Year-End Digital Fundraising: A Slow Start, a Strong Finish
The 2025 year-end digital fundraising season reinforced a familiar— but increasingly compressed — pattern: a slower-than-anticipated start followed by a sharp concentration of giving in the final days of December. Across digital channels, donor intent remained strong, but when and where revenue landed was shaped by calendar dynamics, rising costs, and the growing importance of cross-channel coordination.
Many of these signals first emerged on Giving Tuesday, which once again served as a leading indicator for year-end behavior. Engagement patterns observed during that peak moment — particularly around urgency, resend strategies, and channel intent — persisted through the final weeks of the year. The takeaway was clear: performance challenges early in December were driven less by donor reluctance and more by timing, competition, and technical factors influencing visibility.
Against this backdrop, year-end results are best understood not through a single-channel lens, but as a coordinated digital ecosystem — where email, search, social, programmatic, SMS and CTV each played distinct and interdependent roles.
Email: Deliverability, Timing, and Smart Pivots Drove Results
Email performance in December started softer than many organizations initially projected, driven less by donor disengagement and more by calendar compression and inbox visibility. With December 26 falling late in the week for many campaigns, the traditional post-holiday ramp-up window was shortened — pushing more revenue into the final days of the year.
In 2025, deliverability itself emerged as a measurable driver of year-end revenue. With Google, Outlook and Yahoo enforcing new bulk-sender requirements for organizations sending more than 5,000 emails per day, filtered category inbox placement increasingly determined whether appeals were seen at all. Deliverability performance hinged on email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up), a working unsubscribe link with 48-hr processing and low spam rates under 0.3%. If you missed that, your email deliverability was in trouble across the big three inboxes.
Nonprofits continued to hold a competitive advantage, with average open rates around 38.6%, but early softness prompted many teams to pivot quickly. Resends to non-openers, tighter audience segmentation, and refined urgency messaging were added mid-flight—adjustments that paid off. For some organizations, resend strategies ultimately drove more than a third of total end-of-year email revenue.
As expected, December 31 remained the single most important day of the year, with many organizations seeing 40% or more of total email revenue arrive on the final day. The lesson was clear: year-end email success depended not just on strong creative, but on visibility, adaptability, and the ability to respond quickly to real-time signals.
Search: High-Intent Demand Continues to Anchor Performance
Search once again emerged as the strongest and most efficient digital revenue channel at year-end, despite continued year-over-year increases in CPCs and CPAs.
Google continued to outperform Microsoft in both scale and efficiency for most organizations, with Microsoft largely functioning as a supplemental channel. As urgency peaked, high-intent donors actively searching for causes remained the most reliable source of late-stage conversions.
Notably, despite broader industry concern, we did not observe meaningful disruption from AI-driven changes to search behavior during the year-end period — providing welcome predictability when efficiency mattered most.
Paid Social: Reinforcement Over Revenue Density
Paid social continued to play an important — but supporting — role at year-end. Rising costs and competition limited its ability to match search efficiency, but its value was most evident in reinforcing urgency and sustaining visibility across priority audiences.
For many organizations, social performance aligned with expectations when evaluated as part of a broader media mix rather than as a primary revenue driver.
Programmatic Display & Video: Building Familiarity Ahead of the Peak
Programmatic display and video were most effective when deployed as part of an integrated, cross-channel strategy. Campaigns that combined video and display formats saw meaningful performance lifts, with industry benchmarks showing video completion rates as high as 49% when these formats were paired with other channels.
Rather than acting as a last-click driver, programmatic contributed most strongly by reinforcing messaging, increasing familiarity, and supporting downstream performance in email and search during the final days of the year.
Connected TV (CTV): From Awareness Play to Funnel Driver
In 2025, CTV moved decisively from an awareness-only tactic to a meaningful component of the digital fundraising funnel. Industry-wide, nonprofit CTV investment increased by more than 80% year over year, reflecting growing confidence in its ability to deliver scale, credibility, and measurable engagement. It felt like every nonprofit was leveraging CTV in November and December!
CTV performed best when introduced earlier in Q4, building trust and recognition ahead of peak conversion windows. When paired with email, search, and programmatic display, CTV helped strengthen cross-channel “surround sound,” improving overall efficiency even when it was not the final touchpoint before donation.
As platforms continue to improve targeting, measurement, and CRM-based activation, CTV is increasingly positioned as a bridge between brand storytelling and performance — particularly for organizations seeking to reach incremental audiences at scale.
SMS: Small Channel, Outsized Impact at the Finish Line
SMS once again demonstrated its value as a deadline-driven conversion tool. While list sizes remain smaller than email, revenue efficiency was strong — particularly in the final days of the year — making SMS a powerful complement to email during peak urgency moments.
Vertical Visibility Matters
Issue visibility emerged as one of the clearest differentiators in 2025. Organizations whose missions aligned with prominent news cycles — such as international relief — generally saw stronger performance, particularly in average gift size. Visibility translated into urgency, and urgency translated into generosity.
Conversely, organizations operating outside dominant media narratives often required more digital reinforcement and touchpoints to achieve comparable results.
Final Takeaways
December 2025 reaffirmed several enduring truths:
Calendar dynamics influence when revenue arrives — not whether it does
Inbox placement is inseparable from email fundraising success
Search remains the most reliable channel when urgency peaks
CTV is evolving into a strategic performance amplifier
Cross-channel coordination is no longer optional — it’s foundational
As digital fundraising grows more competitive, the organizations best positioned for success are those that align strong creative, healthy data practices, and integrated channel strategies — meeting donors where they are at exactly the moment they’re ready to give.
Definitions for Acronyms Used
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) – tells inbox providers which servers are allowed to send email on your behalf
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) – proves that an email hasn’t changed since being sent
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting + Conformance) – marries SPF + DKIM to tell inbox providers what to do if authentication fails (send to spam, reject)