Monthly giving makes a non-profit more sustainable because it turns donations from something you chase into something you can plan with. The best data we have is international, and it points the same way: monthly donors keep giving far longer than one-off donors, and the largest organisations rely on them most. For a small South African NPO, even a modest base of monthly gifts means less time spent starting from zero every month.
What does the data say about monthly donors?
I looked hard for South African figures on monthly giving and couldn’t find any published research. So the numbers below come from M+R Benchmarks, a US-based annual study of online fundraising, and they describe American organisations. Read them as a pattern, not a promise.
- Monthly giving is a large share of income. In 2025, “Monthly giving accounted for 27% of all online revenue”. For the smallest organisations in the study it was 22%. For the largest it was 37%.
- One-off donors mostly don’t come back. Of people who gave online for the first time in 2024, 24% gave again in 2025. Across all one-off donors, retention was 48%.
- Monthly donors mostly stay. Some stop early: “10% of sustainers stop giving within two months”. But “after a full year, 71% of sustainers are still active”, and M+R reports that a little more than half of monthly gifts are still active after two full years.
The wider US picture is similar. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found overall donor retention of 43.3% in 2025. More than half of donors, in other words, did not give again the following year.
Why do larger organisations focus on monthly giving?
That 22% against 37% says something. The organisations with the most resources put more of their effort into monthly giving, and I think there are three plain reasons.
Predictability
A monthly gift arrives without a new appeal. You can put it in a budget with some confidence, which is very hard to do with a winter campaign or a year-end push.
Value over time
A once-off gift of R500 is R500. A monthly gift of R200 is R2 400 in its first year, and if the donor stays, it keeps coming. That longer view is what fundraisers call a donor’s lifetime value. It is why a monthly donor is worth more than their first payment suggests.
Retention does the work
Every donor who leaves has to be replaced before you can grow. When most one-off donors don’t return, much of each year’s fundraising goes into standing still. Monthly giving slows that leak.
What does this mean for a small South African NPO?
Trialogue’s research gives us the local context, and it is sobering.
- “The percentage of NPOs without any financial reserves increased to 51% in 2024 from 36% in 2023”. Only 15% had a year or more of operating costs in reserve.
- In 2025, “almost a third (30%) experienced decreased income, up from 11% in 2021”.
- South African individuals gave 12% of NPO income on average in 2024, and 56% of NPOs received funds from individuals.
So individual giving is already there for most organisations, but it is a small slice, and many have no cushion when a grant ends or arrives late. A steady monthly base doesn’t replace corporate or trust funding. It gives you a floor to stand on while you look for it.
How much time goes into chasing funding every month?
This is the part I care about most. Trialogue found that in 2024, half of the NPOs it surveyed “had no staff to manage the function” of fundraising, up from 39% the year before. In practice that usually means the director, the treasurer or a volunteer raises the money in whatever hours are left over.
When all of your income has to be found again each month, those hours never end. Monthly giving doesn’t remove fundraising. It changes its shape. Some of next month’s income is already arranged, so the time you do spend can go on relationships, funders and the work itself, rather than on filling the same gap again.
Does monthly giving lower the cost of raising each rand?
I haven’t found a South African study that measures this, so here is the reasoning rather than a figure.
Much of the cost of fundraising sits in the ask: the appeal, the event, the follow-up, the capture and the thank-you. With a once-off gift, you pay those costs for one payment. With a monthly gift, you ask once and receive many payments. If each later payment is recorded and receipted without someone retyping it, the administration per rand falls as the months go by.
That matters for a simple reason. Every rand not spent on administration is a rand that can reach the people it was given for. We explore the full cost picture in a separate guide, and the funding side in our post on restricted and unrestricted funds.
What are the risks of monthly card giving?
Monthly giving has a weak spot, and it helps to know it upfront. A card subscription stops when the card does. The Charities Aid Foundation in the UK notes that cards “typically have an average 3-4 year life span” and puts the failure rate for recurring card payments at “approximately 13%”, against “typically around 1%” for Direct Debits. That is UK data, but the lesson carries: some monthly gifts will lapse through no choice of the donor.
So plan to notice when a payment stops, and to ask kindly. Sometimes all that’s needed is a new card.
How do you start a monthly giving programme?
- Ask the people who already give. Loyal once-off donors are your likeliest monthly donors.
- Offer monthly at the right moment. The thank-you after a first gift is a natural place to invite a second, smaller, regular one.
- Say what a monthly gift pays for. R150 a month is easier to picture as something concrete.
- Keep the 18A simple. SARS says an organisation “can either issue monthly S18A receipts or a receipt with the total annual amount for the year of assessment”. Decide which you’ll do and tell donors.
- Report back. Monthly donors stay when they can see what their giving builds.
Why this matters beyond the budget is something we wrote about in recurring giving and why automation is stewardship.
How Kaycie helps
Kaycie is built to carry the routine parts of monthly giving, so the people responsible for the money can spend their time on donors, not data capture.
- Monthly card gifts through PayFast. Donors choose monthly on your donation form and pay by card subscription. Kaycie does not run bank debit orders.
- An invitation to give monthly. The thank-you page after a donation offers a “Give monthly” option.
- A donor portal. Donors can follow their own donations and programmes, and keep their details up to date.
- 18A certificates per donation. Each monthly payment is its own donation, with its own numbered 18A certificate on request. Kaycie does not produce a single annual summary certificate.
It doesn’t replace the thank-you call or the treasurer’s judgement. It keeps the record straight so those can happen. You can see what’s included on our features page.
Frequently asked questions
Why is monthly giving better than once-off donations?
Monthly gifts are more predictable and donors tend to stay longer. In M+R’s 2026 US benchmarks, 71% of monthly donors were still giving after a year, while only 24% of first-time one-off donors gave again. Once-off gifts still matter; monthly giving adds a steadier base.
What share of income comes from monthly giving?
There is no published South African figure that we could find. In M+R’s US study, monthly giving was 27% of online revenue in 2025, from 22% for the smallest organisations to 37% for the largest.
Do monthly donors need an 18A certificate every month?
SARS allows either a receipt for each monthly donation or one receipt for the tax year. An annual receipt must include a breakdown of each donation and the date it was received. Kaycie issues one certificate per donation, so a monthly donor receives one per payment, on request.
What happens when a monthly donor’s card expires?
The payment can’t be collected from the old card, so the gift may stop until the donor updates it or sets it up again. UK data from the Charities Aid Foundation puts recurring card payment failures at about 13%, so it helps to watch for stopped payments and follow up kindly.
Does Kaycie support debit orders?
No. Monthly giving in Kaycie runs as PayFast card subscriptions. Kaycie does not run bank debit orders.
Sources
- M+R, M+R Benchmarks 2026: Fundraising (2026, 2025 data).
- Association of Fundraising Professionals, Fundraising Effectiveness Project reports strongest revenue growth in five years (2026, 2025 data).
- Trialogue Knowledge Hub, Overview of NPO income in South Africa (Business in Society Handbook 2024, published 11 December 2024).
- Trialogue, R13bn CSI spend signals stability in a tough economy in 2025 (2025 data).
- Charities Aid Foundation, Regular giving: Direct Debit vs recurring card payments (UK).
- SARS, IT3(d) Third Party Data FAQs (last updated 12 March 2026).