The Stewardship Diagnostic
Fourteen questions about what your donors actually experience after they give. You get a score out of 100, a breakdown across five dimensions, your retention rate measured against sector data, and the three things worth fixing first.
No donor data. Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and no email is required to see your results.
Score your program
Answer honestly rather than aspirationally. The point is a useful number, not a flattering one. If the answer is it depends who is handling it, choose the lower option, because inconsistency is what the donor experiences.
Your result
Fix these first
Ranked by how much score you are leaving on the table, weighted by how cheap the fix is. Work down, not across.
Take this with you
Print it, save it as a PDF, or bring the bar chart to your next staff meeting. Nothing here was uploaded anywhere, so this page is the only copy that exists.
If you want the fixes to arrive one at a time instead of all at once, that is what the daily idea is for: one reviewed, ready-to-run stewardship idea each morning, built for teams with no budget line for this.
Donor retention benchmarks: where the sector actually stands
The short answer: overall donor retention across the sector sits at 43.3 percent, and new-donor retention sits at roughly one in five. If you retain more than about 45 percent of your donors year over year you are ahead of the field, and if you convert more than a quarter of your first-time donors into second-gift donors you are doing something most organizations are not.
| Metric | Most recent sector figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Overall donor retention | 43.3% in 2025, up from 43.1% | AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 report (released April 2026) |
| New-donor (first-year) retention | Roughly one in five, essentially flat year over year | AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project |
| Monthly / recurring donor retention at 12 months | About 71% | M+R Benchmarks 2026 |
| Change in donor counts | Down 3.6% (±0.5%) in 2025, a fifth consecutive annual decline | AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 report |
| Change in total dollars raised | Up 5.0% (±0.5%) in 2025, the strongest growth in five years, driven almost entirely by Major and Supersize gifts | AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 report |
Those last two rows are the ones worth sitting with. Revenue went up while the number of people giving went down for the fifth year running. The sector is being carried by fewer, larger donors, which means the value of keeping any individual donor is rising at exactly the moment the base is shrinking. Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday, put it plainly in the FEP release: converting first-time givers into long-term supporters remains the sector's most pressing challenge.
Sources: AFP, "Fundraising Effectiveness Project Reports Strongest Revenue Growth in Five Years, Even as Fewer Donors Give," April 2026; FEP quarterly report dashboard; M+R Benchmarks 2026. Figures are sector aggregates from participating giving platforms and carry the margins of error noted above.
How to calculate your donor retention rate
Two numbers, one report. Count donors, not gifts, and not dollars. Use two complete fiscal years so you are not comparing a partial year to a full one.
Worked example. 840 people gave last year. 372 of them gave again this year. That is 372 ÷ 840 = 44.3 percent overall retention, a hair above the sector. Of those 840, though, 260 were first-time donors, and only 47 of them came back. That is 18.1 percent new-donor retention. The overall number looks fine. The program is losing more than four out of five new relationships, and the healthy-looking headline is being propped up entirely by people who were already loyal before you did anything.
This is the single most common way a stewardship problem hides. Always calculate both.
How the score is calculated
The diagnostic is a weighted 100-point instrument across five dimensions. Each answer carries a fixed point value, shown in full on this page, so the scoring is fully auditable rather than a black box. Nothing is computed on a server.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures | Why it is weighted this way |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acknowledgment | 25 | Speed and humanity of the thank-you, and whether anyone calls a new donor. | It is the cheapest intervention available and the one most reliably broken. A slow or robotic thank-you costs nothing to fix and undermines everything downstream. |
| First-Year Conversion | 25 | Whether a first-time donor moves through a defined 90-day sequence, and what the second message they receive actually is. | Sector data identifies first-gift-to-second-gift conversion as the largest and most persistent loss in the pipeline. It carries the joint-heaviest weight for that reason. |
| Impact Reporting | 20 | Frequency and specificity of evidence that the gift did something, including willingness to report failures. | Gratitude without evidence stops being believed. Specificity is weighted above frequency because one concrete result outperforms four vague newsletters. |
| Ask-to-Thank Balance | 15 | Non-ask touches per year and whether anyone has audited the calendar from the donor's side. | Weighted lower because it is a consequence of the first three rather than an independent cause, but it is the fastest thing to diagnose. |
| Continuity and Emergencies | 15 | Whether relationships survive staff turnover, whether hard situations have an agreed response, and whether records are current. | Low frequency, catastrophic severity. A single mishandled death or refund request can undo a decade of good stewardship, and almost no organization has written the response before needing it. |
Score bands
- 80 to 100, Seaworthy. A real program with documented practice. Refine the specifics rather than rebuilding.
