At the start of 2025, I made six predictions about where the nonprofit sector was headed. Now, halfway through 2026, it’s time to hold myself accountable — and tell you what I see coming for the rest of the year.

Nobody in this sector likes to be wrong. And I REALLY don’t like it. But nobody learns anything from being vague enough to never be wrong, either. So here’s my scorecard, with receipts — and three predictions for the rest of 2026 that I’m prepared to stand behind.

The 2025 Predictions: What I Got Right, What I Missed, and Why It Matters

Prediction 1: Mergers are coming. ✓ Correct.

I said too many nonprofits were duplicating effort and that funders would be pushed to back consolidation with real money. That happened. Deloitte convened a formal nonprofit M&A strategy webinar in October 2025. Inc. Magazine declared mergers “no longer optional” in January 2026. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that nonprofits are now asking foundations to fund the transaction costs of mergers — legal fees, IT integration, rebranding — because the pressure to consolidate has moved from theoretical to operational.

The driver I underestimated: federal funding cuts accelerated this on a timeline nobody predicted. Consolidation went from a strategic conversation to a survival response for a significant slice of the sector.

Prediction 2: Stop hand-wringing about AI. ◑ Partial.

I was right about adoption. I was too optimistic about impact.

By late 2025, 92% of nonprofits reported using AI in some capacity — up from roughly 31% in 2024. That’s a remarkable shift in 18 months. But the 2026 Virtuous/Fundraising.AI benchmark report found that only 7% reported major organizational improvements from their AI investments. Researchers called it an “efficiency plateau.” I’d call it something less charitable: adoption theater.

The hand-wringing I criticized in 2025 got replaced by performative adoption. One person using ChatGPT to draft an appeal while the rest of the team drowns in manual processes isn’t transformation — it’s optics. I called the direction. I didn’t anticipate that the sector would stop halfway up the hill and declare victory.

Prediction 3: Move beyond “rah-rah” community. ✓ Correct.

I argued the era of passive connection had to end. The federal funding crisis made it end faster than I expected. Organizations that survived 2025 weren’t the ones with the warmest community vibes — they were the ones that built functional coalitions, shared resources, and turned their networks into actual operating infrastructure. Adversity proved my point more efficiently than any trend report could.

The deeper question — one worth its own examination — is whether collaboration has become the sector’s reflexive answer to pressure rather than a genuine strategic choice. When every funder wants partnerships and every crisis triggers a coalition, it’s worth asking what we’re actually building. That argument is coming.

Prediction 4: Authentic relationships are non-negotiable. ✓ Correct.

The sector’s retention data made this prediction look modest in hindsight. The average donor retention rate dropped to 42.9% by the end of 2024 — a 2.6% year-over-year decline. Neon One’s 2025 Generosity Report documented that donors who give consistently for five years contribute 1,519% more than one-time donors. Read that number again.

The sector keeps spending money chasing new donors while the floor collapses underneath them. Authentic relationships aren’t a nice-to-have. They are the financial model.

Prediction 5: Make donating simple. ✓ Correct.

Mobile donations rose 200% year-over-year. Ninety-six percent of nonprofits now use online fundraising techniques. Digital wallets — Apple Pay, Venmo, Zelle — moved from “emerging trend” to table stakes. The organizations that cleared the friction out of their donation process grew. The ones that didn’t have a very good explanation for their board about why they didn’t.

Prediction 6: Invest in tech or risk irrelevance. ◑ Partial.

The urgency was right. The framing was too blunt.

What 2025 actually showed is that the risk wasn’t just underinvestment in technology — it was misallocated investment. OpenGrants’ 2026 analysis found that the organizations seeing real results weren’t chasing flashy applications. They were investing in fundamentals: mobile-first donation pages, clean UX, consistent multichannel marketing. Meanwhile, plenty of organizations bought shiny tools they couldn’t staff, implement, or measure.

“Invest in tech” turned out to be incomplete advice. The right advice is: invest in tech strategically, govern it deliberately, and measure the outcomes — or you’re just burning money on infrastructure theater.

Final Score: 4 Confirmed, 2 Partial, 0 Misses.

I’ll take it. More importantly, the two partials weren’t wrong about the trend — they were incomplete reads on the terrain. How it actually played out is what I missed. That’s what 2026 predictions are for.

