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This episode is presented by the Monthly Giving Builder, Dana’s step-by-step tool that helps nonprofits build and manage their monthly giving program from start to finish. Sign up here.

Ready to walk into EOY with your monthly giving program finally built? Join Dana for a free live webinar and learn the 5-step framework that makes it happen. Register here.

From Spikes to Steady: World Central Kitchen’s Monthly Giving Rebrand + What the Data Says About Recurring Giving Right Now

Most nonprofits have at least one monthly donor. Far fewer are actively building toward more. That gap is not a mystery. It shows up clearly in the data, and it has a fix, but only if organizations are willing to look at what the numbers are actually saying and act on it.

This post pulls from the latest State of Recurring Giving webinar hosted by Dana Snyder, which brought together Seth Garber, VP of Sales at Charity Engine; James, Senior Data Scientist at Giving Tuesday Data Commons; and Matt, Director of Community Fundraising at World Central Kitchen. Together they covered fresh benchmarks from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, platform-level payment collection data, and a Giving Tuesday campaign that set a bold public goal, fell short of it on paper, and still generated over $6 million in projected lifetime donor value.

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Recurring Giving Is Growing, But Most Organizations Are Not Driving It

The Giving Tuesday Data Commons team analyzed recurring giving patterns across thousands of organizations from 2021 to 2025 using data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. The picture that emerges is cautiously optimistic and worth sitting with.

Each year, just over 90% of organizations had at least one recurring donor. The share of donors on recurring schedules grew from 6.6% to 7.9% over that four-year period. Progress, yes, but the median organization had only 4% of donors on recurring schedules.

Those two numbers together tell an important story. A relatively small group of organizations is doing the heavy lifting for the entire sector. Most are not actively acquiring new recurring donors. They are running on the momentum of donors acquired years ago and rarely making a recurring-first ask when engaging someone new.

Nearly half of the organizations in the study had zero new donors join as recurring in a given year. The recurring donor base across the sector is largely inherited, not grown. That is not a crisis, but it is a missed opportunity playing out at scale.

Here is a question worth bringing to your next team meeting: in your fundraising asks throughout the year, is there ever a monthly-specific or monthly-only ask? Dana posed this exact question to a room of 145 nonprofit professionals in Virginia, and not one person raised their hand.

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Monthly Giving Delivers the Highest Donor Value of Any Schedule Type

Of all the recurring schedule types tracked in the FEP data, weekly through annual, monthly giving is the most common and the most valuable by a significant margin. Two-thirds of all recurring schedules from 2021 to 2025 were monthly. The share of total recurring revenue coming from monthly donors grew from 73% to 84% over that same period.

Monthly donors had the highest median annual value of all schedule types: $275 per year, compared to $100 for non-recurring donors. That is nearly a three times lift, and it does not just reflect the recurring gift. It includes the supplemental one-time gifts that monthly donors make on top of their regular giving.

That supplemental giving number deserves more attention than it typically gets. The median one-time gift from a monthly donor was $77. That is a meaningful amount. But only about 30% of monthly donors were making those additional gifts. The opportunity is not only to acquire more monthly donors. It is to invite the ones already giving to participate in more ways. Are your recurring donors being asked to give additionally when you launch a new campaign, respond to a sudden crisis, or fund a special initiative? If not, that additional revenue is sitting uncaptured.

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Payment Collection Is a Silent Revenue Variable

Seth Garber from Charity Engine brought platform-level data that reframes how nonprofits should think about monthly giving infrastructure.

The industry standard for collecting monthly payments sits around 85%. Charity Engine’s customer base is running at over 97% collection. That gap compounds significantly across a year and across a donor base. Every failed payment that does not get recovered is not just a missed transaction. It is a relationship that has to be rebuilt from scratch.

A few benchmarks from the Charity Engine platform that are worth knowing: the average recurring gift is $26, the average credit card donation is $43, and the average ACH donation, meaning a donor giving directly from their checking account, is $115. If your organization is not actively presenting ACH as a giving option, that is a substantial difference in average gift size being left on the table.

Seth also flagged the importance of understanding your platform’s payment retry sequence. Most platforms have at least four touch points built into that process. Knowing exactly what those are, and what the messaging looks like at each stage, is an audit worth doing. If a donor’s card expires and they never hear from you in a way that motivates them to update their information, that is a retention failure that has nothing to do with their commitment to your mission.

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World Central Kitchen Built Kitchen Core to Fund Readiness, Not Just Response

World Central Kitchen has distributed over 600 million meals since its founding in 2010. By nature, their work is crisis-driven. Giving spikes when disasters happen and flattens when they do not. That pattern created a real organizational problem: how do you fund the readiness that makes rapid response possible when donor attention is tied to the news cycle?

The answer was a monthly giving program built around sustainable, predictable revenue. And to make that program work, they knew it needed more than a new payment option. It needed an identity.

Many hands, one kitchen. That phrase is at the center of how World Central Kitchen talks about its work. Kitchen Core, the name they chose for their monthly giving program, came directly from that language. The chefs light the fires on the ground. Kitchen Core keeps them burning. The rebrand was built around four pillars: a sense of belonging for donors, clarity of their role in the organization’s work, brand alignment with existing WCK communities including a volunteer core and chef core, and language that translates across their growing international donor base.

