GivingTuesday brings a rush of new donors. A great many of them will not give to the same nonprofit again.

According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, only 24% of first-time donors make a second gift, compared with 66% of existing donors who return. 

The usual explanation is donor fatigue. But the real issue is trust and relevance fatigue: donors do not stop giving because they are tired of giving; they stop because they’re not hearing from you in a way that feels personal. 

The hard part of GivingTuesday is not just raising the money; it's what you do in the 30 days after to keep donor generosity going.

That’s the subject of our webinar on October 1, 2026. We'll look at how to turn one-time GivingTuesday donors into supporters who stay, featuring Amy Truong, Give Lively’s member success and growth lead; Meg Olenowski, founder and president of the Kathy Olenowski Foundation; and Mary Griffin, content strategist at the Kathy Olenowski Foundation.

Register for the free webinar

Join us for a free webinar, Beyond the First Gift: GivingTuesday Stewardship That Sticks.

When: Oct 1, 2026 from 1:00 to 2:30pm EDT (90 minutes, including live Q&A)

Cost: Free

What to expect:

• A 30-day post-GivingTuesday touchpoint plan that’s ready to implement
• Messaging and segmentation tactics to use with first-time donor welcome packets
• Social media strategies from nonprofit practitioners doing it well
• Give Lively resources to support your stewardship efforts
• A live Q&A about post-GivingTuesday plans

Who it’s for: This session is for fundraising and communications staff, especially at the small and mid-sized nonprofits most exposed to the donor decline described below. If your team runs a GivingTuesday campaign, sends thank-you emails and is planning what comes next, this is for you. Whether you are part of a full development team or a one-person hub for fundraising, marketing and donor relations, the plan covered in this session is designed to scale down as easily as it scales up.

Can't make it live? Register anyway. Everyone who signs up gets access to the on-demand webinar replay and resources.

The giving landscape right now

The unwelcome data

Here's the good news: charitable giving in the United States reached $617.2 billion in 2025, up 5.7% from 2024, according to Giving USA 2026. The bad news, however, is that the donor base keeps shrinking. The year 2025 was the fifth consecutive 12-month period of decline in the number of donors, per the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

This means that overall growth is not reaching every organization equally. The NonProfit Times sees it this way:

• Large nonprofits grew 11.7% in 2025.
• Mid-sized organizations grew about 2%.
• Small nonprofits saw 6.4% declines. 

Similarly, there was a 2.5% decline in donors giving between $1 and $100, in both donor count and total dollar value in the first quarter of 2026, a sign that small nonprofits are losing their everyday donor base fastest. 

The disheartening reality

More dollars are coming from fewer people in larger bundles. If your organization runs on small and mid-sized gifts – as opposed to a handful of major donors – this is a hardship you’re already confronting. 

You can probably already see this in your numbers. Pull your donor lists from the first half of 2026 and analyze them. Are people giving more or less than they were last year? Are gift sizes shifting up or down? 

If you’re showing growth, you’re bucking the trend, but if your data points reflect current figures, you need to focus on your approach to stewardship. Whether you’re seeing growth or not, stewardship needs attention and not as a one-time exercise. Organizations best able to weather the current statistical declines are the ones checking and acting on their donor numbers throughout the year.

What you can control

Your one nonprofit can't fix cost-of-living pressures, wealth concentration or shifting donor behavior. However, you can control your donor experience by leaning into trust, relationships and relevance. For GivingTuesday, the first gift is not the finish line. It’s the start of a connection that turns into a second gift, a volunteer shift or a recurring donation.

30-day stewardship arc

The October 1 webinar will lay out a practical 30-day stewardship arc for the weeks right after GivingTuesday. It will detail what to send, in what order and how to adjust the message depending on the donor (brand new or repeat). 

By the end of the session, you will have a sequence you can add to your calendar right away and start using once you have your GivingTuesday numbers in hand. None of it requires new budget or a bigger team, but it does demand a plan, the kind too many organizations do not have.

Why stewardship works

In this webinar, you’ll learn that acquiring a new donor usually takes more time, money and effort than retaining one, but only with consistent care after the gift. Without it, a first-time donor is just as likely to lapse as a stranger is to become a first-time donor in the first place.

The payoff compounds

Each additional year of a donor relationship builds on the previous one; donors who stick around tend to give more in year five than they did in year one. That compounding effect is the core case for spending real effort on the 30 days after GivingTuesday instead of moving straight into next year's campaign plans.

Trust is the glue

Clear, specific proof of donor impact, not vague appreciation, is what tells supporters that their money did something real. That is what turns a transaction into a relationship that survives the next economic downturn, budget cut or shift in donor behavior that you can't control.

Stewardship happens in social media too

Social media is one of the lowest-cost ways to deliver ongoing stewardship. It lets donors see the impact of a gift, stay connected between campaigns, feel part of your community and share your story with their own networks.

At the October 1 webinar, you will hear from Meg Olenowski and Mary Griffin of the Kathy Olenowski Foundation. This is the organization behind the Pink Witches Night Out, an annual community fundraiser and breast cancer awareness event held in Downtown Denville, New Jersey, where thousands of people fill the blocked-off downtown streets wearing pink and witch-inspired clothing and hats.

They will address how social platforms fit into a stewardship plan between “asks.” Looking through a nonprofit communicator's lens, they will talk about what to post in the weeks after a campaign ends, a time when your organization is not actively asking for anything but still needs to stay visible and relevant to the people who just gave. 

That in-between period is when a lot of nonprofit social accounts go quiet, but it’s right when donors – new and returning – are most likely to be checking in to see what happened. Meg and Mary will walk through how to serve both audiences without running two separate accounts, plus how a foundation their size keeps its social presence consistent between its signature events.

Surprise from Give Lively

It’s new. We're keeping the details for the webinar, but if you have ever typed a request into an AI tool and received a frustratingly generic result, we’ve built something for you. Bonus: it can be used to develop the details of your 30-day stewardship arc.

What comes next

GivingTuesday will bring you a wave of new donors. What you do with them in the following 30 days decides how many of them stay. None of it requires new tools or a large budget. You just need a plan you can put in place. 

Register for the October 1 webinar to get that plan, along with informative stewardship tactics, social media strategies and surprise resources.