The Donor Base is Narrowing: Your Mid-Value Donors are Hiding in Plain Sight

If you only read one paragraph from The Giving Report 2026, read this one: in 2025, less than 0.5% of donors on CanadaHelps – roughly 3,894 people – drove over 16% of all the money raised on the platform. Donations under $100 declined 17%. The $1,000-to-$9,999 segment grew by 40%. The $10,000+ segment doubled. 

Duke Chang, CanadaHelps’ President and CEO, put it plainly: “While the growth in online donations is a milestone, it masks a concerning trend: our charitable ecosystem is becoming increasingly top-heavy.”

He is right. And every Canadian charity needs to understand what this means for their own database. 

The story is not just that giving is concentrating among the wealthy. It is that there is a quiet boom happening in the middle – and most charities cannot see it because their data is not set up to surface it.

Donors who used to give $250 are giving $1,800. Donors who gave $1,200 last year are giving $5,000 this year. These people are already on your list. They have already said yes. They are not waiting to be acquired. They are waiting to be noticed. 

This article is about how to notice them. 

Part 1: What The Giving Report 2026 Actually Says

The Giving Report 2026 contains a handful of findings that should reshape how a Canadian charity thinks about its database for the next 12 to 18 months. 

Finding 1 – Online giving grew 10% to $529 million, but the broad base is shrinking. 

The total number of dollars went up. The number of small donors went down. This is the textbook definition of a top-heavy revenue base — the kind of trend that looks fine on a single year’s revenue report but creates fragility over time. Lose one major donor and the gap is enormous. 

Finding 2 – The $1K to $10K segment grew 40%. The $10K+ segment doubled. 

This is the most actionable finding in the report. Mid-value donors are the most-overlooked segment in Canadian fundraising. Too “big” for the general appeal stream, too “small” for the major gifts officer. They live in the gap. And the gap just got 40% larger.

Finding 3 – Securities donations drive 16% of all giving on CanadaHelps. 

Securities donors are up 200% since 2020. Value is up 361%. The common interpretation is “high-net-worth people are giving more.” That is true, but underneath it is something more useful: middle-class Canadians who own appreciated stocks, ETFs, or RRSP-adjacent holdings are increasingly willing to donate securities — because someone told them it was tax-efficient. The barrier is awareness, not affluence. 

Finding 4 – Atlantic Canada is leading online growth. Toronto and Montreal are lagging. 

Nova Scotia’s online giving has run 58 percentage points faster than the national average since 2019. Newfoundland and PEI are not far behind. Local and regional organizations are the largest cause area on CanadaHelps, and giving to local causes hit $121.8 million in 2025, up 11% year-over-year. Local is winning. National is plateauing. 

Finding 5 – More than two-thirds of charities report rising demand for services. 

Only 88% met their mission goals. The gap between what charities are being asked to do and what they have capacity to do is widening. There is no money to hire a major gifts officer to chase mid-value donors. The work has to come from better use of the data charities already have. 

Part 2: Why Mid-Value Donors Hide

If the mid-value segment grew 40%, why does it not feel like it inside most charities? Three reasons. None of them are unfixable. 

Reason 1: Cumulative giving is invisible. 

A donor who gave $250 in March, $400 in June, and $1,200 at year-end gave $1,850 in total. In most databases, that donor shows up as three separate gifts — not as a $1,850 donor. The acknowledgement letter for the third gift might say “thank you for your gift of $1,200.” Nobody is looking at the year-to-date total. The donor is treated as a $1,200 donor, or a $250 donor, depending on which gift the executive director happens to remember. 

Reason 2: Duplicate records split donors into pieces. 

The same person appears as “Mary Tremblay” with one email, “M. Tremblay” with another, and “Mary T.” with no email at all. Each record holds part of the giving history. No single record shows the full picture. The donor is mid-value in reality and small-value on every screen. 

Reason 3: Segmentation is built around recency, not value. 

Most charities segment by “lapsed,” “current,” or “new.” Almost none segment by lifetime giving value or year-over-year upgrade. So even when the data is clean, the segments do not pull mid-value donors into view. 

The result: charities raise more money from the same people without ever knowing it. And those same people churn out, because they were never thanked at the level they actually gave.

Part 3: A 5-Step Plan to Find and Keep Your Mid-Value Donors

This is the operational work. None of it requires new fundraising. It requires looking at the data you already have, with a sharper lens. 

Step 1 – Deduplicate, then deduplicate again. 

Pull your donor list and sort by last name. Look for any donor who appears more than once with different email addresses or addresses. Run a merge on the obvious duplicates first (same name, same postal code, same phone). Then look at the harder cases. Every duplicate is a donor whose true giving is hidden. 

Target: every donor in your database has exactly one record. Their giving history is one timeline. 

Step 2 – Calculate annual giving for the last 24 months. 

For every donor record, calculate total gifts in 2024 and total gifts in 2025. This is a two-column calculation. It does not require fancy reporting — a list, a date range, and a sum. 

What you are looking for:

• Donors whose 2025 total is more than $1,000
• Donors whose 2025 total is more than 50% higher than their 2024 total
• Donors who crossed from one giving band into another (e.g., $250-$999 into $1,000-$9,999) These are your mid-value donors. Many of them you did not know existed.

Step 3 – Tag them. Put them in a list. Treat them differently. 

