Your Rescission-Motivated Donors Are Better Than You Think 

Frank Auer, VP of Fundraising Marketing Strategy 

This space usually digs into a single focus. This month it’s about a group of people. I presented a longer version of this at the PBS Annual Meeting, and with fiscal year closing for many of you now, it’s worth a wider look as you plan next year. 

Bigger and more valuable at once 

Rescission donors drove 2025 TV and Joint revenue up more than 40%, and it got there with a broad-based approach: donor count up 15%, gifts of $1,000+ up more than 110%, revenue per donor up from $183 to $211. Bigger and more valuable at the same time, which is almost unheard of. 

Why it should impact our plan 

For a decade, we’ve believed surge donors are reactionary — they give once and churn. These donors didn’t follow that script. First-year additional gift rates doubled (3.2% to 6.6%), sustainer add-on gifts doubled too, and across 52 MSB stations and 312,000 new donors, the people we expected to disappear are the ones most likely to stay. They’re younger, more digital and more likely to start as sustainers. These weren’t rage gifts. They were a choice and a statement on how those donors saw themselves.  

What we’re doing about it 

CDP is not just reporting this. We’re acting on it: building customized renewal treatments for the 2025 cohort instead of dropping them into standard series, tracking how they perform in our regular data reviews, and flagging early lapse signals (including an AAP-powered test). The goal is to steward these donors deliberately, not let a once-in-a-decade cohort age out of the file on autopilot. 

Why timing matters 

This is the highest-leverage retention window we’ve had in years, and it’s finite. By winter, most stations will show year-over-year declines just from comparing against the huge 2025 peak. For now, however, the window is still open, which we can see in follow-up emails to existing federal funding crisis donors raising $66,000, with an average gift of $110 and with 26% coming in as new sustainers. Those are great results from new donors who have already donated during the year. These results demonstrate continued untapped fundraising potential from these folks that we can explore over the next year. 

The bottom line 

312,000 new MSB station donors chose public media in 2025, in a year when trust in nearly all other institutions was falling. These donors are worth more than the surge of donors we’ve planned around before, and we’re already at work preserving them. While we all work to retain their revenue, ultimately everyone’s next job is to be worthy of the trust and belief those donors put in your organization.