Monthly Giving Program: Start With Your Smallest Donors

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project published its first-quarter 2026 numbers with two findings sitting a paragraph apart. Donor counts and dollars grew across the Small, Midsize, Major and Supersize tiers, with only Micro donors, defined there as $1 to $100, in decline. Then retention, which the report says “actually fell for Small, Midsize, Major, and Supersize donors this quarter, while Micro was the only segment where retention improved” (2026 Q1 FEP Report).

Read those two together. The money is growing in the four tiers that are getting less loyal, and loyalty is growing in the one tier that is shrinking.

That is an awkward result for a two-person shop, because every piece of fundraising advice written for small organizations says the same thing: your hours are scarce, so spend them where the dollars are. This data says the place where the dollars are is also the place people are leaving faster than last year.

The 18.0% is not the number most people think it is

One correction first, because this figure gets quoted wrong constantly and quoting it wrong will cost you an argument with your board.

The headline retention rate in the report is 18.0%, held “essentially flat” and drifting down from what the report calls 2024’s high of 18.2% (2026 Q1 FEP Report). That is not the share of last year’s donors who came back this year.

FEP states its own definition plainly: “Each metric is expressed as a year-over-year, year-to-date comparison,” illustrated with the example that a second-quarter report compares the first six months of one year against the first six months of the next (FEP methodology). A first-quarter report is therefore a three-month window measured against the same three months a year earlier. An 18.0% reading means roughly one in five of the donors who gave in the first quarter of 2025 gave again in the first quarter of 2026. It is a useful trend line. It is not your annual retention rate, and if you put it in a board deck labeled as one, somebody will eventually check.

Two further things are worth knowing before you lean on these numbers. The 2026 figures come from the first major methodology update FEP has made since 2021, so comparisons against older reports are not clean (FEP methodology). And the panel is built from organizations that “reported at least one transaction in each of the previous 24 months” on a donor-management platform, capped at those under $25 million in annual fundraising (FEP methodology). That is a sample of organizations already running a CRM consistently, which is worth remembering if your own donor records live in a spreadsheet.

Read the tiers, not the total

The report’s recommendation list is blunter than its headline. It tells organizations to “Build a dedicated stewardship track for Small and Midsize donors specifically, since retention is currently softening in both tiers, even as dollar totals grow,” and to “Keep investing in Micro donor engagement despite the segment’s small dollar share” (2026 Q1 FEP Report).

Notice what that second line concedes. FEP is not arguing that micro donors are lucrative. It is saying that a shrinking, low-value segment is the only one whose loyalty moved the right way, and that this alone makes it worth the effort. Which is only true if you can do something with loyalty other than admire it.

You can, and the report names the mechanism itself. Its stated priority is converting new donors into repeat givers, “including locking in monthly-sustainer commitments at the point of acquisition” (2026 Q1 FEP Report).

The point of acquisition is the checkout page. Not the thank-you email, not the spring appeal, not the newsletter. The screen the donor is looking at while their card details are still on it.

The ask has a ceiling, and it is $250

This is where the advice meets a setting you can switch on this afternoon.

Givebutter has a feature called the recurring plan upsell, and its documentation describes exactly when it fires: “When a donor selects a one-time donation of $250 or less, they will be prompted to become a monthly supporter at the next step in the checkout process” (Givebutter Help Center). Above $250 the prompt does not appear, and the threshold cannot be changed.

Sit with that ceiling for a second. The feature built to do what FEP recommends is deliberately pointed at the small end of the donor file and deliberately kept away from larger one-time gifts. The product decision and the sector data agree about where the opportunity is, and they agree on the tier most small organizations have been advised to stop spending time on.

The second design decision is the one worth taking even if you never open a Givebutter account. The suggested monthly amount is lower than the one-time gift, not equal to it. The documentation gives its own example: a donor who selects a one-time $100 donation “may be prompted to donate $20 per month,” and explains the reasoning as “a lower (but more frequent) amount can be more attractive to donors” (Givebutter Help Center).

