Charities: invest in these 5 digital trends for a strong start to the year

10 January 2025  |  Stuart Palmer

With over half of charities prioritising digital development in 2025, the competition for online donors, volunteers and supporters is heating up. It is more important than ever for charity website developers and digital marketing teams to understand the latest online giving trends and to put the right tools and strategies in place to benefit from them.

Here are 5 ways you can give yourself a head start this year:

1. Prioritise your charity website

Statistics have shown that donors actually spend 22% more when giving through a charity’s own website rather than via a third party platform. The reasons for this could include that donors are less likely to recall a charity’s brand on a third party site, or that the content you’re including on your website, such as donation amounts or impact related statistics, are encouraging people to give more.

In 2025, when designing your online donation process, make it easy for donors to give regularly. While one time online gifts have fallen by 5%, monthly giving has increased by 6%. This trend is expected to continue, thanks to the Millennial and Gen Z cohorts. However, these donors demand a seamless experience, so you must make it as easy as possible for them to give regularly.

While creating your donation page, remember to stick to the fundamentals of audience engagement: powerful storytelling, engaging visuals and clear calls-to-action.

2. Regain donor trust through CRM investment

Although there are signs that charities are recovering from the collapse in public trust they experienced in the early 2020s, there is still work to be done to ensure donor loyalty. 2025’s supporters expect to feel valued, so integrating your website with a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) system is vital.

We covered the importance of personalisation in our recent article on creating powerful thank you pages, and well-designed CRM software will ensure that you can apply that level of personal connection across all your donor touch points.

However, to truly create a donor-centric experience, you need to evolve towards hyper-personalisation by embedding automation across your digital ecosystem and carefully integrating the best artificial intelligence (AI) technology – see below.

3. Embed automation into your digital ecosystem

In 2023, 37% of charities admitted that a lack of staff left them unable to operate at maximum capacity. Even if you do have the numbers to run your charity’s day-to-day operations, you won’t be in a position to maximise effective donor engagement without embracing automation.

Fortunately, many of the most popular email marketing services such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Brevo offer powerful features such as automatic email sequences that are triggered by customer actions, or at specific times, as well as automated audience segmentation and email personalisation. Spending a few hours understanding and setting these features up can significantly improve your outreach campaigns and help your supporters to feel valued and appreciated.

Social media scheduling is another task that lends itself to automation, although it is important to choose your software carefully. Some tools don’t work well with all social media platforms, and you may find that free options (e.g., Meta Business Suite) are sufficient if you only use specific social media platforms.

To optimise your workflow, ask your website developer or digital marketing partner how your various automated systems can be integrated so that your staff can manage everything from one central place.

4. Integrate AI as a time-saving partner

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest tech trend, but if you’re looking to introduce it to support your work in 2025, it is vital that you research the strengths and limitations of each AI tool you intend to use before rolling it out. Treat AI as a partner rather than an external resource, and as with a human colleague, make sure that your AI tools can and will work within your brand guidelines.

For example, AI powered software such as DeepAI or Dall-E 2 can create impressive images from text prompts, but it may be better to use the AI-assisted branding tools of Canva to treat your authentic photographs rather than fall into the trap of sourcing free and easy imagery with no back story.

It is also unwise to offload all of your content writing responsibilities onto ChatGPT, Gemini or similar AI tools. Without a guiding hand, AI software can sometimes go off track, even introducing inaccuracies (aka hallucinations) into your content. This can damage your brand reputation, undoing any time-saving benefits.

Nevertheless, there are hundreds of AI tools out there that, when combined with your input, can support your mission through content creation (words, images, audio, video), in-depth data analysis, project management and idea generation.

In terms of personalisation, some AI tools can be used for predictive modelling and ‘lifecycle mapping’, enabling you to identify which supporters are likely to donate, when and at what level.

5. Test all links in your donation chain

One trend that sets successful charities apart is their commitment to testing their campaigns and making changes based on analysing the data received.

If you’re introducing more digital tactics this year, remember to A/B test every element of your donor journey. Doing so can quickly help you identify areas of improvement. For example, it is common for charities to set up a ‘daisy chain’ model of donation whereby a one-off donation is followed by further requests: first share the campaign, then commit to regular donations, then subscribe, etc.

A/B testing each stage of this process can quickly lead to optimising the entire donor journey.

If you’re currently getting your 2025 marketing strategy in place, combining these 5 elements above into your overarching digital projects will ensure your charity is aligned with the most important online fundraising trends.

We would love to hear your success stories, so please let us know how your digital transformation has led to real world benefits.