Learn more about analytics and research best practices, as well as real world examples and solutions for nonprofits.

Unsustainable Trends

These trends might sound familiar:

Your new donor acquisition counts are flat.
Your retention is slipping.
So, your active donor counts are shrinking.
However, you have seen big gains in average gift size.
So overall, your revenue is flat.

This has been the general trend in fundraising for the past couple of years.

And it’s unsustainable. We all know at some point the decreases in active donor counts will be too much for average gift sizes to mitigate.

The question is at what point will your revenue fall?

Here’s a simple equation that will tell you: (-1*%∆R) > (1*%∆RPD)
• Where R = retention, and,
• Where RPD = revenue per active donor per year

In English, when your percentage loss in retention is greater than your percentage gain in revenue per donor, your revenue will fall.

To read Part II of our unsustainable trends blog posts, click here.

Echoes of the Dot-Com Bust

by Bill Jacobs | Dec 6, 2025

I asked the AI Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot to tell me about the dot.com bust of 25 years ago. If you are old enough to remember, the dot.com bust came right off the heels of the Y2K computer fears, the September 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax in snail-mail...

Micro-Sustainers to Lapsed Donors

by Bill Jacobs | Jul 29, 2025

Each fall, we here at Analytical Ones survey the trends in fundraising and come up with testing ideas for your fall campaigns. Last year, we recommended testing first class postage, to avoid the USPS’s SOP of delivering all nonprofit postage appeals on the same day....

Part VII: How Analytical Ones Will be Using AI

by Bill Jacobs | Jul 16, 2025

Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about some potential effects that AI will have on the nonprofit sector. Today, I’m going to end this series on how we as a company intend to use AI. There’s no doubt there is a certain “wow-factor” using AI. It’s like Star...