The power of peer-to-peer fundraising:
Trends, insights, and opportunities
Traditional fundraising is under pressure from every side. Participation fell 3% in 2025, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, and the long-term decline is stark: just 49.6% of U.S. households gave to charity in 2018, down nearly 17 percentage points from 66.2% in 2000. As trust in institutions continues to erode, the challenge deepens. Yet GivingTuesday’s Growing Giving research points to $52 billion in untapped fundraising potential across the nonprofit sector.
That gap doesn’t reflect a lack of generosity. It reflects a shift in how people decide to give.
As donors become more skeptical of institutional appeals and less responsive to brand-led asks, they’re increasingly motivated by causes introduced through friends, family members, colleagues, and peers they already trust.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising is uniquely positioned to meet this moment.
A peer’s ask becomes a powerful substitute for the brand doing the asking, allowing nonprofits to show up through the voices people already believe.
Inside our analysis
To understand how P2P fundraising performs in practice across different organizations, GivingTuesday partnered with GoFundMe Pro to analyze three years of aggregated, de-identified platform data.
Spanning 2022 to 2025, the analysis explored which models of giving resonate with today’s donors, how P2P effectively engages and converts new supporters, and where nonprofits can experiment within their P2P models to grow sustained support.
In total, the dataset covers billions of dollars from tens of millions of donations across all campaign types.