- 60 to 79, Sound but leaking. The instincts are right and the execution is inconsistent. Almost always a documentation problem rather than a knowledge problem.
- 40 to 59, Taking on water. Stewardship exists as intention, not as process. It works when someone remembers, which means it does not work.
- 0 to 39, Adrift. The donor experience after a gift is essentially a receipt and the next appeal. This is also the range with the largest available upside, because the first fixes are free.
What this instrument does not measure
It does not score fundraising performance, dollars raised, board engagement, or acquisition. It measures only what happens after a gift arrives. A program can score 90 here and still miss its revenue goal, and an organization can raise a great deal of money while scoring 30, which is exactly the pattern the sector data describes: rising dollars, falling donor counts. The score is a leading indicator for retention, not a verdict on the shop.
Questions people ask about donor retention
What is a good donor retention rate?
The AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project reported an overall sector rate of 43.3 percent for 2025. Anything above the mid-40s puts you ahead of the field, and the low 50s and up is genuinely strong for a small shop. But the overall rate is dominated by long-time loyalists, so it is the wrong number to judge yourself by alone. New-donor retention, at roughly one in five across the sector, is the number that tells you whether your stewardship works on people who barely know you.
How do you calculate donor retention rate?
Divide the donors who gave in both the prior year and the most recent year by the total who gave in the prior year, then multiply by 100. Count donors, not gifts and not dollars. Then run it a second time using only donors whose first-ever gift landed in the prior year. That second figure is new-donor retention and it is the more diagnostic of the two.
Why is new-donor retention so much lower than overall retention?
A first-time donor has no relationship to fall back on. A twenty-year loyalist forgives a bad thank-you. A first-time donor reads it as the whole organization. The FEP's Q4 2025 report found new-donor retention essentially flat year over year and named first-gift-to-second-gift conversion the most consequential unsolved problem in the pipeline. Most of that attrition is not a failure of affection. It is that the second thing the donor hears is another ask.
What should a first-time donor receive in their first 90 days?
At minimum: a receipt within 24 hours, a human thank-you within 48 hours that is not the receipt, one piece of evidence within 30 days that something happened because of the gift, and one more touch before day 90 carrying no ask. The sequence matters more than the polish. A documented five-touch sequence everyone follows beats a beautiful welcome packet that goes out when someone remembers.
How often should a donor hear from you between asks?
The useful test is the ratio, not the frequency. Print every message a mid-level donor received in the last twelve months, in order, and count how many carried an ask. If most did, you do not have a stewardship program, you have a solicitation calendar with thank-you notes attached. Most small nonprofits under-thank rather than over-contact.
How do you know if your stewardship program is working?
Three signals, in order of reliability. New-donor retention moving year over year, which is slow but unambiguous. Unprompted replies to messages that contained no ask, which is the earliest sign anyone is reading. And whether a colleague could pick up your top ten relationships tomorrow from the CRM alone. A program that lives in one person's head is not a program, it is a dependency.
Is this diagnostic free, and does it need my donor data?
Free, and no. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted, stored, or logged, and no email is required to see your score or print your results. The optional calculator takes four aggregate counts, not records. That follows the same rule governing every AI-generated idea on this site: no donor information ever becomes model input.
What are the five dimensions of the stewardship score?
Acknowledgment (25 points), First-Year Conversion (25), Impact Reporting (20), Ask-to-Thank Balance (15), and Continuity and Emergencies (15). The first two carry the heaviest weight because sector retention data shows first-year conversion is where the largest and most persistent losses occur. The full point values for every answer are published above.
Where to go from your score
If First-Year Conversion was one of your weak dimensions, the First 90 Days Builder turns that specific gap into a dated sequence: answer six questions about your team and it generates every touch a first-time donor should receive before day 90, with an owner on each one and the draft copy already written. Every other fix the diagnostic recommends links to a specific idea in the idea library, each with a step-by-step plan. For the underlying theory, the complete guide to donor stewardship ideas covers the stewardship cycle and how to build a plan you can sustain. If your lowest score was Continuity and Emergencies, the Stewardship Emergencies collection is written for exactly that gap: what to actually say when a donor dies, asks for a refund, or learns their program is closing.