Reading Time: 6 minutes

The State of Recurring Giving: Key Benchmarks, Behavior Shifts, and What Nonprofits Need to Know Right Now

By Dana Snyder, Positive Equation

If you’ve been wondering whether monthly giving is really worth the investment — the data is in. And it’s hard to ignore.

During our most recent quarterly State of Recurring Giving webinar, we brought together CharityEngine, GivingTuesday Data Commons, and World Central Kitchen for a conversation full of fresh research, honest takeaways, and one of the most compelling monthly giving case studies I’ve seen in a while. Here’s everything you need to know.

 

Monthly Giving Is Growing — But Most Nonprofits Are Leaving It on the Table

James Payne-Gill, Senior Data Scientist at GivingTuesday Data Commons, shared brand-new findings from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) — and the headline is this: recurring giving is growing, but slowly, and the gains are concentrated in a relatively small number of organizations.

Here’s what the data across thousands of nonprofits from 2021 to 2025 revealed:

• Monthly donors now account for 84% of all recurring revenue, up from 73% in 2021. The shift toward monthly giving as the dominant recurring schedule is accelerating.
• Monthly donors have a median annual value of $275, compared to just $100 for non-recurring donors. That’s nearly a 3x lift — and that number accounts for both their scheduled gifts and the supplemental one-time gifts they make throughout the year.
• The median organization has only 4% of donors on recurring schedules. Even though over 90% of organizations have at least one recurring donor, most are not actively growing that base. Nearly half of all organizations in the study acquired zero new recurring donors in any given year.

The opportunity here is enormous. Most nonprofits are not making a recurring-first ask. In a room of 145 nonprofit professionals at a recent conference, not one raised their hand when asked if they had a monthly-specific or monthly-only ask in their fundraising calendar. The data confirms what we’re seeing on the ground.

---

Why Only 30% of Monthly Donors Make Extra Gifts (And What to Do About It)

One of the most interesting findings from the FEP data: the median one-time supplemental gift from a monthly donor is $77 — the highest of any donor segment. But only 30% of monthly donors are making those extra gifts.

James pointed to this as a real growth opportunity: monthly donors who feel connected and engaged are more likely to give beyond their scheduled gift. The question is whether your organization is actively inviting them to do so. Most aren’t.

This is where donor stewardship becomes a revenue strategy, not just a nice-to-have.

---

The Technology Behind Predictable Recurring Revenue

Seth Remaley, VP of Sales at CharityEngine, shared some eye-opening benchmarks from their platform:

• Average recurring gift size: $26
• Average credit card donation: $43
• Average ACH (bank account) donation: $115
• Collection rate within Charity Engine: over 97% (compared to an industry average of around 85%)

That collection rate number matters more than people realize. Payment failures are what Seth calls “silent revenue killers.” Most nonprofits lose 15% or more of their recurring revenue not because donors cancel, but because payments quietly fail and no one follows up effectively.

CharityEngine’s platform uses AI-powered payment retries to minimize this — and it’s certified by third-party research as the best CRM for monthly giving collection rates. If you’re not auditing your own payment retry process right now, that’s the place to start.

One practical tip from the Q&A: make sure you know how many retry attempts your platform makes before a recurring gift is marked as failed, and what messaging goes out at each step. Most organizations don’t know, and it costs them real revenue.

---

World Central Kitchen’s Kitchen Core: A Case Study in Monthly Giving Brand Building

This is the part of the webinar I’ve been most excited to share.

World Central Kitchen — founded by Chef Jose Andres in 2010 and responsible for over 600 million meals served to people affected by disaster — faced a recurring giving challenge that will feel familiar to many nonprofits: their giving spiked during crises and went quiet in between. Their monthly donor acquisition was essentially flatlined outside of disaster moments.

They needed sustainable, predictable revenue that didn’t wait for the next emergency.

Their solution was to rebrand their monthly giving program as Kitchen Corps.

What Kitchen Corps Is Built On

The name and brand came from a clear insight: “Many hands, one kitchen.” The chef lights the fires on the ground. Kitchen Corps donors keep them burning.

