The story most nonprofits have been told goes like this: Gen Z is loud about causes but doesn’t actually give. They post, they share, they argue online, and then they close the app and forget about it. New research from GoFundMe and the GivingTuesday Data Commons just blew that up.
Across 10,411 U.S. respondents surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, about 71% of Gen Z reported some form of giving in the past week, compared with 65% of adults aged 30 to 85. They gave money at a higher rate (43% vs. 39%), donated items more often (45% vs. 41%), and volunteered at a much higher rate (35% vs. 25%). All of that despite 68% of Gen Z respondents earning under $75K a year.
The takeaway isn’t that Gen Z is going to write your next $50K check. It’s that they’re already participating in your sector, just in ways your fundraising program probably wasn’t built to capture. Three places that gap shows up most: mobile websites, social media, and Google Ad Grants.
If Your Site Doesn’t Work on a Phone, You Don’t Have a Site
Gen Z lives on their phones. That’s not a hot take, it’s a baseline. When they hear about a cause, they hear about it on Instagram, TikTok, or in a group text. They are not opening a laptop to look you up.
So when a friend shares a fundraiser and 50 people tap through to your website, what happens in the next 30 seconds decides everything. If your homepage takes four seconds to render, your donation form asks for ten fields, or your mission statement is buried under a stock photo carousel, you’ve lost most of them before the page settles.
The same research found that Gen Z donors who plan their giving in advance are reached through website giving prompts at meaningfully higher rates than spontaneous givers. Your site is doing real work for the people who already intend to give. If it’s broken on mobile, you’re breaking the moment.
Practical fixes most nonprofits can make this quarter: kill the third-party plugins slowing your load times, cut your donation form down to the four fields you actually need, and pull up your site on a five year old Android phone. If you can’t comfortably complete a donation in under a minute on that phone, your site has the problem, not your audience.
Sharing Is the Whole Strategy
Gen Z is 10 times more likely than Boomers to share donations on social media. Half of them share a cause or fundraiser at least once a week. They’re 13.2 percentage points more likely than other generations to be reached by giving prompts on social platforms. And nearly 60% say family and friends shape their giving decisions, compared with about 45% of older adults.
What that means for nonprofits: your social content isn’t trying to convince a Gen Z donor to give to you. It’s trying to give a Gen Z supporter something worth sharing with the people they already trust. Those people are who actually convert.
This is a very different job than most nonprofit social accounts are doing. Most organizations are still posting board updates, gala photos, and “National Whatever Day” graphics. None of that gets shared. What gets shared is specific, human, and short. A real client story. A 30 second video from a volunteer. A graphic with one statistic that makes someone stop scrolling.
If your social calendar is built for your board to feel proud of you, redo it. It should be built for a 22 year old to forward to her group chat at 11 p.m.
The $10K a Month You’re Probably Leaving on the Table
A lot of nonprofits still don’t fully use this: Google Ad Grants gives qualified 501(c)(3) organizations up to $10,000 per month in free Google Search ads. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a pilot program. It’s been running for years.
Where this connects to Gen Z: when a friend shares a cause and someone wants to learn more, the next move is almost always a Google search. They search the cause, your name, or the issue. If you’re not showing up there, the journey stops. If you are showing up, with a landing page actually built for that search intent, a passive share just turned into an active supporter.
The catch is that Grants accounts have to be managed correctly to stay eligible. Keyword quality, click through rates, and account structure all matter, and a neglected Grant account gets suspended faster than most nonprofits realize. The free part is real. The “set it and forget it” part isn’t.
The Real Shift
Gen Z isn’t going to engage with your organization the way your 1995 fundraising plan assumed they would. They’re going to find you through a friend’s Instagram story, tap through on a phone, Google your name to confirm you’re legit, and decide in about half a minute whether you’re worth their attention. Your mobile site, your social presence, and your Google Grant account are the three places that decision actually gets made.
If those three things aren’t talking to each other (or aren’t running at all), you’re not just behind on Gen Z. You’re behind on every donor who isn’t 65 yet.
E11 builds and runs all three. If you want an honest read on where your setup stands, get in touch.
