The Middle Is Falling

Part 1 of 3: The data. What our numbers say about household giving to community nonprofits — and why the national headlines can't see it.

Nobody leaves a ten-million-dollar bequest to the local animal shelter.

When the headlines say American charitable giving reached six hundred seventeen billion dollars last year — a record — they are describing money that flows to universities, hospital systems, and large foundations. The shelter, the food pantry, the after-school program, the small congregation: they live on the fifty-dollar gift from a household that decided, this week, to respond to an appeal.

That household has been quietly disappearing for years. We watched it happen in our own data. This is the first of three posts on what we found and what we think community nonprofits should do about it.

What we measured

We took a cohort of more than a thousand nonprofits from our customer base — organizations that were processing online gifts before COVID — grouped them by their 2019 online volume, and followed the same organizations, year by year, through 2025, then month against month for August 2025 versus August 2026.

Because the cohort is fixed, nothing about our own growth affects the numbers. Every figure describes the same organizations compared with themselves, and every figure is a median or a percentage of organizations, so no single large client can move it.

Three groups matter here. Small organizations, under $30,000 a year online: volunteer-run groups, small congregations, clubs. Community organizations, $30,000 to $100,000: local human-service and cultural groups with a small staff. Established organizations, $100,000 to $1 million: regional organizations with a development function. The middle two are where the story is.

1. The middle has been shrinking since 2021

Take the typical organization in each tier and compare its online revenue each year with what it raised in 2019. The typical Community organization was 18 percent above its 2019 level in 2021, the COVID peak. By 2025 it was 18 percent below. The typical Established organization went from 7 percent above in 2020 to 20 percent below in 2025.

Table 1. Typical organization's online revenue — % change from 2019 (nominal dollars)

Tier	2020 vs 2019	2021 vs 2019	2022 vs 2019	2023 vs 2019	2024 vs 2019	2025 vs 2019
Small (under $30K)	+45%	+67%	+49%	+58%	+31%	+23%
Community ($30K–$100K)	+7%	+18%	+13%	−2%	−9%	−18%
Established ($100K–$1M)	+7%	+4%	+5%	−5%	−18%	−20%

Read across a row: each cell is how far the typical organization in that tier was above or below its own 2019 revenue in that year. Median of the tier, so no single large organization moves it. The Small row counts only organizations still processing in each year — see finding 4 for the ones that stopped.

And it hasn't stopped. The same figures year over year:

Table 2. Typical organization's online revenue — % change from the prior year

Tier	2020→21	2021→22	2022→23	2023→24	2024→25
Small (under $30K)	+15%	−11%	+6%	−17%	−6%
Community ($30K–$100K)	+10%	−4%	−13%	−7%	−10%
Established ($100K–$1M)	−3%	+1%	−10%	−14%	−2%

The typical Community organization fell another 10 percent in 2025 alone. Established organizations fell 14 percent in 2024 and a further 2 percent in 2025 — a pause, not a recovery. Small organizations that were still processing fell 17 percent in 2024 and 6 percent in 2025, on top of the one in six that stopped altogether. In every year since 2021, 55 to 61 percent of organizations in the middle tiers were down from the year before, and roughly one in three lost more than 20 percent of its online revenue in a single year — four years running.

Inflation over the same period was about 25 percent — the cumulative consumer price index from 2019 to 2025, with annual rates of roughly 1, 5, 8, 4, 3 and 3 percent compounding to about 26. In real terms, the typical community nonprofit is raising 35 to 40 percent less online than it did before the pandemic. COVID didn't cause this. COVID interrupted it, with a surge of emergency generosity in 2020 and 2021 — and the moment the surge ended, the trend resumed exactly where it had left off.

2. Fewer gifts, not smaller gifts

This is the part that reframes everything. The median online gift was $50 in 2015. It was $50 in 2025. Across every tier, every year, for a decade, the typical gift has not moved. The share of gifts under $100 hasn't fallen either. Households that still give are giving what they always gave — an amount that now buys a quarter less.

What collapsed is the count. The typical Established organization receives 29 percent fewer gifts than in 2019. The typical Community organization is down 28 percent from its 2021 peak. The number of gifts an organization receives is the closest thing there is to a count of the households that support it, and that count has been falling for four years.

Most of the sector's advice is about gift size: upgrade the donor, ask for more, build a major-gifts program. But households aren't giving less. Fewer of them are giving at all. A strategy built on getting more from each donor is aimed at the wrong variable.

3. The one-time gift is the casualty

Compare August 2026 with August 2025 for the same organizations. Total unique donors fell 2 to 5 percent depending on tier — not dramatic. Then split those donors into two groups: one-time givers and monthly sustainers.

One-time donors fell 12 percent at Community organizations and 17 percent at Established ones. In a single year. Meanwhile the number of recurring gifts rose about 4 percent, and recurring gifts went from 58 percent of all transactions to 63 percent. Half of all organizations had fewer donors this August than last. The sustainers held their floor; the one-time donors walked out.

The one-time gift is the gift a household decides to make, or not make, when the appeal arrives. It is the most discretionary dollar a family spends. The recurring gift is a decision that was already made — a standing order — and it survives because nobody has to re-decide it every month while looking at a fuel receipt.

4. The smallest organizations don't shrink. They stop.

Among organizations under $30,000 in 2019, about 17 percent processed nothing at all by 2025, against 3 to 5 percent in the tiers above. They don't decline gracefully; they go silent.

And among the small organizations that survived, the share of revenue from gifts of $1,000 or more rose from 31 percent to 45 percent. The local organization that once ran on a hundred $50 checks increasingly runs on a handful of large ones. That's a narrower base and a far more fragile one — lose two of those donors and the year is gone.

Why the national numbers miss this

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which tracks organizations with professional fundraising operations, reported 2025 dollars up 5 percent while the number of donors fell 3.6 percent — the fifth straight annual decline. The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy's household panel shows the share of American households giving to charity at all fell from 66 percent in 2000 to under half by 2018. None of this contradicts a record year. The totals are lifted by the top. The organizations in our data don't receive those gifts, and for them the only number that matters is the number of ordinary households willing to give $50.

Next week: why the answer is a smaller ask, not a bigger one.

Want to talk through what this means for your organization? Contact us and one of our specialists will call you for a conversation.