How do you get started with digital fundraising?

A charity with 3,000 email addresses will not fix its digital income by buying ads if its donation page loads slowly on a phone. The money leaks out at the page and in the weeks after the first gift.

This article is the short version of our full Digital Fundraising Starter Guide, which adds a 90 day plan, a test log and the country rules for email consent. Here we cover the order of work and the first tests to run.

Know the numbers you are measuring against

Use this diagram with the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide (guide).

Benchmarks tell you whether a result is unusual. They do not tell you what your charity should achieve. The M+R Benchmarks 2026 report, which covers 2025 activity at participating US nonprofits, gives a useful starting reference:

These are US figures in US dollars, and your country, cause and list size will differ. A benchmark describes the organisations that took part; it is not a target you have to hit. Use them to spot the weakest link in your own numbers.

Build the foundation before you buy traffic

Use this diagram with the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide (guide).

We recommend working in four layers, in this order. Each layer makes the next one cheaper.

1. Measurement. Track donations by source, device and page. Without this, every later decision is a guess.

2. The donation page. A page that converts well makes every visitor worth more, whichever way they arrived.

3. The email list and welcome journey. Your list is the audience you own. Ads and social platforms can change their rules; your list stays with you.

4. Paid and in-kind traffic. Only now does buying visitors make sense, because you can see what they do when they arrive.

If you are a team of one or two, finish layers one and two before anything else. A $10 million organisation will run all four at once, but the order still applies to every new campaign.

Email still does the heavy lifting

M+R reports that email directly accounted for 11% of online revenue, and that participating nonprofits sent 31 fundraising emails per subscriber across the year (M+R email chapter). That figure counts only gifts traced straight to an email, so email's real influence is likely wider.

Treat 31 as a description, not a sending target. What matters is revenue per subscriber across the year, measured alongside unsubscribes and complaints. A smaller charity that sends six appeals a year to an engaged list can outperform one that sends thirty to a cold one.

Start with a welcome series for every new subscriber, a clear single ask in each appeal, and a plain-text thank-you that sounds like a person wrote it.

Make the donation page work on a phone

Use this diagram with the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide (guide).

Mobile users made up 52% of website traffic in the M+R data, but only 43% of donation transactions and 28% of revenue. The average desktop gift was $168, against $88 on mobile (M+R website chapter).

That gap does not prove the phone causes smaller gifts. People may browse on a phone and give later on a laptop. It does mean the mobile page deserves its own review.

Open your donation page on your own phone, on mobile data, and time how long it takes to give $25.

The same report found 79% of participating nonprofits accepted PayPal, 58% accepted Google Pay and 57% accepted Apple Pay (M+R website chapter). If you offer none of these, adding one is a sensible test.

Plan the second gift and the monthly ask

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project reports that only 18.9% of donors who were new in 2024 gave again in 2025, compared with 59.3% of repeat donors. Most new donors are lost before their second gift.

This is why follow-up needs to be planned alongside the work of recruiting donors. A planned sequence of thank-you, impact update and second invitation gives each new donor a reason to stay. A monthly giving option, offered clearly but never forced, gives committed supporters an easy way to keep giving. Our monthly giving launch plan covers the operating details.

What published donation tests show

Use this diagram with the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide (guide).

NextAfter’s fundraising experiment library, a US fundraising research lab, publishes the results of randomised tests run with charities. Four are directly relevant to a charity starting out, and each shows how much a small piece of friction can cost. All four were run between 2016 and 2020, so treat them as ideas to retest rather than current benchmarks.

Each result comes from one organisation's audience, page and season. Use them to choose what to test first, then confirm the effect with your own donors.

Run one controlled test at a time

Use this diagram with the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide (guide).

For a useful test, assign people to groups at random and decide what you will measure in advance. Wait for enough gifts before judging the result. With a small list, run fewer, bigger tests. Changing the button colour on a page that receives 40 gifts a month will not produce a reliable answer.

The best known field experiment in charitable giving is a useful model. Dean Karlan and John List sent direct mail appeals to more than 50,000 prior donors. A matching offer raised revenue per letter by 19% and the likelihood of giving by 22%.

But a 2:1 or 3:1 match did no better than 1:1 (Karlan and List, NBER working paper; American Economic Review). That was a direct mail study. Treat it as a hypothesis worth testing in your own emails, not a promise.

Good first tests for most charities:

Follow the consent rules in your country

Email law differs by country, and the rules for charities are not the same as for businesses.

Whatever the law allows, a working unsubscribe link and a record of how each person joined your list protect your reputation. Check the details for your situation with a qualified adviser in your jurisdiction.

Your homework

Digital fundraising grows from a few owned foundations: measurement, a page that works on a phone, an email list and a planned second gift. Compare your numbers with the benchmarks above, fix the weakest link, then test one change at a time. Give your team these assignments:

1. This week: Pull last year's online gifts by device and source, and calculate your mobile donation page conversion rate alongside the desktop rate.

2. Within 30 days: Write or rewrite a three-email welcome series for new donors, ending with a second invitation to give.

3. Within 90 days: Run one randomised test from the list above, decide the measure before you start, and record the result in the test log in the Digital Fundraising Starter Guide.

These timings are our suggested working arrangements, not research benchmarks.