02/10/2026
Are your channels working together, or competing for the same donor?
This week we released the 2026 Fundraising Signals Report (published by VeraData The Donor Science Company, with expertise from Faircom New York + Teal Media) — 11 predictions with watchpoints and decision rules built for fundraisers.
Faircom-authored signals to watch:
💡Proof Design Beats Storytelling When Trust Is the Constraint (Lindsay Marino Long)
💡Direct Mail Stays Strong, but “Mail Everyone” Gets Harder to Defend
(Shaun Petersen)
💡Testing Gets Smaller, Cleaner, and More Valuable (Pam Schlagter)
💡Omnichannel Stops Meaning “Everywhere” and Starts Meaning “Assigned
Jobs” (Madiha Ahmed Watson)
💡“Most Important Donors” Stops Meaning “Biggest Last Gift”
(Heather Foye)
💡Acquisition Becomes a Probability Business (Barbra Schulman)
Get the report: https://lnkd.in/ghs8ntww
We said we’d drop some expert donor science today, so here it is: Our 2026 Fundraising Signals Report — 11 predictions with watchpoints and decision rules for nonprofit growth, built from what we observed across real programs in 2025.
A few signals/predictions you will find inside:
🚦 Donor-first becomes the operating standard for audience-first fundraising
🚦 Direct mail stays strong, but mail-everyone gets harder to defend
🚦 Websites become the source of truth in an AI-summary world
🚦 Acquisition scales on probability + payback, not volume.
Download the full report: https://www.veradata.com/2026signals/
Published by VeraData, with expertise from Faircom New York and Teal Media, grounded in our system: Donor Science™ + Creative Science + Media Science.