By Nick Blake and Liz Ertner “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
Year-end fundraising is just like that — a little bit of sunshine in the darkness (and hoo-boy, we’re in some damn darkness). Well, it’s not *always* like that, but 2025 was indeed some good news: Overall, most of the nonprofits we work with raised more during the busy end-of-year fundraising season compared to last year, after seeing relatively little growth in December 2024.
The channels where we saw the strongest growth were digital advertising and mobile. A majority of organizations we worked with this year saw more revenue come in from these channels compared to the previous year, continuing a steady trend in recent years towards channel diversification among nonprofits’ digital fundraising programs.
Email performance
Email performance was solid if not particularly exciting. Many organizations saw revenue growth in line with overall digital revenue, though some saw lower returns over email (including some who increased revenue overall). Notably, this represents a turnaround in email revenue trends — in 2024, the median organization in our analysis saw slightly lower email fundraising performance at End of Year. This year, the median organization saw respectable 10% growth, although performance varied significantly across organizations.
Paid search
Paid search was where we saw some of the biggest shifts, largely driven by how quickly AI is changing the landscape. For many orgs, traditional Google paid search just isn’t as efficient as it used to be — more dollars paid, less coming back compared to prior years. That said, a lot of nonprofits were able to blunt that impact by leaning more heavily into Google’s Performance Max. In practice, PMax ended up serving a lot of search inventory and helped keep overall revenue from dropping as much as it otherwise might have. Most groups haven’t seen the same from Bing’s version (Bing PMax), but many have started testing it in hopes it performs similarly one day.
Paid SMS
Paid SMS picked up real momentum this year. Several new vendors have appeared in the space since 2024, and many organizations either tried Paid SMS for the first time or significantly scaled programs that were already in place. Early results were encouraging enough that this no longer feels like an “experimental” channel — it’s becoming part of the core mix. We’re seeing it work both for prospecting and for reconnecting with existing supporters who’ve stopped responding on email and other channels.
Audio
Audio continued to be a strong performer. Whether through direct podcast buys or streaming audio, it tended to outperform expectations. Groups are getting more sophisticated with their strategies for audio, including developing custom talking points for individual podcasts based on their tone.
Social
Social continues to be dominated by teams going all-in on Meta’s Advantage+, and it remains one of the strongest channels for driving new donors. But many organizations see a tradeoff in volume versus gift size: social excels at acquiring donors, but average gifts tend to be meaningfully lower than in some other channels.
Display and Connected TV
Display and Connected TV were much less consistent. Results varied widely by nonprofit. Display in particular is getting caught up in some broader shifts happening across the internet as AI changes how traffic works.
More people are getting information directly from tools like ChatGPT instead of visiting publisher sites, and in some cases, AI agents are hitting websites via browsers with no real person behind the session. On the publisher side, that’s leading to more low-quality traffic, more questionable sites selling inventory, and less traffic flowing to higher-quality placements. This isn’t as relevant for channels like CTV, audio, or certain video formats — but it does help explain why display (and, to a lesser extent, programmatic video) feels especially uneven right now.
Creative
Creative including influencer-style ads and direct-to-camera videos from celebrities or trusted staff voices clearly stood out. Straightforward, human-sounding content outperformed highly produced assets in most cases. Several organizations also leaned into using dynamic creative optimization to test hyper personal ads that insert things like time of day, region, and local weather into the ad creative, based on where the person is.
Web performance
Web performance was more interesting, as the rise of artificial intelligence has had big impacts on organic web traffic. Stay tuned — we’ll have much more to say on this soon!
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Stepping back, 2025 was a rough year for causes and people, and that broader context matters. Many political organizations were down year over year, which makes sense given the move from an election year to a non-election year — though performance was still strong overall.
Some international relief organizations also saw year-over-year declines, largely because Gaza was much less prominent in the news cycle than it has been in 2024, making direct comparisons challenging.
Finally, other organizations that stepped up in the face of devastating threats this year — food security groups, immigrant rights — experienced an outpouring of generosity earlier in 2025.
We’ll, of course, dive into all this and more in our upcoming Benchmarks Study, which is set to launch on April 22. Meanwhile, it’s clear that 2026 is gonna be another tough year. It is, as always, heartening to see that people open their hearts and wallets in the face of unimaginable cruelty. They are the invincible summer in this difficult winter. We hope you take some solace that the work you do is part of the light. Hang in there, friends.