Giving Went Up. Donors Went Down. That Is Not Good News.

Giving USA reported that total American charitable giving passed 600 billion dollars for the first time. Headlines called it a record year, and by the raw number it was.

Then look at the other half. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that while giving rose about 5 percent, the number of donors fell about 3.6 percent. More money, fewer people.

Trend one: religion is flat and its share keeps slipping

Religion is still the largest single category of American giving at 151.58 billion dollars, roughly 23 percent of everything given. But Giving USA reported it essentially flat once you adjust for inflation, at negative 0.2 percent, and its share of total giving has been declining for a decade.

Flat is not collapse. It does mean that churches are holding steady in dollars while the rest of the charitable world grows around them, and a shrinking share of a growing pie eventually shows up in a budget meeting.

Trend two: first gifts almost never become second gifts

Overall donor retention sits around 43 percent, so more than half of the people who gave will not give again. For first-time donors it is worse. Somewhere between 70 and 80 percent never make a second gift.

Most churches respond to that by working harder on acquisition. That is backwards and expensive. The gap between a first gift and a second one is almost always that nobody told the person what their money did.

Trend three: the ask has been replaced by the report

The organizations holding their donors are the ones that close the loop. Not an annual report nobody opens. A specific message naming what the gift paid for, who it reached, and what happened.

This is where film earns its keep, and I would say that even if I did not make films. A 90 second piece showing one family who got helped does the closing-the-loop job better than four paragraphs, because donors are not tired of giving, they are tired of vague impact.

The second gift is not won by asking better. It is won by reporting at all.

Trend four: recurring giving is the only real hedge against concentration

If a smaller group is carrying more of your budget, the fix is not finding one more big donor. It is widening the base at a smaller amount, because forty people giving fifty dollars a month is far more stable than two people giving twelve thousand a year.

Recurring giving is unglamorous and it is the single most useful thing a church can build right now. It survives a bad Sunday, a bad month, and a family moving away.

Trend five: the generational handoff is already underway

The people carrying most church budgets are older than the people sitting in most churches. That gap closes one way or another over the next decade.

Younger givers do give. They give differently. They want to see the specific outcome, they are suspicious of institutional language, and they will not respond to an appeal that assumes loyalty they have not been given a reason to feel. That is a trust question before it is a giving question.

What I would not do

I would not commission a big fundraising film as the first move. That is the expensive answer and it skips the cheap one.

Send a plain email to everyone who gave in the last year telling them exactly what their money did, with one real number and one real name in it. That costs nothing, takes an afternoon, and will do more for retention than a film would. If it works, then make the film.

The number to actually watch

Stop watching total giving. It hides the problem, which is exactly what it did in the national numbers.

Track how many households gave, and how many of last year's first-time givers gave again. If total dollars are up and household count is down, you are getting more concentrated, and you should know that while you still have time to do something about it.