Fundraising Metrics and KPIs: The Benchmarks Nobody Publishes

In short. Most fundraising metrics guides give you formulas and no benchmarks, so you can calculate your cost per dollar raised without knowing whether it is good. This page gives the current numbers from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, explains which metrics actually predict anything, and shows why the sector average is usually the wrong thing to measure yourself against.

On this page

The problem with every metrics list

The five metrics worth tracking

Current retention benchmarks

How to calculate each one

Which of these actually have a sector benchmark

Fundraising ROI, and why it is not a sixth metric

Frequency beats size, and it is not close

A worked example

Your number is below the benchmark. Now what?

Why the sector average is not your benchmark

If you cannot calculate these at all

The methodology change that moved the goalposts

What to measure, and how often

The problem with every metrics list

Search for fundraising metrics and you will find lists of 20, 23, 25, 30, 37, 40 and 42 of them. They are competing on quantity.

The lists are not wrong. Cost per dollar raised, donor retention rate, lifetime value and acquisition cost are all real and all worth knowing. The problem is what happens after you calculate one. You work out that your cost per dollar raised is 0.28 and then you have nowhere to go, because none of those pages tells you what 0.28 means.

Even the advice inside the lists contradicts the lists. Several of them open by telling you to pick a small, actionable set rather than tracking everything available. Then the same page lists forty.

A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a metric somebody has decided to act on. In fundraising writing the two words are used interchangeably, and nothing on this page turns on the difference.

The distinction that does matter is a different one. A metric is something you can calculate. A benchmark is something you can compare it to. The sector publishes the first far more readily than the second, which is why so much fundraising reporting consists of numbers nobody can act on.

Two of those pages do carry comparison figures, and it is worth being precise about what they are. One publishes donor retention of 40 to 45 percent drawn from its own platform data rather than from sector research. Another publishes return-on-investment ranges by channel with no source attached. Neither is dishonest, but platform data describes that platform's customers, and an unsourced range is not a benchmark you can defend to a board.

The five metrics worth tracking

If you run a development function with two or three people, this is the set. Everything else is either a component of one of these or a number you will look at once.

Metric	What it is	Why it earns a place
Donor retention rate	Share of last period's donors who gave again	The only metric that tells you whether last year is repeatable
New donor conversion	Share of first-time donors who give a second gift	The steepest cliff in fundraising, and the one most within your control
Cost per dollar raised	Fundraising costs divided by dollars raised	The number a board understands without translation
Average gift by segment	Mean gift, split by donor tier	Movement here tells you which direction your file is drifting
Revenue concentration	Share of revenue from your largest donors	An early warning that a good year is a fragile year

In plain sentences, for anyone who needs to define these to a board:

Donor retention is the practice of keeping the donors you already have, measured as the share of them who give again in the following period. It is distinct from acquisition, which is winning donors you did not have before.

Donor analytics is the practice of measuring donor behavior, retention, frequency, gift size and segment movement, in order to decide where fundraising effort should go. It is the same activity whether it runs in a spreadsheet or a platform.

Donor retention rate is the share of donors who gave in one period and gave again in the next. New donor conversion is the share of first-time donors who go on to make a second gift. Cost per dollar raised is total fundraising costs divided by total dollars raised, including staff time. Average gift by segment is total dollars in a segment divided by the number of gifts in it. Revenue concentration is the share of total revenue that came from your largest donors, usually the top ten.

Revenue concentration is the one usually missing, and the current data makes an unusually good case for it. Through 2025 the sector's growth came almost entirely from Major and Supersize donors. In Q1 2026 that broadened, with donor counts and dollars growing across Small, Midsize, Major and Supersize, and only Micro donors declining.

The catch is that retention moved the other way. Retention fell for Small, Midsize, Major and Supersize in the same quarter, and Micro was the only segment where it improved. Dollars broadened while loyalty softened, which is exactly the pattern a concentration measure is meant to catch and a revenue total is designed to hide.

Current retention benchmarks

Nonprofit donor retention rates for 2026 come from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q1 2026 report, drawn from 3.2 million donors, $3.5 billion in giving and 15,700 organizations. Every figure below is year to date for the first quarter, which matters, and a later section explains why.

Across the sector, the nonprofit donor retention rate is 18.0% year to date for the first quarter of 2026, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. That single number hides most of what is useful, so the three breakdowns below split it by donor type, by gift size and by how many times someone gave.

By donor type. Source: Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q1 2026, year to date.

