Brazen Solutions · Major Gifts

Your donor retention rate is the number that explains a flat year.

What a donor retention rate actually is, what the AFP benchmarks say — under half of donors come back, and roughly one in five first-timers — and what that churn costs you. Plus how to calculate your own number this week from any CRM export.

August 2026 · 3 min read

Your donor retention rate is one thing: of the people who gave to you last year, what percentage gave again this year. Count the donors who gave in the prior year. Count how many of those same names gave again in the current year. Divide the second by the first. For full-year 2025, overall donor retention across the FEP panel sat at 43.3 percent.

What the benchmarks actually say

The Association of Fundraising Professionals runs the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which pools real transaction data from thousands of organizations and reports on it every quarter. Two caveats before you use it: these are sector-wide averages, and the panel is largely American.

Of the people who make a first gift, only about one in five gives again the following year. Donors who've already given more than once behave completely differently — repeat retention runs close to 70 percent.

The math that changes behaviour

Say your file is a thousand donors. At the sector average, you keep 430 of them. Which means that to open next year exactly where you opened this one, someone on your team has to go find 570 strangers.

Take last year's acquisition spend — the mail drop, the ads, the event, the hours your team actually put in — and divide it by the number of first-time donors it produced. That's your real cost per new donor.

Now try to do the same thing for retention. Divide what you spent on keeping donors by the number who came back.

Most organizations can't produce that second number, because keeping donors isn't a line in the budget. That's scarcity math again. The cheapest revenue you have access to is the least funded thing you do.

How to work out yours this week

Export every gift from your last completed fiscal year with the donor ID or the donor name attached. Export the same thing for the year before. You want gifts from individuals only, so pull out the grants, the corporate sponsorships and the government money — those follow different rules.

Reduce each list to unique donors. One row per person, no matter how many gifts they made.

Count how many names appear on both. Divide that by the total number of names on the prior-year list, and multiply by a hundred.

Take only the people whose first-ever gift landed in the prior year, and check how many of them came back. That's your first-time donor retention.

Put it in the plan, and put it in the budget

A retention rate belongs in your fundraising plan as a target with a name against it, sitting beside your revenue goal. The free Doable Fundraising Plan template has a metrics section built for exactly this — retention and the share of your revenue that's unrestricted are the two vital signs it asks you to watch all year.

Give the target a floor. Something like: hold overall retention above 45 percent, and move first-time retention five points from wherever it sits today. Then fund the work that delivers it — the call inside the first week, the story in March about the specific kid your specific summer-camp donor sent to camp. That's the quiet, unglamorous business of donors leaving because of the silence.

Five points sounds like nothing when you say it out loud in a board meeting. On a file of a thousand donors it's fifty people you don't have to go out and replace, and every one of them already knows your name and already said yes once.

Pull the export. Then bring the number to the next board meeting.

Free template

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