Donor Retention Calculator
Enter donors last year, donors this year and how many gave in both, and get your retention rate against the 43% sector average, plus what a five point improvement compounds into over five years. Free, no email, nothing stored.
Enter four numbers and see your donor retention rate, how many donors you lost, how many you acquired, and what a better rate would be worth over five years. Nothing is stored and no email is required.
What a better rate is worth
Five years forward, holding acquisition steady at this year's level. Retention compounds, which is why it is the number worth moving.
| If retention were | Donors in year 5 | Income in year 5 | Five year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enter your numbers above. | |||
The projection assumes you acquire the same number of new donors each year and that retention applies equally to new and existing donors. Real files retain first-year donors far worse than long-standing ones, so treat this as the shape of the effect rather than a forecast.
How the rate is calculated
Donors who gave in both years, divided by donors who gave last year.
The denominator is last year, not this year. That trips people up: retention measures whether you kept the people you had, so growth from new donors does not improve it and should not. An organization that doubled its donor count while retaining a quarter of last year’s file has a growth story and a retention problem, and only one of those is sustainable.
What counts as a donor
Decide this before you calculate, write it down, and never change it, because changing the definition makes the series meaningless.
Most organizations should count gifts above a small threshold and exclude event ticket purchases, which behave nothing like donations and will flatter or wreck the number depending on your event calendar. Including everyone who bought a raffle ticket produces a retention rate that measures raffle tickets.
Reading your number
| Rate | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Under 30% | Acquisition-led, often event or crisis driven. The file is being refilled each year rather than grown. |
| 30% to 45% | Around the sector norm. Improvement here is the cheapest growth available to you. |
| 45% to 60% | Working. Usually indicates real stewardship rather than luck. |
| Over 60% | Strong, and worth checking the definition before celebrating. A high rate on a tiny file of major donors is a different fact. |
Sector retention runs around 43 percent, which means more than half of last year’s donors do not give again. That figure is the context for the whole exercise, and it is why a five point improvement is worth more than most campaigns.
Calculate first-year retention separately
The single most useful refinement, and the calculator above does not do it for you because it needs a different export.
First-year donors retain far worse than long-standing ones, typically around 20 to 25 percent against a blended average near 43. Blending them hides the group where intervention pays most, because a second gift changes a donor’s lifetime value more than any other single event.
Run the calculation twice: once on donors whose first gift was last year, and once on everyone else. The gap between those two numbers tells you whether your problem is acquisition quality or ongoing stewardship, and they need completely different responses.
About the projection
The five year model holds acquisition constant at this year’s level and applies your retention rate to the whole file each year. It is deliberately simple, and it overstates slightly because real files retain new donors worse than established ones.
What it gets right is the shape. Retention compounds, so a small improvement sustained changes the size of the file rather than one year’s income, and that is genuinely hard to see from a single year’s numbers. An organization looking at a flat total raised often has a retention problem that will not appear in the headline figure for another two years.
What actually moves it
Almost none of it is fundraising technique.
Acknowledge quickly and specifically. Within 48 to 72 hours, naming what the gift will do. Speed matters more than polish.
Report back before asking again. The most common cause of lapse is that the only contact between gifts was another appeal.
Fix failed recurring payments with a phone call. A meaningful share of monthly donor loss is an expired card and nobody deciding anything. This is the highest return retention work most organizations have available.
Concentrate on the second gift. Everything else compounds from it.
For the signals that a specific donor is drifting, see how to tell a donor is about to lapse. To segment the file rather than measure it in aggregate, our RFM scoring tool does that in your browser, and the method is explained in RFM analysis for nonprofits.