Matching donations and peer-to-peer fundraising were among the most effective online fundraising strategies in 2020, a report from Classy finds.

Based on data from more than forty-eight hundred nonprofits using Classy's online giving platform, the report, The State of Modern Philanthropy 2021: Future-Proofing Your Fundraising (39 pages, PDF), found that campaigns with donation matches raised three to five times more than those without, depending on the quarter in which they took place. Meanwhile, the median amount raised by events that enabled attendees to raise money through peer-to-peer fundraising pages was four and half times the median amount raised by ticketed events, while four out of five donors who gave in response to a peer-to-peer fundraiser were new to the organization. According to the report, enabling digital wallets resulted in an increase of between 11 percent and 14 percent in mobile conversion rates.

The report also found that health-related nonprofits had the highest share of recurring donors among their online contributors, at 25 percent, followed by religious organizations (14 percent), environmental and animal welfare groups (12 percent), and education nonprofits (10 percent). And organizations that raise more than $50 million annually online saw the share of total revenue from recurring gifts jump from 26 percent in 2019 to 37 percent in 2020, with recurring donors accounting for 38 percent of their donor base.