Nonprofit Fundraising and Grant Prompts

More money, from fewer people

Giving USA 2026 put total US charitable giving at $617.20 billion in 2025 — up 5.7% in current dollars, 3.0% after inflation, and the first year the figure has ever cleared $600 billion. Read on its own, that number says the sector is healthy.

It is not the only number. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, run by the Association of Fundraising Professionals with the GivingTuesday Data Commons, estimates that donor counts fell about 3.6% in 2025 — a decline in every single year since 2021. The donors vanishing fastest are the small ones: the $1–$100 group, which is roughly 57% of all donors by headcount, shrank by about 11% year over year. Overall donor retention edged up from 43.1% to 43.3%, driven by repeat donors — retention of first-time donors stayed essentially flat, and remains well under 20%.

Meanwhile the largest increase by source in 2025 was bequests, up nearly 20%.

Put those together and the picture becomes specific rather than gloomy. The sector is posting record dollars by harvesting relationships built decades ago, while the pipeline that produces those relationships empties. A bequest received in 2025 is a first gift from the 1980s that somebody kept renewing for forty years. If the $25 donor you acquire this year never gives a second time, there is no bequest in 2065.

Three consequences follow, and they shaped every prompt in this pack.

Retention is the strategy, not a program

When fewer than one in five new donors gives again, acquisition without a second-gift plan is a treadmill run at full cost. Most organizations still treat retention as something the database person handles after the campaign, and define a lapsed donor as someone who hasn't given in thirteen months — by which point the relationship has usually been over for a year.

Keep Donors From Lapsing and Win Back the Ones Who Did works from your actual giving history rather than a generic cadence. It sets an at-risk trigger well before the conventional lapse point, separates the donors worth a personal call from the ones worth an email, and — the part most retention advice skips — tells you which lapsed segments to suppress rather than chase. Some donors gave once because a friend asked them to, and the honest move is to stop spending on them.

Two structural fixes sit alongside it. Build a Monthly Giving Program Worth the Setup converts the retention problem into an operational one: a sustainer doesn't have to be re-persuaded every year. And Write an Annual Appeal That Doesn't Sound Like Everyone Else's exists because the appeal is where most second gifts are won or lost, and most appeals are interchangeable.

Concentration is a governance question

As the small-donor base thins, revenue concentrates. An organization where three funders cover 60% of the budget is not having a fundraising problem — it is carrying a risk the board is responsible for understanding. That reframing is why this pack puts as much weight on the board as on the donor file.

Recruit a Board That Fills Your Actual Gaps starts from the skills and access you are missing rather than from who is available, and treats absent lived experience of the issue as a governance weakness rather than a diversity checkbox. It also insists you fix meeting times, expense reimbursement, jargon, and pre-reading load before recruiting someone into a board that cannot accommodate them.

Get Your Board to Help With Fundraising is built on an observation that survives contact with most boards: nearly all of them contain people who will never make an ask, and a program offering only that gets nothing from most of the room. So it builds a difficulty-ordered menu — personal gift, signing letters, handwritten notes, thank-you calls, introductions, hosting, joining an ask, making one. Most donors would rather be thanked by a board member than asked by one, and thanking is a job almost anyone will take.

Small gifts are pipeline, not campaign ROI

If you judge a $25 acquisition on the revenue it produced this quarter, you will stop acquiring $25 donors — which is precisely the decision the sector has collectively been making, and precisely why bequests are the only source growing fast. Small-gift work has to be judged on lifetime value and on what it feeds.

That is the job of Move a Donor Toward a Major Gift: to make the path from a small recurring gift to a significant one explicit, so the pipeline is a thing you manage rather than something that happens to you.

Never hide what the work costs

The second thread running through this pack is the starvation cycle, first named by Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2009. Funders hold unrealistic expectations about overhead; nonprofits respond by both underspending on infrastructure and underreporting what they do spend on the Form 990; funders read the reported numbers and harden their expectations. Everyone acts rationally and the whole sector ends up under-built.

The editorial rule for every money prompt here: never help an organization produce a budget that conceals what the work costs.

Build a Program Budget That Includes What It Really Costs applies it directly. It reminds you that under 2 CFR 200.414(f) a recipient without a negotiated indirect cost rate may elect a de minimis rate of up to 15% of modified total direct costs — raised from 10% in OMB's 2024 revision to the Uniform Guidance, requiring no documentation, and available indefinitely. Many organizations still quote 10%, or claim nothing at all. It then forces the shortfall into the open: where a funder's cap sits below your real cost, you calculate the gap in dollars and name which source absorbs it. A program that runs 30% unfunded is a decision worth making deliberately, not a discovery worth making in month eight.

Grants: the four pieces nobody teaches

Grant advice tends to collapse into how to write a proposal. This pack deliberately does not include a generic proposal prompt — the library already covers eligibility screening and rubric-driven drafting in Apply for a Grant or Non-Dilutive Funding. Instead it takes the four pieces that get skipped.

Prospect research that reads filings, not mission statements. Private foundations publicly file every grant they paid, to whom, and how much. Find Foundation Funders Worth Applying To has you check whether the same grantees recur every year — a closed circle — or turn over, and whether new grantees are your size. A foundation whose stated priorities match you perfectly but whose grants all go to organizations ten times your budget is not a prospect.

The letter of inquiry as its own artifact. Write a Letter of Inquiry That Gets You Invited to Apply treats the LOI as what it is — a two-page argument whose only job is to earn an invitation — rather than a compressed proposal.

The report as the renewal conversation. Write the Grant Report Your Funder Will Actually Read reports line by line against the original promise, and for every shortfall requires four things: what you expected, what happened, why, and what you did about it. The thing that actually damages a funder relationship is not a missed target — it is a missed target explained by circumstances, with no evidence anyone noticed at the time.

The case that everything else draws from. Write a Case for Support People Will Actually Give To and Build a Theory of Change That Survives a Funder's Questions are the upstream documents. If the appeal, the LOI and the major-gift conversation each invent their own version of why you matter, they will contradict each other in front of the same funder.

Claims you can defend

Report Your Impact Without Overclaiming sorts every claim you currently make into output, outcome, and impact, and flags the ones promoted above their evidence. Served 400 people is an output. Transformed 400 lives is the same fact with an unsupported claim attached. The prompt forces alternative explanations for every outcome — selection effects, people who would have improved anyway, other services they were receiving — and lands on a contribution claim rather than a causal one, on the argument that contribution stated confidently persuades a serious funder more than causation asserted without support.

Three prompts in this pack — the appeal, the grant report, and the impact report — carry explicit participant consent and dignity checks: whether consent was informed and is revocable, whether identifying someone is necessary, and whether the person is portrayed as someone who did something rather than someone something was done to.

Where this stops

These prompts are drafting and thinking tools, not professional advice. The budget prompt defers cost allocation methodology and the treatment of federal awards to a nonprofit CPA. The major-gift prompt stops before stock, donor-advised funds, and planned gifts, all of which need a nonprofit attorney. The volunteer prompt — Build a Volunteer Program That Doesn't Burn People Out, which is program management rather than community building — defers background check policy, mandatory reporting duties, and liability coverage to an attorney and your insurer.

Sources

• Giving USA 2026 — charitable giving rose to $617.20 billion in 2025, Giving USA Foundation, researched and written by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy
• Fundraising Effectiveness Project quarterly reports, a collaboration of the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and the GivingTuesday Data Commons
• Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2009
• 2 CFR 200.414 — Indirect costs, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations