Give kindness a clear path to your cause

The internet can feel overwhelming. Algorithms reward outrage, bad news fills our feeds, and donor participation is declining across the sector. It’s easy to wonder if people care less.

GoFundMe’s latest report, The Kindness Gap, challenges that. From July 2025 through June 2026, 8.6 million donors made more than 34 million nonprofit donations through GoFundMe, raising $2.7 billion. The number of nonprofit donors across GoFundMe also rose nearly 10% year over year.

Kindness is still here. However, the opportunity is to make it easier to act. The Kindness Gap explores how nonprofits can create clear paths from the desire to help to sustained support.

What it takes to close the kindness gap

Our report follows kindness from the moment someone encounters a cause through ways they can act, bring others in, and stay connected.

1. Meet kindness where it is

Growing your donor base starts with making your mission easier to discover and focusing your time and resources where discovery already happens.

Our data points to organic social and community-powered fundraising platforms like GoFundMe as promising ways to reach new supporters. Every organic social channel we measured brought more first-time donors to GoFundMe Pro than organic search, paid search, or paid social. Facebook and Instagram brought especially strong numbers.

Explore where new supporters find causes and where to focus your efforts.

2. Give kindness a way to travel

One person’s discovery can open the door for others, as supporters help carry your story into networks you may not otherwise reach directly. On average, a peer-to-peer campaign on GoFundMe Pro brings in 123 donors who are new to that cause.

Learn what else our data says about helping supporters bring others along.

3. Turn kindness into action

However someone discovers your cause, they need a clear, confident path to act. The right ask and enough context ensures they feel confident taking the next step.

Our experiments show how details of the giving experience can shape follow-through, like masking certain fundraiser page elements to understand which signals impact conversions. Most elements made little difference on their own. However, goal progress and recent donation activity were the exceptions.

Dive into the data to see what makes giving easier while preserving the context donors need.

4. Grow one act into another

A completed gift opens the next part of the relationship: helping supporters stay connected and continue giving.

The first 30 days of a recurring plan are a critical window, as our platform data shows that 7% of plans are canceled during that month. Afterward, monthly retention rises above 98% and keeps climbing. And that momentum lasts, with 82% of plans still active after one year.

Read on to learn how nonprofits can build on a first gift, encourage the next, and grow lasting support through recurring giving.

Give kindness somewhere to land

Every day, kindness shows up across GoFundMe’s community of 200M+. Our research explores how nonprofits can help it travel further, from discovering a cause to making a gift and choosing to stay involved.

Explore more findings and practical ideas in The Kindness Gap.