Nonprofit marketing: donors, email, and the $10,000 Google grant

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project publishes one number that should reorder a nonprofit's whole marketing plan. Among donors who gave a single gift the year before, 7.4% had given again by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Donors who gave two gifts came back at 19.4%. At three to six gifts the rate is 44.6%, and at seven or more it reaches 88.1%.

Read the curve from left to right and the job changes. Signing up a new donor buys a 7.4% asset, the second gift makes that person almost three times likelier to come back, and by the seventh a donor behaves like a subscriber. The question worth the most money is what happens in the eight weeks after a first gift lands.

M+R's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from online giving in 2025, show the same shape. New one-time online donors came back at 24%, donors with a giving history at 66%. FEP also counted donors down 0.8% year over year while dollars rose 4.3%: fewer households giving larger gifts.

Ask what slice of the year the number covers before you compare your rate to anyone's. FEP counts retention year to date, so the same measure reads about 18% in a first-quarter report and roughly 43% in a yearly one. Boards have set targets against a Q1 figure and decided the charity was failing.

Check where a retention number came from before it reaches a board deck. The top-ranking page for the term claims roughly 70% of first-time donors give only once, with no source attached.

Email pays at a rate that reads as small until you multiply it out. Nonprofits raised $54 for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent in 2025, up 4% on the year. M+R's worked example: a send to 100,000 people produced about 50 gifts and about $5,400. Revenue per subscriber reached $2.40, and email drove 11% of all online revenue.

The response rates under that revenue are thin, and worth knowing before anyone sets a target. Fundraising email pulled a 0.59% click-through rate and a 0.05% response rate in 2025. Advocacy email pulled 2.3% and 1.4%, twenty-eight times the response.

Volume is rarely the broken part. The average subscriber got 50 emails in 2025, 31 of them appeals. Lists grew 5% net across the year, and under that number 12% of subscribers opted out and another 4% went unreachable. Adding volume to a list with no lifecycle logic speeds up that churn.

If the sending setup does not exist yet, start there: a platform, a domain signed with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and a capture form worth an address. We wrote that out in how to set up email marketing for a small business.

Four flows carry most of the money, ordered by return per hour of setup.

1. 1

   First gift to second gift, days 0 to 60

   Receipt and thank-you inside 24 hours, with no ask attached. A short, specific report at day seven to ten on what the gift paid for, still with no ask. The second ask at day 45 to 60.
2. 2

   Monthly conversion at the first gift

   Ask on the thank-you page and again in the first week, at roughly a quarter to a third of the one-time amount. FEP's Q1 2026 advice is to lock in monthly commitments at the point of acquisition. 71% of monthly donors are still giving after twelve months against 24% for new one-time donors.
3. 3

   Sustainer card recovery

   Trigger on a declined charge, or a card due to expire within 30 days. Three touches over two weeks, a one-click update link, then a phone call for gifts above your median. 10% of monthly donors stop within two months of signing up.
4. 4

   The year-end deadline sequence, December 26 to 31

   Date-triggered and escalating, with a real match behind it if one exists. The last week of the year produced 10% of all nonprofit online revenue in 2025, and December 31 alone produced 4%.

Two more earn their place once those run: a gift ask on the thank-you page of any advocacy or petition action, where 0.34% of people who act do give, and a welcome series for subscribers who have not given.

The trigger logic carries over from retail with the labels changed. We ranked the general set in the seven email automation flows, and the nonprofit versions key off gift count instead. Win-back campaigns for lapsed donors rank last on purpose: FEP's recapture rate is 0.8% year to date. Our email marketing work builds these where the donor record already lives.

Google gives nonprofits that qualify $10,000 USD a month of in-kind ad credit for text ads on Google Search. That is roughly $329 a day, and it does not roll over. What it returns is where the sector's marketing content goes quiet.

