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1-844-PUSHPAY Mobile giving benchmarks in 2026
What 2026 benchmark data says about text giving adoption, digital wallets, and comparing mobile giving platforms on the second gift.
Text giving grew 48% last year and still funds less than 1% of online giving.
M+R’s 2026 Benchmarks study, built on data from 180 nonprofits, put mobile messaging at 0.9% of all online revenue. Under one percent. Mobile revenue did grow 48% that year against 15% growth for online revenue overall, so the channel is moving quickly from a very small base.
Four figures from the M+R study set the range for what SMS does, and they line up with what broader church giving trends show.
Which is why the keyword and the short code are the wrong place to run a platform comparison. The gift that decides your budget is the one a donor makes six weeks later, with nobody asking from a stage.
How many of your regular givers could finish that gift right now, on a phone, without typing in a card number?
Text-to-give vs. text-to-donate
Text-to-give in its original form is carrier billing. Your donor texts a keyword to a five- or six-digit short code, a fixed amount goes on their phone bill, and the carrier remits it to the organization later, minus its cut. The gift is capped at whatever the carrier allows, and the money takes longer to land.
You also get almost no donor record out of it.
Text-to-donate keeps the text and moves the transaction. The keyword comes back with a link to a secure giving page, where your donor sets the amount and can make it recurring in the same flow.
On the Pushpay® platform, that first text is keyword plus amount. A donor at a church using the keyword Western texts “Western 100 Missions” to the church’s number, taps the link in the reply, confirms the details, and they’re finished. A fund name in the same message designates the gift. Some churches run on a shared number where the keyword tells the system which organization the gift belongs to, and others have a 10-digit toll-free number of their own.
After that, the text is just the number. Send “20” and it processes against the payment method already on file.
Text giving runs on credit and debit cards only. ACH isn’t available in the text flow, so a keyword on the bulletin insert moves new volume onto card rails at card rates, which cuts against a finance team that has spent two years shifting people to bank transfers. A short list of smaller carriers doesn’t support it at all.
What the 2026 numbers say about adoption
Four figures from the M+R study set the range for what SMS does.
- Revenue share: mobile messaging drove 0.9% of all online revenue in 2025.
- Against email: nonprofits raised nine cents by text for every dollar raised by email.
- Response rates: 0.17% on fundraising messages, 2.6% on advocacy messages.
- By size: small organizations saw 3.1% of online revenue come through mobile messaging, the highest of any size cohort.
Digital wallets sit in a different place. Nonprofit donation pages in the same study offered PayPal on 79% of pages, Google Pay on 58%, Apple Pay on 57%, and Venmo on 44%. A wallet doesn’t add a channel. It takes the typing out of the one you already have.
Springs Church put a QR code up on the screens and their pastor asked the room to give to an orphanage in Haiti. Karen Woodyard, their deacon ministry director, said everybody lifted a phone and donations started coming in within ten seconds. A specific ask, a two-tap path, a room already listening. Those are different mechanics from a scheduled SMS campaign, and the benchmarks above are measuring the campaign.
M+R’s panel is 180 nonprofits across the sector, not churches, and church giving skews far more into recurring donations. Read the SMS figures as a baseline, not a forecast for your room.
The stored-card question
Of the people who gave last month, how many had a payment method already saved? If most of your card volume arrives as freshly keyed sixteen-digit numbers, the constraint is your checkout rather than your reach.
A saved-card base also decays on its own. Roughly one in four card donors has to update payment information every year. Before Everygift® features existed, over 75% of failed recurring payments at churches on the Pushpay platform stayed failed for at least three months. That number now sits under 1%.
But we’re not switching platforms mid-year
Fair, and the version of that concern that holds up is specific. On many platforms a migration asks recurring donors to re-enroll: new password, card entered again, a monthly base that sags for months before it climbs back.
Churches that move to the Pushpay platform grow recurring donors by 24% on average, because nobody gets sent back to a setup screen.
