The Q1 FEP report has a bright spot. Read one line further and it tells you why the sector keeps losing donors.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s Q1 2026 report landed this week, and the top line reads like relief. Dollars up 4.3% year over year. The donor count decline has shrunk from 2.3% a year ago to 0.8% now. Growth broadening past the Major and Supersize donors it had been leaning on. After three years of watching donors walk out the door, a plateau feels like a win.
Read one line further.
Donor counts and dollars grew this quarter across Small, Midsize, Major, and Supersize donors. Retention fell for every one of them. The only segment where retention improved was Micro, the $1-to-$100 donors, the tier everyone treats as a rounding error. So, the growth is real, and none of it is sticking. You are acquiring and upgrading your way to a bigger number on top of a base that is quietly going cold.
This isn’t one dataset having a bad day. Giving USA crossed $600 billion for the first time in 2025 – $617.2 billion – and that record was built the same lopsided way. Nearly a third of the year’s growth came from bequests, up almost 20%, much of it from a handful of large estates. The number of donors giving under $1,000 kept shrinking. The national report and the quarterly one describe the same organization from different perspectives: dollars at the top, participation eroding below.
There is one genuine bright spot, and it’s easy to miss. The donor-count decline didn’t just narrow in aggregate; the improvement was concentrated in mid-level donors – the Midsize and Major tiers roughly held while losses kept coming at the bottom. That’s the one place the erosion actually slowed.
FEP is careful, and correct, not to overclaim what caused it. But they name the plausible driver: the sector’s growing investment in mid-level donor programs – stewardship, personalization, relationship-building. They stop at correlation. I won’t. The one place the numbers steadied is the one place organizations have started building actual relationships, and it showed up as a slower decline rather than real retention because most of that building is still just a good intention rather than a funded system.
That’s the whole report in one sentence. Relationships are the only thing that holds a donor in place, and the sector still treats building them as something you hope for rather than something you build.
Building has a specific meaning, and it isn’t the one the word usually carries. Stewardship is not a personality. It is not a warm development director who remembers birthdays. It is not a line in the strategic plan that says “deepen donor engagement.” It is infrastructure: a defined touch cadence, an owner for every relationship, a way to know which donors saw that their last gift did something and which ones heard nothing back. That difference is what the quarter measured: the gap between organizations that funded the infrastructure and those that wrote a number into a budget and hoped someone would make it real.
Retention is the number that separates the two, because it’s the one you can’t fake. Acquisition can be bought; more mail, more ads, a matching gift. Upgrades can be engineered inside a quarter with a sharp ask and a deadline. Both are rented growth: the moment you stop paying, they’re gone. Retention is the growth you own. It moves only when the relationship is real, because a donor stays when they trust you and can see that the last gift mattered – and neither happens by accident or by charm. If your donor relationships would go cold the month your development director resigned, you never owned them. You were renting one person’s memory, one resignation away from starting over.
Which is the part leadership keeps trying to skip. The board that calls donor relationships sacred is often the same board that funds the acquisition mailing and starves the stewardship program, then asks in the fourth quarter why retention is soft. Engagement becomes the thing you do if there’s budget left over, and there is never budget left over. So it doesn’t get built, the donors don’t stay, and next year’s report shows another segment slipping.
The Q1 numbers are a reprieve, not a recovery. Some of the late-2025 surge was gifts pulled forward ahead of the tax changes that took effect in mid-2025 – donors bunching their giving to beat the new rules. Both reports say so plainly. That isn’t new money; the giving moved, it didn’t multiply. And the second half of 2026 is where the gap shows up.
So what does this mean? Shore up the donors you already have before you go looking for more. Before you set a single acquisition target, get clear on one number: of the donors who gave last year, how many gave again, and do you know why the rest didn’t? If you can’t answer that, no growth plan is real yet, because you’d be setting out to add donors without knowing how fast you lose the ones you have. The work that comes first isn’t a campaign. It’s the unglamorous infrastructure – a way to thank people that isn’t rote, a reason to reach out that isn’t an ask, someone who notices when a gift doesn’t renew.
That is what keeps a donor after the offer works, and it’s what the organizations whose numbers hold in 2026 will have built. Stewardship is that infrastructure, and you pay for it either way: once to build it, or every year to buy back the donors it would have kept.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “This sounds like us” — it probably is.
Hope is not a fundraising strategy. And the fix is rarely what organizations think it is — a new hire, a new database, a new campaign. Most fundraising problems start upstream, in leadership and system design. That’s where Foundry begins. And we don’t stop at the diagnosis — we build the fundraising infrastructure to back it up.
If you’re ready to find out what’s actually going on and do something about it, let’s talk.