Across M+R's 2026 study, Google Grants spend returned $0.17 for every dollar of credit. Paid search, the kind you fund yourself, returned $2.48, and average cost per gift on the grant was $793. Grant ads sit below paid results, budget is capped, and the search terms you may bid on are limited.

The grant still earns its keep. The same data shows 229 site visits for every $1,000 of credit, which is cheap list building for a small charity and feeds the first-gift flow above. We run paid media for a living, and we will say it plainly: budget the grant against email addresses, not gift income.

Who cannot hold a grant

Whole categories are ruled out before the form is filled in. No arm of government can hold a grant, and neither can hospitals, health care groups, schools or universities. The charitable arm of a hospital or school can qualify. A US charity needs its own IRS 501(c)(3) status, or proven affiliation to a parent group that holds one, and an organization under a fiscal sponsor is ruled out by name.

The five rules that keep an account alive

• A 5% click-through rate every month, at the account level. Two months in a row below 5% deactivates the account until you clean it up and ask for reinstatement.
• Conversion tracking, with at least one conversion a month, for accounts created on or after April 22, 2019. Time on site and homepage visits cannot count.
• Conversion-based Smart bidding for those accounts: Maximize conversions, Maximize conversion values, Target CPA, or Target ROAS.
• Geographic targeting and at least two unique sitelink assets. That pair is the entire published account-structure rule.
• Keyword hygiene. Single-word keywords are banned, with ten exceptions: charity, charities, donate, donation, ngo, ngos, nonprofit, nonprofits, volunteer and volunteering. Overly generic terms are out, and any keyword at Quality Score 1 or 2 has to be paused.

Conversion tracking is where most grant accounts fail quietly, serving ads while logging nothing Google counts. We wrote the setup out click by click in the conversion tracking lesson. Grants also carry a website rule: HTTPS, a domain you own, a phone-ready site, and original writing about your mission. Our free SEO report checks the HTTPS and mobile half in thirty seconds.

The CRM choice is a choice about whether your gift data can trigger an email. If the database cannot fire a message on "first gift received, no second gift, 45 days elapsed," none of the retention math above is open to you.

Keep the donor record and the email send in one system where you can, because every flow above keys off gift-count and gift-date fields in the database. Model the fees against your own gift mix before you assume free is cheap. The nonprofit stacks we inherit are usually one link short of triggering anything.

Start in October. December brought 37% of all nonprofit online revenue in 2025, the last week brought 10%, and December 31 alone brought 4%. Hunger and poverty groups took 46%. The crush is well known; the lead time is what gets missed.

GivingTuesday falls on December 1, 2026, inside the December window rather than ahead of it. Thanksgiving is November 26, so signup drives and list warming have to finish by the third week of November. Google reviews a new Ad Grant over several business days on top of any website fixes.

1. Early October. Build the first-gift sequence and the card-recovery flow. Fix the mobile giving page. Apply for the Ad Grant if you lack one.
2. Late October. Pause Quality Score 1 and 2 keywords, remove single-word terms, confirm two sitelinks and a live conversion action. You want a clean month of CTR behind you.
3. November 1 to 20. Signup drives, list warming, welcome series. Write the December emails now.
4. December 1. GivingTuesday. Treat it as the opening of the season rather than the season.
5. December 26 to 31. The deadline sequence, escalating to the final day. That week carries 10% of the year.

The mobile giving page deserves its own line, because for a small charity it can out-earn every flow above. Phones bring 52% of nonprofit website traffic and convert at 8% on the main giving page against 11% on desktop, and small nonprofits convert phone traffic at 4%. The average gift is $88 on a phone against $168 on a desktop. Wallet payments are the standard fix: 79% of nonprofits offer PayPal, 58% Google Pay and 57% Apple Pay.

Most of this costs attention rather than money. Open your database tonight, filter to the donors whose only gift landed in the last ninety days, and count them. That list is the 7.4%. It sits in a system you already pay for, waiting on a thank-you that asks for nothing.