2024 Impact Report

Fundraising Best Practices

As your organization navigates another year of fundraising, with limited staff and waning donor retention, consider what simple yet effective best practices you can implement.

Recurring Giving

What would a steady, dependable income stream mean to your nonprofit? Recurring giving regularly infuses those funds to keep your nonprofit sustainable.

Donor retention for recurring donors is nearly double that of a one-time supporter

Make recurring giving an option on every appeal, campaign, and donation form, or add a pop-up to encourage donors to become monthly sustainers. As with any appeal, be specific about what recurring donations mean to your mission.

Tip Box

Use these Recurring Giving Appeal Templates to copy, paste, and edit pre-made recurring giving appeal templates for emails, social media posts, and text messages.

Donor Covered Fees

Use All Parts of the Platform

Donors can elect to cover credit card processing fees on GiveSmart. When given the option, 49% choose to cover them. Make sure to give donors the option! Those micro fees can add up over time to make a big difference to your mission.

GiveSmart offers unlimited use of dozens of fundraising tools—from peer-to-peer campaigns to ticketing and text-to-donate to embeddable donation forms—across both modules of our fundraising platform.

When nonprofit organizations make use of all of these tools across GiveSmart Events and GiveSmart Fundraise, they consistently raise more for their missions.

Organizations had $10.5 million in credit card fees covered by their donors last year