Create three segments: 

Segment	Definition	What you do with it
Mid-value, upgraded in 2025	Gave $1,000-$9,999 in 2025; gave less in 2024	Personal acknowledgement from ED. Add to mid-value stewardship sequence.
Mid-value, sustained	Gave $1,000-$9,999 in both 2024 and 2025	Quarterly impact update. Personal phone call once per year.
Mid-value, slipping	Gave $1,000-$9,999 in 2024; less than $1,000 in 2025	Recovery sequence within 30 days. This is the urgent list.

The “slipping” segment is the one most charities miss entirely. A donor who gave $2,000 last year and $400 this year did not become a small donor. They are signalling something. Find out what. 

Step 4 – Build a stewardship sequence that respects the band. 

A mid-value donor should not receive the same year-end appeal as a $50 donor. The ask amount, the impact story, and the channel all have to shift. 

A practical mid-value stewardship sequence for a small Canadian charity:

Month	Touchpoint	Channel	Effort
Within 7 days of qualifying gift	Personal thank-you from ED	Phone or handwritten note	15 min per donor
Month 1	Impact update tied to a specific program	Email or letter	Templated, personalized salutation
Month 4	Mid-year story update	Email or letter	Templated, personalized salutation
Month 7	Invitation to small donor event, site visit, or program tour	Personal email or phone	30 min per donor
Month 10	Renewal ask at upgraded amount	Personal letter from ED, signed	45 min per donor
Month 12	Annual report and year-end appeal	Standard channels	Same as broader list

Six touchpoints per year. Roughly 2 to 3 hours of staff time per donor per year, total. For a donor giving $2,000+, the math is easy. 

Step 5 – Make the band visible on the donor profile, every time you open it. 

The single biggest operational shift is making it impossible to look at a donor’s record without seeing their current giving band and their year-over-year change. If you have to dig for it, nobody will look. If it is the first thing you see, every conversation gets better. 

Part 4: The Securities Conversation Almost No One Is Having

The Giving Report’s securities finding is the most under-exploited opportunity in Canadian fundraising right now. 

Donations of publicly traded securities (stocks, ETFs, mutual funds) are exempt from capital gains tax when donated directly to a registered Canadian charity. The donor receives a charitable receipt for the full fair market value at the time of donation. For a donor sitting on appreciated holdings, donating securities directly is significantly more tax-efficient than selling, paying capital gains tax, and donating the cash. 

The barrier is awareness. Most mid-value Canadian donors do not know this is an option. Most charities do not raise it because they assume their donors are not “wealthy enough.” The Giving Report data — 200% more securities donors since 2020 — says that assumption is wrong. 

A simple action: in your year-end communications to mid-value donors, include one paragraph and one link about donating securities. CanadaHelps has a securities donation tool that handles the brokerage logistics. You do not need a planned giving officer. You need a paragraph.

This is not legal or tax advice. Refer donors to their own financial advisor and the Canada Revenue Agency’s resources on gifts of publicly traded securities. But raise the option. Right now, almost nobody is. 

Part 5: Three Things to Stop Doing

The mid-value opportunity is real. So are the failure modes.

Three patterns to break:

• Stop running the same year-end appeal for every donor.
• A $2,000 donor receiving a $50 ask is a deflating experience. They will give the $50 you asked for, and you will lose the upgrade you earned. Differentiate the ask by band.
• Stop treating duplicate records as a “cleanup later” problem.

Every month you wait, more gifts hit duplicate records, and more upgrades go invisible. Make deduplication a monthly 30-minute task, not an annual project.

• Stop assuming local donors will keep showing up forever.

The Atlantic Canada surge is real, and so is the slowdown in Toronto and Montreal. If your charity is in a major urban market, the broad base is shrinking faster than the national average. Mid-value retention is not optional. It is survival.

How Ensemble Fits

Ensemble is a Canadian donor management platform built for the practical work this article describes.

The capabilities most relevant to mid-value identification:

• Unified donor profiles that show cumulative giving across years, not just gift-by-gift
• CanadaHelps Data Sync that pulls online giving directly into the same record, so online and offline gifts live in one timeline
• Contact Merge to consolidate duplicate records without losing giving history
• Segmentation by lifetime giving, year-over-year change, and giving band — so the three mid-value segments above can be built and saved
• Automated receipting that respects donor preferences and CRA requirements at scale
• Activity tracking so the stewardship sequence can be logged against each donor

Ensemble does not yet have built-in reporting dashboards, and it does not have a communications module. Email sends still happen in your existing tool — Ensemble exports segments cleanly so the work flows. That tradeoff is deliberate: Ensemble focuses on the donor data layer, where the work is hardest, and leaves the communications layer to specialized tools you may already be paying for.

The mid-value opportunity in The Giving Report 2026 is not a feature problem. It is a data problem. That is what Ensemble is built for.

What to Do This Week

If you do one thing after reading this, do this:

Pull a list of every donor who gave $1,000 or more in 2025. Sort it. Cross-reference against your 2024 list. Find the donors who upgraded, the donors who sustained, and the donors who slipped. Call the slipping donors first. Then send a real thank-you to the upgrades.

That single afternoon of work, done before June 1, will be worth more to your annual revenue than any campaign you will run this year.

The donor base is narrowing. Your mid-value donors are not. They are right there, in your database, waiting.

Ready to find your mid-value donors before they slip?

Start a free trial of Ensemble and see your donors’ full giving history — across online, offline, and CanadaHelps – on one profile. Or book a 20-minute demo with our team to walk through your specific data.