What we learned from Giving Tuesday 2025: Trends, timing, and donor behavior
Giving Tuesday isn’t just a fundraising event, it’s a live stress test of donor motivation, digital experience, and campaign design. When thousands of donors take action within a single 24-hour window, clear patterns emerge.
This year’s data revealed where donors leaned in, where they hesitated, and what fundraising teams should focus on as they plan upcoming campaigns and future Giving Days. Here’s what stood out.
The 3 most important takeaways from the timing data
Late morning was the day’s strongest giving moment
Giving volume steadily rose throughout the early morning hours, with the highest volume of giving occurring late-morning. While exact time varied by time zone, this late-morning window consistently produced the strongest donor follow-through.
Future campaigns should build momentum leading into this period and ensure donors have clear, simple pathways to complete their gifts when activity is naturally highest.
Giving resurged twice: at lunch and again in early evening
Two smaller but meaningful lifts appeared around midday and again in the early evening. These windows suggest donors re-engage during natural breaks in their day, creating opportunities to regain momentum.
Teams can use these moments to reinforce progress, spotlight challenges or matches, and re-engage donors who showed interest earlier but didn’t complete a gift.
Donor engagement tapered at the edges of the day
The lowest activity occurred very early in the morning and late at night. While engagement tapered significantly during these periods, they still hold strategic value: early hours for refinement and setup, and late hours for regrouping and updating results.
These windows are best supported by automation rather than live effort, allowing teams to focus attention when donors are most active.
The real drop-off wasn’t at the “Give” button, it was in the form journey
One of the most revealing patterns came from form funnel behavior:
- 100% completed Giving Form Click A
- 95.49% completed Click B
- 83.66% completed Click C
- Only 47.28% made it through Step D
Adding context, the average donor who completed a gift spent 5.1 minutes moving from the initial giving form click to the final thank-you step.
That’s a meaningful investment of time (especially on mobile) and it shows abandonment wasn’t driven by lack of intent. Donors were willing to stay engaged, but friction inside the journey ultimately determined whether they finished.
More than half of donors who started the giving process didn’t complete it.
Where donors likely struggled:
- Too many fields
- Unclear designation options
- Optional steps that feel mandatory
- Small mobile frustrations
- Asking for unnecessary information early
- Cognitive overload (“Where should I give?”)
This is the definition of friction, and a major opportunity. A 10% improvement in Step D completion would translate into thousands of additional gifts across organizations.
Where donors came from matters more than teams realize
Referral data revealed another important pattern. While the top referral source in our data often appeared as “not set” (common in large-scale campaigns), identifiable sources still provided meaningful insight into donor discovery:
- 4,900+ donors arrived via Google
- 3,700+ donors came from Instagram
- 4,500+ donors came from Facebook
- A significant share arrived via direct site links, including bookmarked pages, email clicks, and shared URLs
The takeaway isn’t attribution perfection, it’s donor behavior.
Donors aren’t discovering Giving Tuesday campaigns in one place. They encounter them across search, social, direct links, and peer sharing, often multiple times before giving.
Two realities stand out:
- Visibility across channels matters more than optimizing a single platform.
- The destination experience matters more than the referral source.
No matter how donors arrive, the decision to give happens inside the giving experience itself. If the form is clear, fast, and intuitive, donors follow through. If it isn’t, even the best traffic won’t convert.
Device breakdown reinforces why mobile-first design is no longer optional
Device data added another layer of insight into donor behavior:
- 79.31K visitors on desktop
- 40.1K visitors on iPhone or Android
- 775 visitors on iPad
Desktop drove the largest share of traffic, but mobile collectively represented a substantial portion of engagement, often during the same high-activity windows identified earlier.
This reinforces a familiar but often under-addressed reality: donors move between devices, and the giving experience must work seamlessly across all of them.
Mobile friction compounds form friction.
The same issues that cause drop-off in multi-step forms are amplified on smaller screens. A process that feels manageable on a desktop can quickly become frustrating on a phone.
For teams across all organizations, this creates clear priorities:
- Test giving forms on mobile, not just desktop
- Reduce typing and decision points wherever possible
- Ensure buttons, progress indicators, and calls to action are easy to see and complete
The goal isn’t to abandon desktop optimization, but to recognize that mobile readiness directly impacts conversion, especially when donors are fitting giving into busy moments.
Once donors made it through the giving experience, the type of campaign they encountered played a decisive role in whether they completed a gift.
Campaigns tied to identity, community, and immediate impact performed strongest
Certain campaign types consistently outperformed others:
- Athletics (men’s lacrosse, baseball, women’s basketball, football)
- Student life funds, including academics and student-run organizations
- General and flexible funds such as tuition or financial aid support
Even if your organization doesn’t run these exact types of campaigns, the takeaway still applies. What mattered most wasn’t the category of fund, it was the underlying structure of the appeal.
These high-performing campaigns shared three traits:
- Clear community identity and belonging: Built-in audiences tied to teams, majors, or organizations
- Easy-to-explain impact: No interpretation required
- High emotional relevance: Strong connections to belonging and pride
Giving Tuesday continues to reveal overlooked opportunities.
Across organizations, several themes emerged:
- Mid-level donors need clearer pathways: Many clicked but stalled before committing
- Personalization doesn’t need to be complex: Short, focused messaging outperformed long appeals
- Donors reward simplicity: Clear purpose, clear impact, clear next steps
- General and flexible funds are gaining momentum as affordability concerns rise
The big takeaway for Fundraising teams: Simplicity wins
Giving Tuesday 2025 reinforced a simple truth: donors don’t need more messages, they need clearer pathways.
When organizations simplify forms, reduce decision points, clarify impact, time outreach intentionally, and remove friction from the giving journey, donor follow-through rises.
Looking ahead to 2026 spring campaigns and beyond
This year’s patterns point to several strategic shifts:
Start strong during high-activity windows.
Plan announcements, progress updates, and challenges before peak giving begins, and rely on automation to support low-engagement hours.
Simplify the giving experience.
Revenue growth lives inside the form journey. Fewer steps, smarter defaults, and mobile testing can prevent drop-off at critical moments, regardless of how or where donors arrive.
Build around identity and clarity.
Campaigns grounded in community and simple impact stories continue to outperform.
Map friction points now.
Understanding where donors hesitate, across channels, devices, and form flow, creates a roadmap for improvement long before the next major campaign.
Giving Tuesday is more than a single day; it’s a window into donor behavior year-round. Organizations that act on these insights won’t just raise more on Giving Tuesday, they’ll strengthen their entire fundraising ecosystem in 2026.
About the data behind these insights
The insights in this analysis are drawn from Giving Tuesday campaigns run by higher education and nonprofit organizations using Advance from Gravyty to power their Giving Days.
Advance is used to manage end-to-end digital fundraising experiences, including campaign pages, donation forms, fund selection, progress tracking, and post-gift confirmation. This allowed us to observe donor behavior across the full giving journey, from initial engagement and referral source to form interaction, device usage, and gift completion.
Rather than looking at a single institution or campaign type, this data reflects patterns across thousands of donors interacting with live Giving Tuesday campaigns in real time. The result is a clear view into how donors actually behave when timing matters, attention is limited, and the path to give needs to be simple.