That is the part hand-built monthly asks usually get backwards. An organization that has just received $100 tends to ask for $100 a month, which lands on the donor as a twelvefold increase and gets declined. A fifth of it reads as a smaller commitment than the gift they already made.

Switching it on takes two toggles and both are required. Recurring plans have to be enabled first, and the documentation is explicit that “the upsell option will not appear if recurring donations are disabled on your account.” Then, in Settings, under Account, under the General heading, you enable “One-time to recurring donation offer” (Givebutter Help Center). Two limits to know going in: it is an account-wide setting rather than a per-campaign one, and it currently works only on Form campaigns, not on Page or Event campaigns (Givebutter Help Center).

The same feature, three different prices

The monthly-ask mechanism is not one vendor’s invention, but what it costs you varies far more than the feature does. All three platforms below support recurring gifts, and all three prices were checked on the vendors’ own pricing pages today.

Zeffy states its price as “$0” and describes itself as “100% free, always,” with “No transaction fees. No platforms fees. No fees period,” adding that it “even covers all transaction & credit card fees” (Zeffy pricing). The model is donor tipping: the company says it “relies entirely on optional contributions from donors” and that “2 of 3 donors tip, which covers our costs” (Zeffy pricing). Recurring donations are listed among its features. The tradeoff you are accepting is that your donors see a tip request on their way through your checkout.

Givebutter works the same way by default. Its pricing page shows 0% platform fees and 0% processing fees with optional tips switched on, and notes that “If you prefer to disable tips, a small platform fee applies instead” (Givebutter pricing). The free tier is listed as “Free forever” at $0 per month. The paid tier, Givebutter Plus, starts at $29 per month, or $348 billed annually, at 250 contacts or fewer, and what it adds is automation, texting, custom reports and data hygiene, not the upsell described above (Givebutter pricing).

Donorbox prices the same capability differently, and this is the comparison to make before you commit. Its Standard plan is free, with “Fees between 2.95% and 3.95%.” Its Pro plan is $150 per month, brings fees down to “between 1.75% and 2%,” and the Pro feature list names “Recurring donation upsell” outright (Donorbox pricing). On Donorbox, the one-time-to-monthly prompt sits behind the $150 tier. On Givebutter it is a checkbox in account settings.

That does not make Donorbox the wrong answer, and this is worth working out rather than assuming. The fee gap between its free and Pro tiers runs roughly 1.2 to 2 points (Donorbox pricing). On $10,000 processed in a year that gap is worth $120 to $200, against $1,800 a year for the plan, so the free tier wins easily. On $400,000 processed it is worth $4,800 to $8,000 and the plan pays for itself several times over. The crossover sits somewhere between $90,000 and $150,000 processed annually, depending where in that fee range you land. Run it with your own number before you read anyone’s recommendation, including this one.

What twelve months of it actually adds up to

What follows is a hypothetical, stated as one, because the numbers are arithmetic rather than an observed outcome.

Picture a small nonprofit that takes 200 one-time gifts in a year, all under the $250 threshold, averaging $75 each. That is $15,000. Now say the checkout prompt converts 8 of those 200 donors onto a monthly plan at $15 a month. Twelve months of those eight plans is $1,440, against the $600 those same eight people gave once.

The caveats matter more than the total. Eight out of 200 is a rate I am assuming, not one I measured, and yours could be half that or double it. Monthly plans lapse and cards expire, so the $1,440 assumes all eight survive a full year, which they will not reliably do. And the $600 is money you were getting anyway, now arriving in pieces rather than in addition to anything.

What the arithmetic does show is the shape of the thing. The gain comes from duration, not from generosity. Nobody in that example was persuaded to give more per decision. They gave across more months from a single decision, made on a screen that had already been built and paid for.

Where I would push back on my own argument

Facts above. What follows is opinion.

