nonprofit fundraising conversations have centered around volatility: unpredictable news cycles, funding cuts, market uncertainty, and an imperative for fundraising leaders to do more with tighter budgets. And yet, faced with all this, nonprofits did more than merely meet the moment. They shattered expectations and set themselves up to finish the year riding a wave of momentum. We’re celebrating the growth in giving that nonprofits saw – 13% over 2024, according to givingtuesday.org – and the incredible impact that our partners’ Giving Tuesday efforts made for their missions:

MissionWired is honored to work alongside nonprofits driving powerful change in their communities – fighting against gun violence, ensuring families can access food and health care, making critical research advances, responding to crises around the world, protecting our planet, and strengthening communities. We’re also grateful to the people who donated to these and other causes, meeting the year’s upheaval with generosity. We felt proud to help our partners recruit those donors with inspired storytelling, targeted tech optimizations, and tested engagement strategies – mustering everything we learned this year to support our partners’ success on Giving Tuesday and drive that powerful $11.5 million in revenue toward their world-changing causes.

Now, as fundraisers assess their results and consider their strategies for year-end and beyond, our Giving Tuesday Report is here to offer context, takeaways, and the top strategies to carry forward.

Below, we’ll share results, case studies, and creative top performers from 39 nonprofit partners across sizes and sectors. And, like we’re seeing across the industry this year, results varied from one organization to the next. Across our partners, we saw 62% were up YoY, 21% down, and 16% flat. The most successful organizations saw a combination of factors at play: their proximity to the stories dominating the news, as well as tactical decisions to diversify their fundraising channels and commit to consistent audience growth. The ten takeaways below will dig into opportunities to leverage all of these factors – the ones both in and out of our control – to maximize results for your program’s unique challenges and opportunities.

Now let’s dive into the trends and takeaways!

1. Average gift amount in 2025 tells a complex story.

Across our full range of nonprofit partners, a $125 average gift is an increase over 2024 – yet a closer look at year-over-year results by organization reveals a different trend. Many organizations saw a noticeable decline in the number of large gifts made in response to Giving Tuesday campaigns. Our strategy experts suspect that this trend isn’t an absence of larger gift donors, but rather that higher-dollar donors may have made their gifts at other points of the year – in response to a particular moment in the news or rapid response effort.

This possibility places extra importance on stewardship and cultivation efforts, since we know that the more time passes between gifts, the harder it can be to recapture a donor’s attention. As end-of-year campaigns roll out in the weeks to come, consider how you can address this trend in personalization strategies: Try specifically targeting high-dollar givers who have not yet made a donation in December, or making sure your asks reflect their past donation history.

Heading into 2026, direct response programs making choices about how to move donors up and down the pipeline based on their activity should look closely at their audience of large donors. Average gift can be a helpful view for understanding if your segmentation is pricing out donors or the opposite – not asking enough. Still, remember that average gift is just one indicator of your program’s fundraising health and should be considered along with other trends like engagement metrics, your total number of donors, and new-to-file donors when making decisions in response to your results.

3. Previews are helping nonprofits grow their revenue, and they’re starting earlier.

As Giving Tuesday evolves over the years, we’ve reported seeing fundraising stretch beyond a single day into a longer campaign. This year, the trend continues to play out, with previews ahead of Dec. 2 providing a great source of added revenue for many. While campaign timing varied greatly from one organization to the next, several of our partner nonprofits saw that adding volume ahead of Thanksgiving or during the holiday weekend drove more growth than the day right before Giving Tuesday.

For some organizations that saw high response rates to preview messaging, extension results were flat or decreased, which suggests a few possibilities: Programs that drove strong results early may not have needed to lean as hard on extensions at the end of their campaigns. At the same time, while preview messaging has high potential for growth, stretching earlier into the week of Thanksgiving, the potential for extension messaging is often limited to next-day “missed goal” messaging and may not be able to grow at quite the same rate.