Donor type	Retained year to date	Change on last year
New donors	7.1%	-0.1 p.p.
Repeat donors	25.8%	+0.2 p.p.
Recaptured donors	0.8%	-0.1 p.p.

By donor size. Source: Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q1 2026, year to date.

Segment	Gift range	Retained year to date	Change on last year
Micro	$1 to $100	10.0%	+0.1 p.p.
Small	$101 to $500	22.6%	-0.5 p.p.
Midsize	$501 to $5,000	31.6%	-0.6 p.p.
Major	$5,000 to $50,000	29.2%	-0.1 p.p.
Supersize	$50,000 and above	32.9%	-0.7 p.p.

Two things in that table are worth stopping on. Micro donors were the only segment whose retention improved. And major donors retained worse than midsize donors, which cuts against the assumption that the larger the gift, the more loyal the giver.

If your own numbers land below these, donor retention strategies covers what to do about it. This page is about measuring; that one is about tactics. And if you want the compounding argument for why retention pays better than acquisition, see the 7x rule of donor retention.

How to calculate each one

Benchmarks are no use if you cannot produce your own number to set beside them. These are the formulas, with the mistake that most often makes each one wrong.

To calculate donor retention rate, divide the number of donors who gave in both periods by the number of donors who gave in the earlier period, then multiply by 100. If 1,180 people gave last year and 214 of them have given again this year, the donor retention rate is 214 divided by 1,180, which is 18.1%. The denominator is the earlier period's donors only. The most common error is dividing by everyone who gave this year, which folds in new donors and quietly turns the retention rate into something else.

Metric	Formula	The mistake to avoid
Donor retention rate	Donors who gave in both periods, divided by donors in the earlier period	Counting anyone who gave this year, including new donors. The denominator is last year's donors only
New donor conversion	First-time donors who made a second gift, divided by all first-time donors in the period	Measuring too early. A donor acquired in November has not had a fair chance by January
Cost per dollar raised	Total fundraising costs, divided by total dollars raised	Leaving out staff time. Salaries are usually the largest fundraising cost and the one most often excluded
Average gift by segment	Total dollars in the segment, divided by number of gifts in that segment	Using donors rather than gifts as the denominator, which quietly turns it into something else
Revenue concentration	Dollars from your top ten donors, divided by total dollars	Measuring by donor rather than household, which understates concentration when couples give separately

Two general rules. Compare like periods with like: your year-to-date number belongs beside a year-to-date benchmark, not an annual one. And decide once whether you are counting gifts or donors, then hold to it, because most disagreements about fundraising numbers turn out to be two people using different denominators.

Which of these actually have a sector benchmark

Since this page exists to complain about benchmarks nobody publishes, it should be straight about which ones it can and cannot give you.

Metric	Sector benchmark available?
Donor retention rate	Yes. FEP publishes it quarterly, split by donor type, size and frequency
New donor conversion	Yes. 7.1% year to date, from the same source
Fundraising ROI	No. Same measurement as cost per dollar raised, and equally unbenchmarkable
Cost per dollar raised	No defensible one. Figures circulate, but we could not trace any to a current published methodology, and it varies so much by channel and by how staff time is allocated that a single sector number would mislead
Average gift by segment	No. Too dependent on cause area and file composition to compare across organizations
Revenue concentration	No. Not published by anyone we could find

For the bottom four, the useful comparison is not the sector. It is your own organization last year, measured the same way. A cost per dollar raised of 0.28 tells you nothing. Moving from 0.31 to 0.28 tells you something, provided you counted staff time the same way both times.

That is a less satisfying answer than a table of industry averages. It is also the honest one, and an invented benchmark is worse than none, because people act on it.

Fundraising ROI, and why it is not a sixth metric

Fundraising ROI is the return generated per unit of fundraising spend. To calculate fundraising ROI, subtract fundraising costs from funds raised, divide by fundraising costs, then multiply by 100 for a percentage. Raise $100,000 at a cost of $25,000 and the ROI is 300%.

It is missing from the list of five above for a reason worth stating plainly: fundraising ROI and cost per dollar raised are the same measurement expressed two ways. Cost per dollar raised divides cost by revenue. ROI divides net revenue by cost. One is close to the reciprocal of the other, so an organization that reports both is reporting one number twice.

That matters because the two flatter differently. A cost per dollar raised of 0.25 sounds unremarkable. The same performance stated as 300% ROI sounds excellent. Neither is wrong, and choosing whichever reads better to a board is the most common quiet distortion in fundraising reporting.