The weakness in all of this is that a checkbox is not a relationship, and a monthly donor who never hears from you is a cancellation waiting for a card to expire. The report is careful on exactly this point: its concern is a “persistently weak first-to-second-gift conversion rate,” and a recurring plan technically produces the second gift while leaving the real question, whether this person feels any connection to the work, completely unanswered (2026 Q1 FEP Report).

So the toggle earns its place only if something follows it. The first thirty days after a first gift is where this is won or lost, and the problem is structurally the same one any business has with a new customer, which we laid out as a four-touchpoint cadence in Strategic Communication Plan: Stop Early Customer Churn. Take the structure and change the nouns.

This is also where I would be precise about what an AI assistant is for here. Drafting is a real use: hand it your actual program facts and ask for four short messages spaced across a donor’s first month, then cut everything that reads like a brochure. Sorting a donor export into who gave what and when is a real use. What it cannot do is the thing that decides whether a monthly plan survives, which is a named human noticing that one specific donor gave a second time and writing something a machine would not have produced. Automating the drafting so a person has time to do the noticing is the trade that works. Automating the noticing gets you an impressively consistent file of people who used to give. If you want the wider program mapped before you touch any settings, the free Build a Sustainable Donor Engagement Strategy prompt at BusinessPrompter.com runs it as a five-step chain across segments, stewardship and the recurring path, which is a reasonable thing to prepare before a board meeting rather than during one.

One last argument, and it is a cash-flow argument rather than a fundraising one. A hundred donors on monthly plans is a figure you can write into a January budget and still believe in June, which is a different class of asset from a year-end appeal that may or may not land. Any small organization trying to smooth uneven income is solving the same problem, and we made the case for watching it weekly in A Cash Flow Playbook Small Businesses Can Run Weekly. That argument belongs in front of whoever approves your budget, and if that is a board that has been quiet lately, its job description is already printed on your own tax return, which we went through in Nonprofit Board Responsibilities: Use Your Own Form 990.

Open your own donation form on a phone, the way most of your donors will. Pick $50. Count the screens that pass before anything offers you a monthly option, and whether anything does at all. If the answer is none, you have just found the cheapest item on your entire fundraising list: a setting that already exists, aimed at the only group of donors that got more loyal this year.

Frequently asked questions

Is 18% really how many of our donors come back each year?
No, and this is the most common misreading of the figure. FEP states that “Each metric is expressed as a year-over-year, year-to-date comparison,” so the 18.0% in the Q1 2026 report measures donors who gave in the first quarter of 2025 and gave again in the first quarter of 2026 (FEP methodology). It is a quarter-to-quarter trend line, not an annual retention rate.

Will offering a monthly plan cost us the one-time gift we would have received?
On Givebutter the prompt appears after the donor has already selected a one-time amount, at the next step in checkout, and the suggested monthly figure is lower than the amount they picked, not equal to it (Givebutter Help Center). That design makes the monthly option an alternative rather than an upsell on top. Whether a given donor takes it, declines it, or abandons the form is something only your own numbers will tell you, so check your conversion rate before and after you switch it on.

Our donor records live in a spreadsheet, not a CRM. Does any of this apply?
The checkout setting does, because it lives on the donation platform rather than in your records. The benchmark data is a different matter: FEP builds its panel from organizations that “reported at least one transaction in each of the previous 24 months” on a donor-management platform (FEP methodology), so it describes organizations already running one. Treat the 18.0% as sector context, not as a target your spreadsheet is failing to hit.

Which platform should a very small nonprofit actually pick?
Work it out from what you process rather than from a recommendation. Zeffy and Givebutter both run at $0 per month with donor tipping covering the fees (Zeffy pricing, Givebutter pricing), so at low volume the subscription question does not arise. Donorbox charges fees of 2.95% to 3.95% on its free Standard plan and 1.75% to 2% on Pro at $150 per month (Donorbox pricing), and that gap only outruns the subscription somewhere above roughly $90,000 processed a year.