Faith-Based Fundraising: How to Keep Donors After the First Gift

In faith-based fundraising, many donors share an organization's beliefs before they know anyone who works there, and research on identification suggests that coming to know the organization's people is the better basis for giving again. A 2025 meta-analysis in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly by Cassandra Chapman, Jessica Spence, Matthew Hornsey and Lucas Dixon pooled 109 effect sizes from 89,570 participants and found that identifying with the fundraisers who ask had the largest correlation with giving reported in the study's abstract (r = .36). The same study found that how strongly a donor identifies with a group had more than double the correlation with giving (r = .32) of simply belonging to the same group as the people being helped (r = .15). For an organization whose donors already share its faith, that points the stewardship work of the first months toward relationships with people.

Why do donors to faith-based nonprofits give once and stop?

Most first-time donors do not give a second time, across the sectors benchmarked. The Virtuous 2026 Nonprofit Fundraising Benchmark Report, released in April 2026 and based on giving data from 771 mid-sized and large US nonprofits in human services, faith, healthcare and education, found that only 25.84% of first-time donors went on to a second gift. The report summarizes it plainly: three of four first-time donors never make a second gift. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project's Q4 2025 report, which covers 15,102 organizations, describes the same pattern for 2025: retention is edging up overall, but the improvement comes from donors with an existing relationship with the organization, "while those who are new are still less likely to return".

Faith-based organizations have a particular version of this problem. A donor who hears a message that matches their convictions, perhaps on a broadcast, at a church partner's service, or in a friend's post, can make a first gift before they know anything about the organization except that it shares their faith. The shared belief is real and it matters. But it is the same shared belief that a dozen other faith-based organizations can also claim, and it does not by itself tell the donor why this organization, with these people, should receive the next gift.

What does the research say about shared identity and giving?

The Chapman meta-analysis studied social identification, the psychologists' term for how much a person sees a group as part of who they are. Its results are correlations, written r, which run from -1 to 1, where 0 means no relationship and 1 a perfect positive one, and the authors describe their overall figure of r = .29 as medium-sized. Three findings in the study's abstract bear directly on faith-based fundraising:

• Identifying with the fundraisers who ask was more strongly associated with giving (r = .36) than identifying with the beneficiaries (r = .24) or with other donors (r = .23).
• Strength of identification, meaning how much a person feels a group is theirs, was more strongly associated with giving (r = .32) than shared identity, meaning simply belonging to the same group as the recipient (r = .15).
• Identification predicted giving when the gift went through a charity (r = .34) but not when people gave directly to an individual (r = .04).

Taken together, the three findings describe a path. Shared faith gives a donor a reason to trust the organization at the start. A stronger identification grows when the donor comes to know the specific people doing the work and asking for support. And the charity-versus-direct result suggests donors value the organization as the channel through which their generosity reaches people, so showing that channel at work is part of the relationship. As Givelify's Giving in Faith report puts it, "for many people, giving is an expression of faith, generosity, and spiritual growth", and an organization that shows how it carries that gift faithfully is giving the donor something to identify with.