Two practical rules. Pick one and hold to it across every report and every year, because switching between them makes your own trend unreadable. And whichever you pick, include staff time in the cost. Salaries are usually the largest fundraising cost and the one most often left out, and excluding them can turn a mediocre ROI into a spectacular one without anything changing.

There is no defensible sector benchmark for either figure. Ranges do circulate, usually presented as returns by channel, and we could not trace any of them to a published methodology. It varies too much by channel, by cause area and by how organizations allocate staff time for a single sector number to mean much.

The useful comparison is your own prior year, measured the same way, and your own channels against each other. A direct mail ROI and a major gifts ROI are not comparable and should never sit in the same column.

Frequency beats size, and it is not close

The same report breaks retention down by how many times someone gave, rather than how much. Source: Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q1 2026, year to date.

Gifts last year	Retained year to date	Change on last year
1 donation	7.4%	-0.1 p.p.
2 donations	19.4%	+0.3 p.p.
3 to 6 donations	44.6%	+0.7 p.p.
7 or more donations	88.1%	-0.3 p.p.

Set the two breakdowns side by side. Sorted by gift size, retention runs from 10.0% to 32.9%, a spread of a little over three times. Sorted by gift frequency, it runs from 7.4% to 88.1%, a spread of about twelve times.

A donor who gave seven or more times last year is retained at 88.1%, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q1 2026 report. A donor who gave more than $50,000 is retained at 32.9% in the same data.

How often someone gives predicts whether they will give again far better than how much they give. That has a direct consequence for where a small team spends its attention. Moving somebody from one gift to two, or from two to three, changes their retention profile more than moving them up a giving tier does.

It also reframes what a monthly giving program is for. A recurring donor is, mechanically, a seven plus donation donor.

Frequency is also the middle letter of RFM, and RFM analysis explains how to compute the score itself. This section explains why that dimension predicts retention. The two are halves of one argument.

A worked example

An arts organization with 1,400 donors on file wants to know how it is doing at the end of Q1.

Step one, retention. Of the 1,180 people who gave last year, 214 have given again so far this year. That is 214 divided by 1,180, or 18.1% year to date.

Step two, the right comparison. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project's figure for the same period is 18.0% year to date. Not the 43.3% full-year figure from its Q4 2025 report, which would have made this organization look like it was failing. Against the correct benchmark, it is performing normally.

Step three, split it. The aggregate hides the useful part. Splitting the 214 by frequency:

Gifts last year	Their donors	Retained	Their rate	Benchmark
1 donation	690	38	5.5%	7.4%
2 donations	285	60	21.1%	19.4%
3 to 6 donations	165	79	47.9%	44.6%
7 or more	40	37	92.5%	88.1%

The four bands add back to 1,180 donors and 214 retained, which is the 18.1% above. If your own split does not reconcile to your total, something is being double counted.

Now the picture is specific. This organization is at or above benchmark everywhere except one-time donors, where it is nearly two points behind. It does not have a retention problem. It has a first-gift-to-second-gift problem, concentrated in a group of 690 people.

That is a different piece of work from "improve retention," and a far smaller one. The aggregate number would never have told them.

Your number is below the benchmark. Now what?

A benchmark is only useful if a bad result points somewhere. This is the triage.

What is below benchmark	What it usually means	Where to look first
New donor retention, but repeat retention is fine	An onboarding problem, not a stewardship problem	What happens in the 90 days after a first gift. Most organizations send a receipt and then nothing until the next appeal
Repeat donor retention, but new is fine	A stewardship problem	Whether anyone is deciding who gets attention, or whether attention follows whoever emails you
Retention across every band	Usually a data problem, not a fundraising one	Duplicate records. If one donor exists as three records, all three look lapsed
Cost per dollar raised	Often an attribution problem	Whether staff time is allocated across all activity or loaded onto one campaign
Revenue concentration rising	Not always bad, but always worth naming	Whether the base is shrinking or the top is growing. Those need opposite responses
Recaptured donors near zero	Normal. The sector figure is 0.8%	Reactivation is the lowest-yield activity in fundraising. Spend the time on second gifts instead

The last row is worth saying plainly, because reactivation campaigns absorb a lot of effort for very little. At 0.8% against 7.1% for new donors in the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q1 2026 data, bringing a lapsed donor back is close to nine times harder than converting a first-time donor into a second gift.

Why the sector average is not your benchmark

FEP publishes two versions of each headline number: the aggregate, and the figure for the typical organization. They disagree, and the gap is the most useful thing on the page.