Staff time is the cost that stays either way. Someone owns the data cleanup, the fund mapping, and the questions from donors who can’t tell whether their gift went through. No migration is invisible. The question is which month absorbs it, and it shouldn’t be the one with Christmas Eve in it.
At a glance
| Platform | How text giving works | Fits if |
|---|---|---|
| Tatango | Messaging platform; sends donors to a giving page you already run | Your checkout works and your list doesn’t |
| Donorbox | Hosted donation forms with a text keyword option | You need a form live this month |
| Givebutter | Free to start, cost shifted to optional donor tips | Events and campaigns drive most of your giving |
| GoFundMe Pro (formerly Classy) | Campaign and event pages for larger nonprofits | Your fundraising year is a calendar of campaigns |
| Pushpay Giving | Keyword and amount to a 10-digit toll-free number, gift completes on a branded page | Weekly recurring giving is your budget |
If your gap is the list (Tatango and SMS-first tools)
Tatango is a messaging platform rather than a giving platform. It sends broadcast and peer-to-peer text at volume and points people toward a giving page you already run. It fits if your checkout works and your list is the problem, which is the case when your first-time-guest records have no mobile number attached to them.
If your gap is the form (Donorbox, Givebutter, GoFundMe Pro)
Donorbox, Givebutter, and GoFundMe Pro are built around campaigns, ticketed events, and one-time appeals. Donorbox sells hosted donation forms and pages with a text keyword option layered on. Givebutter starts free and shifts its cost to optional donor tips, with wallets and event tooling included. GoFundMe Pro, sold as Classy until recently, is organized around campaign and event pages for larger nonprofits.
Their donor experience centers on a campaign page rather than a weekly gift. If your fundraising year is one fall building campaign and little else, that shape fits.
If your gap is the second gift (Pushpay)
Pushpay Giving is built around the weekly pattern: the same households giving most Sundays, most of them on a phone. A phone number and a texted code replace the password, and QuickGive completes a gift in under six seconds in the church app or on a branded giving page. A donor who can’t remember which email address they used never reaches a reset screen.
Because the platform is the direct payment provider rather than a software layer sitting on someone else’s gateway, transactions post at a 95.1% success rate against a 92.5% industry standard. Fewer handoffs, fewer failure points. Card deposits fund in two business days and ACH in four.
Bear Creek Church put numbers to that. Their senior executive pastor, Tim Hill, credits Everygift features with $18,000 to $20,000 a month in stronger giving and $1.5 million in increased giving through secured growth.
That money was already committed by donors. It wasn’t arriving.
Questions churches ask before printing a keyword
Is text-to-donate the same as text-to-give?
No. Text-to-give charges a fixed amount to the donor’s phone bill through a carrier short code. Text-to-donate replies with a link to a secure giving page where the donor sets the amount and can turn it into a recurring gift. For churches the second model wins on gift size, on the donor record you keep, and on your ability to follow up next week.
Which churches get the most out of SMS giving?
Churches with a full room and a habit of asking for a response in the moment. If your giving runs on pledge cards and one annual appeal, a keyword won’t change much.
What should we compare before choosing a platform?
Compare the second gift, not the first. How does a returning donor complete gift two, what happens the month their card expires, and what does a migration do to your recurring base? Fees matter less than a recurring donor who lapses in March and doesn’t come back.
How much do digital wallets change gift completion?
Published lifts run from roughly 2% for Apple Pay and 2.6% for Google Pay in Fundraise Up’s data to 11% to 14% in Classy’s. The mechanism is the same in every case: the wallet fills in billing details and confirms with a fingerprint or a face, so the payment step stops being a typing step. Turning wallets on is cheap. Choosing a platform on wallet support alone isn’t the trade the numbers support.
Before December decides for you
December accounts for 37% of a nonprofit’s annual online revenue, per that same M+R study. Those gifts land on whatever setup is already in place by Thanksgiving, which makes September and October the window where any of this is still changeable.
A giving analysis from the Pushpay team will show you how many recurring gifts failed last year and how many came back. Ask before October.