The brand was built around four pillars:

Belonging. Donors aren’t just supporters — they’re the steady, critical energy behind everything WCK does.

Clarity of role. Monthly donors aren’t passive. They’re active participants in a collaborative kitchen model, making every meal possible.

Alignment. WCK already had a Volunteer Corps and a Chef Corps. Kitchen Corps fit naturally into that existing community language.

Global reach. The kitchen metaphor translates across cultures and languages, important for an organization with an international donor base.

The Giving Tuesday Campaign

For GivingTuesday and year-end, World Central Kitchen set a bold public goal of welcoming 20,000 new monthly donors. They built a campaign around:

• 10 emails across Giving Tuesday and year-end
• 8 distinct donor segments based on giving history and relationship to the monthly program
• Urgency-driven messaging framed around crisis readiness, not just crisis reaction
• An omni-channel approach: email, paid media, and web
• A donation match of $50 for each new monthly giving plan (extended to $100 at year-end)

The results:

On Giving Tuesday alone, WCK saw over $60,000 in new recurring commitments — more than 1,300 new monthly donors in a single day, representing 52% of the full campaign total.

The full campaign brought in 2,800 new monthly donors.

Did they hit 20,000? No. But here’s the number that matters: over $6 million in projected lifetime value from those 2,800 donors, based on approximately 8% annual churn over five years. That’s multiple disaster activations and readiness deployments funded.

The Honest Takeaways

Matt Tripsas, Director of Community Fundraising at World Central Kitchen, was refreshingly transparent about what they’d do differently:

• They’d set a tiered public goal rather than one big aspirational number, so the team and donors had incremental wins to celebrate throughout the campaign.
• They’d have done more upfront work to bring existing monthly donors into the Kitchen Core identity before the public launch, so that community felt invested in the campaign goal.

And critically: the launch is just the beginning.

WCK has since built a three-part welcome series (triggered three days after first gift), a monthly newsletter specifically for Kitchen Corps members, and a dedicated webinar series to connect donors to the work on the ground. One person, Daisy, is now fully dedicated to managing and stewarding 75,000+ recurring supporters.

---

What This Means for Your Monthly Giving Program

Pulling the threads together, here are the most actionable things to take away:

Know your five key numbers.

1. What percentage of your donors are recurring?
2. What is the lifetime value of your average monthly donor?
3. What is your monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
4. Annual recurring revenue (ARR)?
5. What is your retention rate, broken down by year one, year two, year three?

If you can walk into any internal meeting and answer those questions, monthly giving becomes impossible to deprioritize.

Make a recurring-first ask. Most organizations are not actively inviting new donors to give monthly. Your website, your appeals, your events — are any of them making monthly giving the primary ask, not just an option?

Audit your payment retry process. Silent payment failures are costing you revenue right now. Find out how many retry attempts your platform makes, what triggers those retries, and what communication goes out to donors at each step.

Build a brand around belonging. Kitchen Core is a masterclass in this. What is the name and identity of your monthly giving community? Do your donors feel like they’re part of something, or just on an autopay list?

Reframe value for your leadership. A campaign that acquires 2,800 monthly donors might look modest on day one. Framed as $6 million in lifetime value, it’s transformational. Leadership needs to see the LTV, not just the donor count.

---

Ready to Build Your Monthly Giving Program?

If you’re looking for a place to start, the Monthly Giving Builder at Positive Equation walks you through every step — landing page copy, branding, acquisition planning, retention strategy — for $49/month. It’s designed to be the most accessible, actionable monthly giving tool available to nonprofits of any size.

You can also use our free LTV calculator to run the numbers for your own program and see what your monthly donor community is actually worth over time.

The data is clear. The case studies are compelling. The question is what you’re going to do next.

---

Dana Snyder is the founder of Positive Equation, author of The Monthly Giving Mastermind, and host of the Missions to Movements podcast. She hosts the Annual Monthly Giving Summit and the quarterly State of Recurring Giving webinar series.