The CRM is full, the forecast is a guess.
It is October. The board asks the question every fundraiser dreads: will we make year-end? You open a spreadsheet, look at the pipeline and give one number. You say it with confidence. You are not sure.
The data is all there. Gifts, pledges, donors, history. It sits in a CRM nobody has time to mine. The forecast is a guess dressed as a figure.
What the data says about donors
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, run by the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday, tracks US giving. It shows something every fundraiser feels.
- Through Q3 2025, overall donor retention was 31.9%. New donors were retained at only 14.0%. Repeat donors, at 43.6%.
- Retention climbs with every gift. A one-time donor stays 19.2% of the time. A donor who has given seven or more times stays 87.3%.
- Giving rose by an estimated 5.0% in 2025, the strongest growth in five years. But the number of donors keeps falling. Growth comes from large and frequent donors.
Show and tell: real data, from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. It is US data. We use your own history for a forecast.
The message: your repeat and major donors carry the year, and the step from first gift to second gift is a big leak. A single forecast number hides all of that.
Why a forecast should never be one number
A forecast is not a promise. It is a range with reasons. We always show three scenarios: a cautious one, an expected one and a stretch. The board sees the range and what would move you from one to the next. That is a better conversation than defending a single figure in November.
Annual fund and major gifts also behave differently. Annual fund is about volume and retention. Major gifts are about a small number of conversations and their timing. One method for both gives a poor answer for each.
Why we built it
The Year-End Forecast is our year-end forecast for Canadian nonprofits and small companies. It looks only at the run to 31 December. It uses your own giving history, shows three scenarios, treats annual fund and major gifts differently and comes with a dashboard. A named person signs off before it reaches you.
Sources
- Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q3 2025 report (retention figures as reported by Bloomerang) and Q4 2025 report (as reported by DonorPerfect). US data.