Measure	Sector aggregate	Typical organization
Dollars, year on year	+4.3%	+3.2%
Donors, year on year	-0.8%	0.0%
Retention, year on year	-0.0 p.p.	-0.1 p.p.

The aggregate says the sector lost donors. The typical organization did not. Donor loss is concentrated rather than universal, so an organization that held its donor count flat has performed in line with its peers even though the headline says the sector shrank. If you benchmark against the aggregate, you will conclude you are doing better than you are.

There is a second trap in the timing. The widely quoted 43.3% retention figure is a full-year number from the Q4 2025 report. The 18.0% headline in the Q1 2026 report is a year-to-date number covering one quarter. They are not comparable, and comparing your own part-year data against a full-year benchmark will make your organization look far worse than it is.

If you cannot calculate these at all

Most guides assume the numbers are sitting there. Often they are not, and the reasons are ordinary.

Duplicate records do the most damage. One donor entered three times looks like three lapsed donors, and no amount of good fundraising will show up in a retention figure calculated over them. Deduplicate before you measure anything, or you will diagnose a fundraising problem that is really a data problem.

Households give jointly and are recorded separately. If a couple gives one gift from a joint account but exists as two records, your donor count, average gift and concentration figures are all wrong in different directions.

Offline gifts arrive late. Checks entered weeks after they were received make any recent period look worse than it was. This is the same effect FEP corrects for in its own data. If you measure a quarter the week it closes, you are measuring your data entry, not your fundraising.

Soft credits and matching gifts get double counted, inflating both totals and donor counts.

The practical version: pick one metric, get its underlying data clean, and measure that one properly for a year. One number you trust is worth more than eight you have to caveat every time you present them.

The methodology change that moved the goalposts

If you are working from a benchmark you learned before spring 2026, it was calculated a different way. In the Q1 2026 report, FEP made the first major change to its methodology since 2021, which matters for two practical reasons: older and newer figures are not directly comparable, and one widely repeated claim about small organizations turns out not to hold.

Three things changed.

1. The panel is rebuilt every quarter. Previously it was locked at the start of each year and organizations were selected on three years of past results. An unusual year could keep an organization out of the sample long after it stopped being relevant. Now an organization qualifies by reporting at least one transaction in each of the previous 24 months, with most gifts entered promptly, and by raising under $25 million.

2. Late data is handled at the transaction level. The old approach applied a fixed percentage uplift to headline totals only, which meant the topline and the breakdowns beneath it did not add up. The new approach applies an identical cutoff date to both years being compared. Error bar ranges have been dropped as a result.

3. Size-based weighting has been removed. This is the significant one.

FEP tested weighting by fundraising volume against IRS data, running 1,000 simulations a year from 2020 to 2023. In their words, it "did not reliably improve estimates: it made the average estimate worse in three of the four years, and worse in 43% of individual simulations overall."

The reason matters more than the result. A prior year's dollar volume is mechanically linked to that year's growth rate, so organizations in smaller bands tend to show faster growth through arithmetic alone, through a combination of small-base effects and regression to the mean. FEP describes the resulting "smaller organizations grow faster" pattern as largely a measurement artifact.

That pattern has been repeated in sector commentary for years. It is worth knowing that the body that produced the data no longer stands behind it.

FEP is also unusually direct about its own limits, describing the report as "fairly blunt" as a benchmarking instrument and noting that correcting for cause area "does not make the panel fully representative." A dedicated benchmarking tool is on their roadmap.

What to measure, and how often

1. Monthly, ten minutes. New donors acquired, and how many second gifts arrived from people whose first gift was 60 to 90 days ago. Nothing else moves fast enough to be worth monthly attention.

2. Quarterly, an hour. Retention split by gift frequency rather than gift size, using the bands above. This is where divergence shows up first.

3. Quarterly, same hour. Revenue concentration. What share of revenue came from your top ten donors, and is that share rising.

4. Annually. Cost per dollar raised and average gift by segment. Both are too noisy to read more often than that.

5. Whenever you report to a board. One number with a benchmark beside it, and the source named. A number without a comparison invites a question you cannot answer in the room.

The point of the cadence is that most metrics do not change fast enough to justify watching them. Reviewing forty indicators quarterly produces a report nobody reads and no decisions.

If the quarterly split is the step that never actually happens, automate it rather than drop it. Segment reporting of this kind is what Gratefully is built to produce, and a CRM with decent reporting can be made to do it too. The habit matters more than the tool. For how this fits a two- or three-person shop, see the development director's view.