The Fundraising Effectiveness Project has published donor retention data annually since 2006. The 2024 report put first-year retention at 26.3% — meaning that for every hundred people who give to a charitable organization for the first time in a given year, roughly seventy-four of them will not give again. That figure has been essentially stable for more than a decade, which means the sector has been aware of the problem long enough that awareness alone has not moved it.

The research on why donors lapse is also stable. The Association of Fundraising Professionals' repeated surveys of lapsed donors find the same cluster of reasons: the donor was never thanked, they felt their gift was not used wisely, or they received no information about its impact. Each of these is, at root, an information failure. The donor gave and received no credible accounting of what followed.

The organizations with the highest retention rates are not necessarily the ones with the most compelling mission. They are the ones with the infrastructure to close the information loop — to tell a specific donor what happened to their specific contribution in verifiable terms. That infrastructure is expensive to build and staff-intensive to operate. Large institutional charities have development departments that can produce personalized stewardship at scale. A food pantry with three hours a week of paid staff time cannot, and the gap in retention outcomes between those two types of organizations reflects that capacity difference more than it reflects differences in mission quality or donor intent.

This creates a retention disparity that runs along organizational size rather than organizational effectiveness. The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University has documented a long-term concentration of charitable giving among fewer, larger donors — a trend that correlates with, among other things, the capacity of larger organizations to provide the accountability infrastructure that sustains major donor relationships. Small organizations serving high-need communities are competing for donor attention without the stewardship tools that larger organizations treat as standard operating infrastructure.

The second gift is also the most predictive one. Donors who give twice retain at materially higher rates than first-time donors, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's cohort data. Getting from one gift to two is the steepest part of the retention curve — which means the stewardship that happens between the first gift and the potential second one is disproportionately important relative to any communication that happens afterward.

For a small organization, the practical question is whether the stewardship required to earn that second gift can be produced without dedicated development staff. The answer depends on whether the operations workflow — the actual intake and distribution of donated goods — can be made to produce donor-ready data as a byproduct rather than as a separate task. If a scan that records a donated item also generates the information needed to tell the donor what happened to it, the stewardship step stops requiring additional labor. The data is already there; the only remaining question is whether it gets sent.

Whether organizations that have made that connection see retention improvements, and by how much, requires more longitudinal evidence than currently exists in the field.

GracePoint Solutions generates verified donor impact records automatically from donation intake operations. Free for small organizations at gracepoint-solutions.com.