Time for my crystal ball

Three Predictions for the Rest of 2026

Prediction 1: The merger wave becomes the merger reckoning.

The consolidation momentum I predicted in 2025 is real. But mergers driven by crisis rather than strategy have a well-documented failure rate. The sector is about to learn the difference between a merger and a rescue operation — and funders are going to be asked to tell them apart.

Here’s what I expect: a meaningful number of 2025 mergers will surface integration failures in the back half of 2026. Misaligned cultures, unresolved governance disputes, donor confusion, staff attrition. The organizations that merged from positions of strategic strength will compound their advantage. The ones that merged because they had no other options will discover that combining two struggling organizations doesn’t automatically produce one strong one.

The Foundry Law applies here: hope is not a merger strategy, either.

Prediction 2: The AI efficiency plateau breaks — in both directions.

The 7% of nonprofits that have built real AI infrastructure — documented workflows, governance policies, outcome measurement — are going to pull away from the field in the second half of 2026. The gap between organizations that implemented AI as a system and those that adopted it as a habit will become visible in fundraising results, staff capacity, and donor experience.

Meanwhile, the sector will produce its first high-profile AI failure stories. A major donor communication that goes sideways. A chatbot that handles a sensitive constituent interaction badly. An organization that discovers their “AI-powered” CRM vendor was mostly selling them a rebranded workflow with a chatbot bolted on. The backlash will be disproportionate to the actual harm — it always is — and a predictable wave of hand-wringing will follow.

The organizations that govern their AI use deliberately will weather it. Everyone else will have a board meeting about it.

One external force worth naming: Anthropic announced “Claude Corps” on June 11, 2026 — a $150 million fellowship program that will embed 1,000 trained fellows inside nonprofits to help them use AI more effectively. The first cohort of 100 fellows starts in October. Applications are open now. This is not a small gesture. It is a direct acknowledgment that the sector’s AI implementation problem is a human capacity problem — and that no amount of tool access resolves it without people who know what they’re doing. Whether Claude Corps moves the needle or becomes another well-funded program that the sector absorbs without changing remains to be seen. But dismissing it as vendor interest misses the structural point: the bottleneck isn’t the software.

And yet. The pearl-clutching continues. Despite 92% adoption, a third of nonprofits still cite ethical concerns and employee resistance as primary barriers. Sixty percent say they lack in-house expertise to evaluate tools. Forty percent report that nobody in their organization has been educated on AI at all. The sector managed to adopt a technology at near-universal rates while simultaneously refusing to govern, train for, or commit to it. That is a remarkable organizational achievement. It means the hand-wringing didn’t stop — it just moved upstream. The question used to be “should we use AI?” The new version is “what if something goes wrong?” Both questions function as permission to do nothing.

 

Prediction 3: Donor retention becomes the sector’s defining crisis — and most organizations will still respond to it wrong.

The retention data from 2024 and 2025 is not a blip. It is a structural collapse in first-time donor conversion and repeat donor loyalty playing out in slow motion. By the end of 2026, organizations that have not deliberately invested in retention infrastructure — stewardship sequencing, donor segmentation, relationship-based communication — will face a compounding math problem that no year-end campaign can fix.

Here’s what I also predict: most of the sector’s response will be to acquire harder. More prospecting. More events. More peer-to-peer campaigns chasing new names while existing donors quietly lapse. Because acquisition feels like action and retention feels like maintenance — and boards fund action.

That is exactly backward. And it will cost the organizations that get it wrong more than they currently understand.

The Through-Line

If there’s a unifying thread across both the 2025 recap and the 2026 predictions, it’s this: the nonprofit sector is remarkably good at identifying the right trends and remarkably bad at executing on them with sufficient depth.

AI is a good idea. Unimplemented, ungoverned, and unmeasured, it’s an expensive distraction. Mergers are a good idea. Driven by desperation and executed without integration plans, they’re a slow-motion failure. Donor relationships are non-negotiable. Acknowledged but underfunded, they’re just a talking point.

Knowing what needs to happen is not the same as doing it. Leadership is what changes. Everything else is commentary.

What Doesn’t Change

“Hope is not a fundraising strategy.”

“If the pipeline isn’t there, the goal isn’t real.”

“Burnout is a design failure.”

“Leadership is what changes.”