Most fundraising reports to the board answer one question: are we on budget? That’s a fair question. It’s also the least useful thing you can tell a board about fundraising, because revenue is the last number to move when something goes wrong.
By the time the dollars drop, the problem behind them has usually been building for a year or two. Fewer people gave. Fewer of last year’s donors came back. One large gift covered the gap and nobody noticed.
If you want your board to make good decisions about fundraising, you have to show them what’s underneath the total. Here’s how to build a fundraising report for your board that fits on one page and tells the real story.
Why the revenue line can look fine while your program shrinks
The sector-wide numbers make the case better than I can. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s full-year 2025 results showed charitable dollars up an estimated 5.0% while the number of donors fell 3.6%. Overall donor retention was 43.3%. In plain terms, more than half of the people who gave in one year didn’t give the next.
So the money grew and the donor base shrank at the same time. Neon One’s summary of the same report notes that major and supersize donors made up 3.4% of donors but gave 78.6% of the dollars, and that the steepest declines were among donors giving $500 or less.
That’s the national picture, and your organization may look different. But the pattern is common enough that a board looking only at total revenue can easily miss it.
Imagine a youth mentoring program that raised $612,000 this year, up from $590,000 last year. The report says revenue is up about 3.7%. The board is pleased.
Now look underneath. Last year 1,240 people gave. This year 1,105 did, a drop of about 11%. Two new donors gave a combined $60,000 this year. Take those two gifts out and revenue is $552,000, down about 6.4% from last year. Of last year’s 1,240 donors, 520 gave again, a retention rate just under 42%.
None of that is a crisis yet. All of it is something the board should know about now, while there’s still time to do something.
The one-page board fundraising report
A good board report does three jobs. It shows what happened, explains why, and tells the board what’s coming. I’d build it in six short sections, in this order.
1. Dollars against goal and against last year at this point. Show year-to-date revenue next to the same date last year, not just next to the annual budget. Fundraising is seasonal, so “we’re at 61% of goal in November” means nothing unless you know where you were last November. If you’ve already built a pace chart for your campaigns, the approach for tracking year-end giving while there’s still time to fix it works for the full year too.
2. Number of donors, split into retained and new. Three numbers: total donors year to date, how many gave last year and gave again, and how many are new or returning after a lapse. This is the line that would have caught the problem in the mentoring program example.
3. Retention rate. Report overall retention, and first-year retention separately if your database can produce it. Use a rolling 12-month view so the number doesn’t swing wildly depending on which month the board meets. Translate the percentage for them: “Of the 400 people who gave for the first time last year, about 130 have given again.”
4. Where the money came from. A simple table by gift size works well: under $250, $250 to $999, $1,000 to $9,999, and $10,000 and up. Show the count of donors and the dollars in each band, compared to last year. Flag any single gift that’s more than, say, 5% of total revenue. Board members aren’t being told the gift was bad. They’re being told not to plan on it repeating.
5. What’s coming in the next 90 days. List the asks that are scheduled, the appeals that are going out, and the grant decisions you’re waiting on, with realistic amounts. This is the forward-looking part, and it’s the part most reports leave out. It also gives the board a reason to ask useful questions instead of reacting to last quarter’s numbers.
6. One thing you need from the board. Not a list of ten. One specific request: three thank-you calls each before the end of the month, introductions to two local business owners, or a decision about whether to fund a donor database upgrade. A report that never asks for anything trains the board to treat fundraising as something staff report on, not something they’re part of.
What to say when the numbers are bad
The temptation, when retention is down or the donor count is shrinking, is to bury it on page four or leave it out. I’d resist that.
A board is more likely to lose trust in your reporting when the bad news shows up all at once, usually the year revenue finally drops. If you’ve been showing them the donor count falling for three quarters, the revenue drop isn’t a surprise. It’s a conversation you’ve already started.
When a number is bad, give it a short explanation and a response. “We had 135 fewer donors this year. Most of the drop is in donors under $100 who came in through last year’s emergency appeal. We expected some of that. We’re testing a second-gift email series for new donors starting in January.” That’s three sentences, and it tells the board you see the problem and have a plan.
Avoid the opposite mistake too. Not every dip needs a long explanation. If a foundation moved its payment from June to July, say so in one line and move on.
Questions your board should be able to answer after reading it
Here’s a simple test for your report. After reading it, could a board member answer these questions?
- Are more people giving to us this year than last year, or fewer?
- Are the donors we had last year coming back?
- How much of this year’s revenue came from a handful of gifts we can’t count on next year?
- What’s expected to come in over the next three months?
- What am I being asked to do?
If the answer to any of those is “I don’t know,” the report needs another line.
You’ll notice none of these questions require the board to understand your CRM or the difference between a soft credit and a hard credit. Keep the report in plain language. If a board member wants the detail, have the backup ready, but don’t lead with it.
Getting started with your next board meeting
You don’t need a dashboard tool to do this. A one-page document or a single spreadsheet tab is enough, and you can usually pull most of these numbers from a standard donor database report.
Before your next board meeting, pull three numbers you may not have reported before: total donors this year to date, total donors at the same point last year, and how many of last year’s donors have given again. Put them at the top of the page, above the revenue line. Then watch what questions the board asks.
Once the board is used to seeing donor counts, the next step is helping them understand what a donor is worth over time, which changes how they think about spending money to keep one. This guide on how to calculate donor lifetime value walks through the math, and it pairs well with setting a fundraising goal your budget didn’t make up, which is usually the next conversation a more informed board wants to have.