Here’s how the revenue growth breakdown looked for a sampling of our nonprofit partners across varying sizes and missions between preview, day-of, and extension messages:

4. Watching the clock is stressful. But for many, results take off late into the evening.

Refreshing results as the clock ticks on Giving Tuesday, it can be tempting for us as fundraising practitioners to get nervous if early results feel slow. Yet some organizations that saw revenue start off slowly on the day, with only a small percentage of revenue coming in before 11 a.m., also saw their results pick up significantly as the day went on.

As we’ve seen in years past, a large portion of the revenue comes in post-8 p.m. – likely once people are at home, catching up on their phones after their day. Take a look at two large nonprofits’ revenue distribution across the day, with more than 30% of their daily revenue coming in after 8 p.m. on Giving Tuesday:

For organizations leveraging matches and highlighting deadlines, these urgency-driving tactics often perform best during late-in-the-day sends. And as more nonprofits grow their texting programs, the after-work hours are also typically the highest performing over SMS.

As you head into your end-of-year campaigns, remember not to fret if early results come in more slowly on Dec. 31! For many organizations, up to one third of day-of revenue comes after working hours – sometimes more so if there’s a looming deadline like end-of-year. By reviewing your send times and optimizing your end-of-year messaging based on the times you saw revenue come in at Giving Tuesday, you can leverage your top-performing content during high-potential windows for your audience. And for campaigns sending across time zones, consider splitting out final sends of the day to allow your end-of-day messages to reach audiences on the west coast of the United States later.

5. Staying nimble – and identifying key opportunities to pivot strategy – made the difference for many.

In major moments like Giving Tuesday, we work closely with our partners to assess results in real-time and identify the shifts in tactics like resends, segmentation, and signers that will drive wins wherever possible. For many, this approach helped bring in revenue crucial to meeting their goals.

For one nonprofit, resends on Giving Tuesday alone amounted to an additional $150K raised for their campaign. Another organization identified an email that drove twice the average number of gifts compared to the rest of their appeals. By resending this email, they increased their total gifts for the campaign by 12%.

Nonprofit fundraisers navigate a unique tension in Giving Tuesday and end-of-year campaigns – balancing months of planning with the last-minute shifts it takes to remain truly nimble in the moment can feel tricky to navigate. But with a close eye on small adjustments that can have a big impact on your overall results, remaining nimble is a key strategy. For some of our nonprofit partners that respond to a variety of emergencies, this means identifying the messaging that resonated most with supporters at Giving Tuesday and making strategic shifts to end-of-year campaigns to prioritize that subject matter.

6. Direct mail efforts on Giving Tuesday are growing and adding meaningful revenue.

As fundraising around Giving Tuesday begins sooner every year, the campaign isn’t just for digital anymore. We’ve seen this to be especially true among mid-level and higher-dollar donors. One organization that saw success with Giving Tuesday language in the mail in 2024 tested a call-out to Giving Tuesday on reply devices this year, with updated acknowledgment copy and landing page copy referencing Giving Tuesday alongside a postcard mailing to mid-level audiences. Two more of our partners added a postcard mailing to their Giving Tuesday campaign, featuring a QR code to a unique donation page – and saw the effort add extra revenue to their overall campaign.

Humane World Action Fund

7. Email results are holding steady – but channel diversification was essential to YoY growth.

After a flurry of conversation around email softness in 2024, many organizations saw performance hold steady in the channel by scaling up volume and optimizing their segmentation. Still, the greatest potential for overall program growth lies in diversifying across channels to expand your reach to wherever your audience is engaging.

SMS, which has emerged as an important channel to reach supporters during high-volume moments, is also seeing competition increase this year. Now a core channel for nonprofit fundraising, mature programs are finding that scaling up over text in big moments like Giving Tuesday is key to driving growth. For one of our partners, increasing SMS spend contributed to 12% total revenue growth over 2024.

