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Giving USA 2026 Key Takeaways for Advancement Teams
- Grace Carew
- Jul 7
- 2 min read
Over the last few months, several fundraising reports have analyzed last year’s philanthropy, with Giving USA's annual report among the most recent. The common thread as I’ve read through them: philanthropy continues to grow.
But anyone who's spent time inside a development office knows that a topline number rarely tells the full story. Most organizations have more donors who deserve individual attention than staff allow. That gap has always existed, but with each new report, it becomes harder to ignore.
According to Giving USA, individual giving grew 4.1% in 2025. But that growth is increasingly coming from a smaller group of donors making larger gifts, not from a broader base of giving expanding underneath it. We know from our State of Donor Management Survey that most organizations only manage 3% of their donors. Relying that heavily on so few relationships doesn't create a healthy, long-term pipeline.
Every organization has donors who give consistently for years without ever escalating into major-gift territory. They don't show up on anyone's urgent list because they haven’t lapsed and they're not flagged as ready for an ask. They're just quietly there, consistently giving year after year. Managing these donors individually, rather than letting them sit in mass communications, is exactly the kind of steady, personal cultivation that's easy to talk about and hard to actually deliver at scale.
Planned giving is where we have seen this play out clearly. Across our partners, VEOs and VPGOs have surfaced existing planned gifts that donors never disclosed, including a $100,000 gift which we announced earlier this year. Donors want to leave a legacy, and planned giving is one of the fastest-growing forms of philanthropy, with giving by bequest growing 19.7% according to Giving USA. Reaching more of these unmanaged donors with individualized conversations is how organizations grow their planned giving and longer-term revenue.
Whether you’ve just closed your fiscal year or you’re still in the middle of it, it's worth taking an honest look at who's been steady in the database for years without ever really being cultivated. It’s an opportunity to think about what it would actually take to give those donors the kind of consistent attention that translates into deeper giving. Most teams already know who those donors are. The harder part has always been finding the capacity to reach all of them, not just the ones at the top.
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