Deep dives
No Kid Hungry Raised $160M in a Crisis Year. What Can the Public Numbers Show About the Base?
An independent read of Share Our Strength's public filings, and the surge-donor questions only its own file can answer.
By Donor Insights · Published August 28, 2026 · 8 min read
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Key takeaways
- Share Our Strength's public support more than doubled from $75.0M in FY2019 to a $159.8M peak in FY2020, then receded to $85.3M, $83.6M, and $79.1M through FY2022 to FY2024 before recovering to $89.9M in FY2025 (IRS Form 990, via ProPublica).
- Its celebrity-chef brand, cause-marketing and text-to-give program, and fast COVID emergency response are the publicly visible strengths, and the surge year banked reserves, with reported expenses running ahead of revenue in the years that followed.
- Public filings cannot show whether the donors acquired during the crisis surge gave a second time, how many quietly lapsed, donor concentration, or which acquisition sources pay back, so every read of the donor base here is an inference.
- The constructive question after a one-time surge is retention: how do you keep crisis-acquired donors so the base does not fall back to pre-surge levels.
- Donor Insights turns an organization's own giving records into that cohort and reactivation picture, while the team runs the outreach in its own tools.
No Kid Hungry, the campaign run by Share Our Strength, is one of the clearest examples of a fundraising program that met a national emergency. Its public support more than doubled from $75.0M in FY2019 to a peak of $159.8M in FY2020 as the pandemic closed schools, then eased over the next three years to $85.3M, $83.6M, and $79.1M before recovering to $89.9M in FY2025, according to its IRS Form 990, as published by ProPublica. This is a constructive read of what those public numbers show about its donor base, and an honest account of what they cannot show. No donor-level figures here are private; where a number would require the donor file, we say so.
What is No Kid Hungry doing well?
Three things stand out in the public record. The first is the brand itself: Share Our Strength built No Kid Hungry on a celebrity-chef foundation, with events like Taste of the Nation and Dine Out for No Kid Hungry that turn restaurants and chefs into a recurring cause-marketing channel. The second is a strong digital and text-to-give program that makes a small gift easy to give from a phone, exactly the kind of low-friction path that brings first-time donors in at scale. The third is speed under pressure: when schools closed in 2020, the organization moved emergency grants to school districts and community partners so meals kept reaching kids who had lost their school lunch.
There is a quieter strength in the same filing. In FY2020, reported expenses were about $86.3M against that $159.8M of revenue, so the surge year added heavily to reserves rather than spending everything as it arrived. That discipline is what let the organization keep funding its work through the leaner years that followed. A brand, a digital channel, and a reserve are exactly the assets that make a donor base durable. They are also assets a public filing can describe but never measure. The 990 shows the money that arrived. It does not show how many of the crisis-year donors ever gave again.
What does the revenue path show?
A steep spike, then a long step back toward the earlier baseline. Public support ran $75.0M, then $159.8M, then $145.5M, then $85.3M, $83.6M, and $79.1M, before FY2025 recovered to $89.9M. The two crisis years towered over everything around them, and from FY2022 through FY2024 reported expenses ran ahead of reported revenue. The public totals are consistent with spending down the reserves banked in 2020, though a filing alone cannot confirm that.
| Fiscal year | Total revenue | Total expenses | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2019 | $75.0M | $65.4M | Baseline |
| FY2020 | $159.8M | $86.3M | Surge; reserves grew |
| FY2021 | $145.5M | $136.3M | Second surge year |
| FY2022 | $85.3M | $110.2M | Receded; expenses above revenue |
| FY2023 | $83.6M | $111.2M | Down; expenses above revenue |
| FY2024 | $79.1M | $101.8M | Low; expenses above revenue |
| FY2025 | $89.9M | $83.6M | Recovered above expenses |
What the table does not say is who those FY2020 donors were, or where they went. A crisis brings in a wave of first-time givers who respond to the moment. Some of them become lasting supporters; many give once and are never asked back in a way that lands. If the base settled near its pre-surge level, the surge donors mostly did not stay. If it settled well above it, a good share converted. Those are very different outcomes with very different fixes, and no public document can tell them apart. Only the donor file can.
Why surge retention is the question that matters
Because a one-time spike is only worth what stays after it. A donor who gave during the crisis and gave again the next year is worth far more than the first gift, since the value of a supporter is in the repeat, not the arrival. That is the same logic behind donor lifetime value: the second gift is where a name becomes a relationship. The single most important number after a surge is the second-gift conversion rate of the donors the surge brought in, and a public filing reports neither the count nor the conversion.
The other half of the question is reactivation. In the general pattern of crisis fundraising, a share of surge donors lapse within a year or two of a single gift, and whether that is true of this base is exactly what a public filing cannot show. A lapsed crisis donor is a warm name rather than a cold one, since they chose this cause once, at a hard moment. Reaching them with the right message is usually cheaper than buying a new donor from scratch. Our guide to lapsed-donor reactivation covers how to size a win-back by recency and prior value, which is precisely the work a post-surge base needs.