For some nonprofits, significant growth from paid search also drove overall YoY growth. One organization scaled up ads spend by 41% to achieve a 66% increase in revenue. And programs testing Google Performance Max at Giving Tuesday saw the new ads tool power strong results and drive significant increases in new donors:

Human Rights Watch

In challenging economic landscapes and crowded giving environments like we’ve seen in 2025, investing in acquisition ahead of big moments like Giving Tuesday is key to having the largest, best audience to turn to. This year, we saw nonprofits that invested in acquisition in the late summer and early fall drove stronger results.

Out of 40 organizations that invested in list growth with The Digital Co-Op before Giving Tuesday, 23% saw their investment pay back more than 100% and 40% saw their investment drive 50% or more ROI. And nonprofit partners collectively raised nearly $500K added revenue on Giving Tuesday through reactivated names – powered by The Digital Co-Op.

Strategic list growth from high-quality, modeled acquisition sources and reactivation efforts from lapsed supporters need to be paired with good email hygiene, so be sure to suppress non-responders, grow lists consistently, and activate and re-activate your audiences with compelling engagement ahead of your major fundraising appeals.

9. In a charged giving environment, leaning into impact and the relevancy of the moment motivates powerful response.

In a year saturated with breaking news moments driven by domestic uncertainty, an increase in rapid response efforts, and ongoing international conflicts, many organizations are facing increased need in their communities, reduced resources, or both. Throughout 2025, we’ve been tracking monthly results to identify giving trends across the nonprofit industry in real-time through our interactive dashboard, Nonprofit Trends by MissionWired. One of the key takeaways we’ve identified from this monthly reporting is that results this year have varied greatly by vertical, and whether an organization’s work is impacted by these critical moments of increased need.

Food banks responding to SNAP cuts in October and November went into Giving Tuesday wondering if results would flag after an unprecedented influx in giving – but for many, the response was still incredible. One food bank we partner with drove a 24% increase in revenue and 43% increase in gifts YoY on Giving Tuesday.

Organizations impacted by the decisions of the current administration are also seeing strong results on Giving Tuesday. One nonprofit who responds directly to the Trump administration’s actions saw a major spike in giving and audience growth last Giving Tuesday in the aftermath of the presidential election. In 2025, this program still managed to drive 31% year-over-year growth over email and SMS.

Key to breaking through and reaching donors in this environment is the powerful storytelling that connects your work and mission to the urgency of the moment. As volume goes up and competition increases, campaigns that invited folks into a compelling story, leaned into relevancy wherever possible, and prioritized authentic and eye-catching creative drove strong response. Affinity in peak fundraising moments matters, so taking the space to directly and explicitly share the impact gifts can have led to some of the day’s standout performers across partners.

10. Three creative strategies helped campaigns achieve these breakthrough moments:

Inboxes on Giving Tuesday are packed with appeals leveraging the best-practice urgency tactics that are still essential for driving opens, clicks, and donations. But this increased competition makes it essential to find ways to target and inspire folks to give to your organization and your mission in particular. This year, many campaigns leaned into the unique landscape of 2025 to stand out in inboxes through impact- and mission-focused storytelling and visuals and a sophisticated approach across channels.

Here are three ways our nonprofit partners brought their work front and center through their creative:

Creatively incorporate Giving Tuesday branding to build a cohesive, integrated campaign.
As you connect with your donors across channels, a cohesive approach to visuals strengthens your audience’s recognition of your integrated campaign and overarching message. Organizations made their Giving Tuesday campaigns stand out as a unique effort from regular messaging by incorporating the logo for the day of giving into their organization’s signature visuals and branding.

With End of Year just weeks away, these are the trends that will help us be nimble partners for the nonprofits we work with – ready to respond in real-time to make the adjustments that lean into what’s working and maximize what’s possible for every email, text, mail piece, and ad. We hope they offer insights to inform your planning and inspire your next big strategic swing.

We can’t wait to talk with you more about how to apply these learnings to your next campaign. Share your email below to stay in touch – we’ll make sure you’re among the first to receive our annual report in January, which digs into all the need-to-know trends and results from Giving Tuesday and EOY.

Have an insight or result from Giving Tuesday you’d like to share – or just looking to chat about the tactics outlined here? Get in touch by sending us a note at [email protected].