A 990 filing recently surfaced on social media that stopped a lot of people mid-scroll. A prominent nonprofit, working a humanitarian cause that dominated news cycles in 2024, paid a well-known influencer $2 million. Through that partnership, they raised approximately $7 million.

That’s a remarkable fundraising outcome by almost any standard. But the math underneath it tells a different story.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

Twenty-nine cents of every dollar raised went to a single individual for amplification. Not to programs. Not to the people the nonprofit exists to serve. To attention.

This isn’t an indictment of the nonprofit or the influencer — the cause was urgent and the partnership delivered results. But it reveals something structural: the cost of being found often rivals the cost of doing the work.

This pattern isn’t unique to influencer deals. Direct mail acquisition costs nonprofits $1.00 to $1.25 for every dollar raised¹. The M+R Benchmarks 2025 Study reports nonprofits reinvest $0.12 in digital ads for every dollar of online revenue², with return on ad spend outside of search hovering below $1.00³.

The sector has normalized spending enormous sums just to get noticed.

140,000 moments of connection — and the true cost

At a $50 average donation, $7 million represents roughly 140,000 individual gifts. But the $2 million influencer fee wasn’t the only cost. Whatever fundraising platform processed those donations almost certainly charged its own fees — typically 3-5% on top of payment processing. Even conservatively, that’s another $350,000+ on $7 million. The true all-in cost likely exceeded $2.35 million — over a third of every dollar raised.

Now consider a different path. On Gudsy, with an annual contract, the platform fee is $0.75 per transaction. Combined with PayPal’s nonprofit rate of 1.99% + $0.49⁴, each $50 donation costs about $2.24 in total — roughly 4.5%.

Across 140,000 donations: approximately $313,000.

That’s $313,000 versus $2.35 million. The $2 million difference is the entire annual budget of many small nonprofits.

What if the news cycle worked for nonprofits?

When a humanitarian crisis dominates headlines, millions of people search for ways to help. That’s exactly what happened with this cause in 2024. But those searches mostly led to social media posts, crowdfunding pages, and — if they were lucky — a celebrity’s fundraising link. The nonprofit’s own story, its own updates from the ground, its own financial transparency — buried.

Imagine instead that this nonprofit’s updates — field reports, impact data, IRS-sourced financials — were indexed and discoverable through semantic search. When someone searched “humanitarian relief” or “organizations working on [this cause],” the nonprofit’s own words surfaced. Not an ad. Not an endorsement. The work itself, findable in the moment people were looking.

Those updates could then be shared across messaging apps, social platforms, and community groups with a single tap — each share extending the organization’s reach organically, at zero marginal cost.

The 140,000 people who donated didn’t need a celebrity to tell them the cause mattered. They already cared. What they needed was a way to find the organization, verify its work, and act — without a $2 million intermediary.

The retention problem compounds the cost

Here’s where the math gets humbling. According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s Q4 2024 report, overall donor retention dropped to 42.9%⁵. For new donors, only 19.4% gave again the following year⁶ — 4 out of 5 first-time donors never return.

When your cost of acquisition is $14.29 per donor ($2 million divided by 140,000), and 80% of them vanish within a year, the effective cost of acquiring a retained donor climbs to over $70 — for a single repeat $50 gift.

A platform where supporters follow an organization’s ongoing work — as naturally as they follow a friend — changes the retention equation structurally. Not through more email appeals (nonprofits already send 59 per year per subscriber⁷), but through sustained, low-friction visibility.

Our hypothesis, not our proof

We built Gudsy around the idea that nonprofits shouldn’t have to rent attention. That public updates — searchable across causes and geographies, surfacing during the news cycles that matter most, shareable with a tap — could replace the need for expensive intermediaries.

We don’t yet have the data to prove that at scale. We’re honest about that.

But we can point to the math. A platform where 140,000 donors find and follow a nonprofit through discoverable content — paying a $0.75 platform fee plus standard processing on each gift — would cost that nonprofit roughly $313,000 instead of $2.35 million. That’s an 87% reduction in costs while keeping the nonprofit’s story in its own hands, discoverable long after any single news cycle fades.

An invitation

If you work at a nonprofit that’s been quoted six or seven figures for a campaign to “build awareness,” we’d love to explore whether a different design might improve the odds.

If you’re a supporter who’s ever wondered how much of your donation reaches the cause, the 990 filings are public record. The answers are sometimes uncomfortable — and always worth knowing.

Let’s find out together whether awareness has to be this expensive.

References

Association of Fundraising Professionals, “Ask An Expert: New Donor Acquisition Rate,” https://bloomerang.com/blog/ask-an-expert-whats-a-good-new-donor-acquisition-rate/
M+R Benchmarks 2024 Study, https://2024.mrbenchmarks.com/
M+R Benchmarks 2023 Study, https://2023.mrbenchmarks.com/
PayPal Nonprofit Charity Rate, 1.99% + $0.49 per transaction for verified 501(c)(3) organizations, https://www.paypal.com/us/cshelp/article/how-do-i-apply-for-the-charity-rate-help221
Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2024 Quarterly Benchmark Report, https://afpglobal.org/FundraisingEffectivenessProject
Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2024 data: new donor retention rate of 19.4%, https://neonone.com/resources/blog/donor-retention/
M+R Benchmarks 2023 Study: nonprofits sent an average of 59 emails per subscriber in 2022, https://2023.mrbenchmarks.com/