What public data cannot reveal here
The 990 is an annual snapshot of totals. It is silent on every donor-level question that actually decides whether a surge becomes a durable base or leaks away. For No Kid Hungry, as for any organization, the public record cannot show:
- Surge-donor retention: what share of the FY2020 first-time donors were still giving one and two years later, and what share lapsed.
- Second-gift conversion: whether the crisis donors, who arrived one time, were ever converted to a second gift. See the second gift.
- Donor concentration: how much of the $159.8M peak rested on a handful of large emergency gifts that would not repeat. See donor concentration risk.
- Acquisition payback: which channels, from text-to-give to the chef events, bring donors who stay long enough to return their cost, and which quietly lose money.
- Involuntary churn: how much recurring revenue is lost to failed cards rather than real cancellations, and how much is recovered.
How would you rank and bucket the base?
The same way any organization should, before deciding where outreach goes. Rank donors by recency, frequency, and value, then place each in the lifecycle stage that sets the next action. Four buckets carry most of the work:
| Bucket | Who is in it | The next action |
|---|---|---|
| Acquire | New and first-time donors, including one-time crisis and text-to-give givers | A prompt thank-you and one clear second invitation |
| Convert | Donors who gave a second time or started a monthly gift | Steward and invite the upgrade to recurring or a larger gift |
| Retain | Active repeat donors and sustainers | Protect against failed payments; deepen the relationship |
| Reactivate | Lapsed donors, including surge donors now a year or two out | A win-back sequence sized by recency and prior value |
This is the readable version of a fuller model that adds value tiers, grassroots through major, on top of the lifecycle. The guide to RFM segmentation walks through the scoring, and donor cohort analysis shows how to read the FY2020 join-year cohort as it ages, which is the exact picture a post-surge base needs.
The action plan any organization after a surge can run now
None of this requires a new platform to begin. In order of return:
- 1.Cohort the surge donors by the month they first gave, and read how many were still giving twelve and twenty-four months later. This one curve tells you whether the crisis built a base or a spike.
- 2.Build a real second-gift path for the one-time crisis donors who never came back, so the people the surge brought in are invited to give again rather than left to lapse.
- 3.Run a win-back to the lapsed surge donors, sized by how recently they gave and how much, before spending a dollar on brand-new acquisition; a warm lapsed name is cheaper to move than a cold one.
- 4.Measure acquisition by source against the value each source returns over two years, not by the count of donors it delivers, so text-to-give and event donors are judged on who stays.
- 5.Watch concentration: know what share of the peak rested on the largest emergency gifts, so a non-repeating gift is never mistaken for a base that has grown.
“It is far less expensive to keep an existing donor than to acquire a new one.”
So what would you do next?
Public data got this analysis to the edge of the interesting questions and no further. The surge-donor cohort curve, the second-gift conversion of the crisis wave, the concentration of the peak year, the payback of each acquisition source: all of it lives in an organization's own giving records, not in any filing. Donor Insights reads those records and returns a prioritized action file: the FY2020 donors who never gave again, the lapsed surge donors worth a win-back this quarter, the one-time givers ready for a second gift, and the repeat donors close to an upgrade. Each one comes with the next best action and the donors it applies to, so the work is a list your team can pick up rather than a report to interpret.
From there the loop is steady work you already know how to do. You make each ask in your own tools, watch the retained base hold and grow, and send the gifts that would have quietly lapsed back toward the mission itself, more meals reaching kids who would otherwise go without. A donor base that stays is what lets that mission keep going and keep growing toward the day no child goes hungry. To see this analysis built on your own data, start with your own file.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this analysis based on No Kid Hungry's private data?
- No. Every figure is drawn from Share Our Strength's public IRS Form 990 as published by ProPublica, and from the organization's own published materials. No donor-level or private data is used, and each donor-base observation is labeled as an inference from public totals.
- Why did revenue fall after 2020?
- The public record shows support peaking at $159.8M in FY2020 during the pandemic, then easing to $79.1M by FY2024 before recovering to $89.9M in FY2025. A step down after a one-time emergency is expected, but the filing cannot say whether the crisis donors stayed and converted or mostly gave once and lapsed. Only the donor file can tell those apart.
- What is the biggest fundraising question after a donor surge?
- Retention. The value of a surge is what stays after it, so the key numbers are the second-gift conversion rate of the donors the surge brought in and the reactivation rate of those who have since lapsed. Both are donor-level and invisible in a public 990.
Sources
Related articles
Lapsed Donor Reactivation: A Data-Driven Win-Back Playbook
The whole lapsed list is not one audience. Win back the donors most likely to come back, first.
The Second Gift: Why It Decides Whether a Donor Stays
The gift after the first one is where a donor relationship is kept or lost.
Donor Cohort Analysis: Read Your File the Way a Fund Reads a Portfolio
Group donors by when they joined, then watch each group age. The average never told you this.
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