For Giving Tuesday, they set a public goal of 20,000 new monthly donors. The campaign included 10 emails spanning Giving Tuesday and end-of-year, eight distinct donor segments based on giving history and current status, urgency-driven messaging framed around crisis readiness rather than crisis reaction, and a match of $50 per new monthly gift extended to $100 toward year end.

On Giving Tuesday alone, World Central Kitchen saw over $60,000 in new recurring commitments and more than 1,300 new monthly donors. That single day accounted for 52% of the total campaign. Across the full campaign, they acquired approximately 2,800 new monthly donors.

That number was not 20,000. Matt said so directly, and that transparency is part of what makes this case study useful.

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2,800 Donors Is Not a Shortfall. It Is $6 Million.

When you run the five-year lifetime value calculation on 2,800 new monthly donors at an 8% annual churn rate, the number that comes back is over $6 million. That is funding for multiple disaster responses, activations, and readiness investments around the world. The gap between 2,800 and 20,000 matters a lot less when you are looking at the number through that lens.

Matt’s honest reflections on what they would do differently are instructive for any organization planning a recurring giving push.

A tiered public goal structure would have created interim milestones to hit and surpass rather than one large number that shaped how the entire campaign felt. Existing monthly donors, who had not been brought into a defined community before Kitchen Core launched, were not primed to rally around the goal. The launch itself was not paired with the onboarding infrastructure that now exists. The launch is not the beginning. The welcome series, the community experience, the retention strategy, those are what determine whether a campaign’s results last.

Since Giving Tuesday, World Central Kitchen has built a three-part welcome series that triggers within three days of a donor’s first gift, including a personalized video from founder Jose Andres. They launched a monthly newsletter for Kitchen Core members specifically, a webinar series for that community, and a spring acquisition campaign built on what the Giving Tuesday and end-of-year data showed them. They also hired a dedicated monthly giving manager who is now stewarding approximately 75,000 recurring donors in partnership with their communications and paid media teams.

The Giving Tuesday campaign planted something. The work happening after it is what determines what grows.

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Segmentation Is What Lets You Grow Monthly Giving Without Alienating Major Donors

A question that came up during the webinar Q&A is one that surfaces often for organizations starting to invest in recurring giving: how do you build a monthly giving program without making major donors feel like they are being deprioritized or pushed toward a lower tier of engagement?

The answer is segmentation, and it is less complicated than it sounds. Not every ask is right for every donor. Major donors giving significant one-time or annual gifts should be excluded from monthly giving acquisition messaging entirely. Propensity modeling tools can help identify grassroots donors giving at lower levels who show a pattern likely to convert to recurring. Your data already contains that information. The work is building the communication segments that act on it.

As Matt framed it, digging into your data to understand who gets which message is what separates a monthly giving program that grows cleanly from one that creates confusion or friction with your most important donor relationships.

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Five Things to Act On Before Your Next Campaign

The recurring giving opportunity for most nonprofits is not hiding. It is visible in the data, and the organizations furthest ahead are not doing fundamentally different things. They are executing with more consistency and more intention.

Know your five core recurring giving metrics. Percentage of donors on recurring schedules, lifetime value of an average monthly donor, monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, and retention rate by year. These numbers belong in every board meeting and every internal fundraising review.

Audit your payment collection process this week. Find out how many retry touch points your platform has, what the messaging says at each one, and what your current collection rate is. If it is below 90%, that is the first place to focus.

Make a recurring-first ask at least once this year. If no fundraising appeal in your calendar is monthly-specific, add one. It does not need to replace existing campaigns. It needs to exist.

Build the onboarding experience before you run the acquisition campaign. A welcome series, a community identity, and a clear sense of what it means to be a monthly donor at your organization should be in place before you ask anyone to join.

Reframe monthly giving internally around lifetime value. A $25 monthly donor is not a $25 donor. Over five years at average retention, that relationship is worth multiples of the monthly gift. When leadership sees recurring giving through that lens, the priority it gets in your strategy tends to shift accordingly.

The data is clear that most organizations are not actively growing their recurring base. The ones that are doing it differently are not waiting for a perfect moment. They are making the ask, building the community, and doing the math.

Resources & Links

This episode is presented by the Monthly Giving Builder, Dana’s step-by-step tool that helps nonprofits build and manage their monthly giving program from start to finish. Sign up here.

Ready to walk into EOY with your monthly giving program finally built? Join Dana for a free live webinar and learn the 5-step framework that makes it happen. Register here.

The Monthly Giving Builder is the only interactive tool that generates your entire monthly giving program with you, starting at $49.99/month.

My book, The Monthly Giving Mastermind, is here! Grab a copy here and learn my framework to build, grow, and sustain subscriptions for good.

Not sure where to start in building your program? Start with this $5 audit to know where your gap is. Takes 5-10 minutes max, and you’ll know where to start –> Monthly Giving Interactive Audit 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dana Snyder
Dana Snyder is the founder of Positive Equation, creator of the Monthly Giving Builder, a sought-after keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, and the author of The Monthly Giving Mastermind: A Framework to Build, Grow & Sustain Subscriptions for Good. She is also the host of the global nonprofit podcast Missions to Movements, and host of the Monthly Giving Summit, a worldwide event for nonprofit professionals focused on building stronger recurring revenue programs.