Every November, someone on a nonprofit team asks the same question: should we be texting donors this year? Sometimes it follows a vendor webinar. Sometimes a board member mentions that their alma mater texted them on GivingTuesday.
It’s a fair question. Text messages get read. But texting at year-end is mostly a question about who you already have permission to text, not about whether texting works. If you don’t have an opted-in list today, November is the wrong time to try to build a text fundraising program. If you do have one, a few well-timed messages can quietly add gifts to your December results.
Here’s how I’d think through the decision, using the most recent benchmark data.
What the benchmarks say about nonprofit text messaging
The best public data on nonprofit texting comes from the M+R Benchmarks study. The 2026 edition, which covers 2025 results, has a few numbers worth understanding before you commit staff time.
Across all participating nonprofits, mobile messaging produced 0.9% of online revenue. For every dollar raised through email, nonprofits raised about 9 cents through mobile messaging.
That sounds small, and for many organizations it is. But two other findings are more interesting:
- Small nonprofits did better than average. For small organizations in the study, mobile produced 3.1% of online revenue and about 20 cents for every email dollar.
- The channel is growing fast. Mobile revenue grew 48% in 2025, compared with 15% growth in overall online revenue. Total messages sent rose 40%.
There’s a catch, though. Mobile list growth slowed to 4% in 2025, after 13% and 15% in the two prior years. And the average participant had only 176 mobile subscribers for every 1,000 email subscribers.
So what does that mean for you? Organizations are sending more texts to lists that aren’t growing much. That’s usually a sign that the easy gains are being squeezed out of existing subscribers. It also means your text list, if you have one, is probably much smaller than your email list.
Do the math on your own list before you decide
Benchmarks only help when you translate them into your own numbers. Let’s walk through a hypothetical.
Imagine a literacy program with 3,000 email subscribers. If it matched the benchmark ratio, it would have roughly 528 mobile subscribers. Plenty of small organizations have far fewer than that, or none at all, but let’s be generous and round up to 600.
M+R reports a fundraising response rate of 0.17% for text messages. At that rate, a single fundraising text to 600 people would produce about one gift. Four texts across December would produce about four.
Now look at it from the revenue side. If that literacy program raises $25,000 by email at year-end, and texting performed like the small-nonprofit benchmark (20 cents per email dollar), texting might add something like $5,000 over the full year. At the overall benchmark of 9 cents, it would be closer to $2,250.
Those two ways of looking at it don’t line up neatly, and that’s the point. Benchmarks are medians across very different organizations, and they won’t predict your results. What they tell you is the shape of the opportunity: texting is a supporting channel. It can be a useful one, but it won’t rescue a weak year-end campaign.
Permission is the whole game
The reason you can’t start texting your donor database in mid-November is consent.
In the United States, organizations sending texts from standard 10-digit phone numbers through a platform must register those messages under a system called A2P 10DLC. Twilio’s nonprofit guide states plainly that all organizations using 10-digit long code numbers in the U.S. must register, and that registration is required to message consumers on AT&T and T-Mobile. Part of what that registration checks is whether recipients agreed to receive the kind of messages you’re sending.
Having a phone number in your CRM because someone wrote it on a reply card is not the same thing as permission to text them fundraising appeals. There are also federal rules (the Telephone Consumer Protection Act) that apply to automated texting. I’m not a lawyer, and the details depend on how you send and what you send. Before you launch, ask your texting platform what consent it requires and run your opt-in language past someone who knows the law.
Registration also takes time. If you’re starting from scratch, don’t plan your GivingTuesday text around a platform you haven’t been approved on yet.
If you already have opted-in donors: use texts as reminders, not appeals
If you’ve built a text list (through event sign-ups, a text-to-join keyword, or an opt-in box on your donation form), here’s where I’d use it during year-end.
GivingTuesday. One text in the afternoon, pointing to the same campaign donors have already seen by email. Not three. If you’re still deciding whether GivingTuesday is worth it for your organization at all, start with whether your small nonprofit should even do GivingTuesday.
A mid-December update. Not an ask. Tell subscribers what’s happening with the campaign or share one specific result. This makes the later ask feel less like a cold interruption.
December 30 or 31. This is where texting earns its place. Donors who meant to give and forgot are the people you’re trying to reach, and a short reminder with a direct link to a mobile-friendly donation page fits that moment well. Coordinate it with your email schedule so a donor doesn’t get an email and a text ten minutes apart. If you’re mapping those final days, planning your last 72 hours of December emails will help you place the text in the sequence.
A thank-you in early January. Text a short thank-you with a sentence about what December’s gifts made possible. No ask.
That’s four messages, roughly in line with the benchmark median of 7.3 fundraising messages a year. You don’t need to send more to learn whether the channel works for you.
A few rules for the messages themselves:
- Identify your organization in the first few words. People don’t save your number.
- Keep it to one idea and one link.
- Make sure the link goes to a donation page that works well on a phone. If the form takes eight fields and a CAPTCHA, the text did its job and the page lost the gift.
- Include opt-out instructions according to your platform’s requirements.
Here’s sample language for a December 31 reminder:
Riverside Literacy: Today is the last day to make a 2026 gift. Your gift helps a child get reading help in January. Give here: [link] Reply STOP to opt out.
Plain, short, and honest about the deadline.
If you don’t have a list: use December to start one
For most small shops, the better year-end texting move is to start collecting permission now so you have something to use next year.
Add an optional opt-in to your online donation form: a checkbox with clear language about what you’ll send and how often. Add a line to your January thank-you email inviting donors to get a few texts a year. Collect opt-ins at your spring event.
Then measure whether texting is worth the effort. Track gifts from text links separately in your year-end reporting, the same way you’d track your year-end campaign while there’s still time to fix it. Compare revenue to what you paid the platform. Next November, you’ll be deciding with your own numbers instead of a vendor’s.
Where I’d start this week
Open your CRM and answer one question: how many donors have explicitly agreed to receive text messages from you?
If the answer is a few hundred or more, plan a GivingTuesday text and a December 31 reminder, and confirm your platform registration is complete. If the answer is zero or close to it, skip texting this December. Put your energy into the email and mail pieces that will raise most of your year-end money, and add an opt-in box to your donation form so next year’s answer is different.
If you want help pulling the whole year-end campaign together (mail, email, and every channel around them), my year-end fundraising course walks through planning and running a year-end fundraising campaign. Texting is one small piece of that plan. The rest of the plan is where most of your December gifts will come from.
