Stop Guessing: How GA4 and a Content Audit Can Boost Your Nonprofit Fundraising in 2026
Insights, delivered.
The last year and a half has been a bit of a rollercoaster for every organization in every sector. Nonprofits weren’t immune. Federal funding seemed tenuous. Stock indices teetered. And the airwaves were thick with urgent calls to action.
Election years make longstanding donors less willing to open their checkbooks. They also pull the attention of prospective donors in a million other directions.
That usually means marketing teams have to fight harder just to match previous performance. This pressure is typically felt more by nonprofits, who often have tighter budgets and smaller teams.
Results from our annual Mighty GPS marketing survey—a marketing self-assessment that measures effectiveness and confidence in six key areas—were concerning. Four out of six of those key areas dipped for nonprofits.
If you’d like to dive into the nonprofit results yourself, you can read the full report here. You’ll see scores for each specific question and get a longer list of recommendations.
Below, we offer up our takeaways and recommendations.
1. Too many nonprofits missed the shift in Google Analytics
Google began sunsetting Universal Analytics (UA) platform in 2022. It was their longstanding website dashboard that gave organizations key insights into web traffic and site performance. It officially ceased collecting data in July of 2024, replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
We suspect many nonprofits didn’t have the resources or know-how to make the transition. This widened the existing knowledge gap for turning site analytics into online relevance.
That means nonprofits backslid in SEO. Less than half of nonprofits (45%) feel confident in their website analytics tracking. Effective use of an analytics platform dropped to a three-year low.
Our recommendation
Set up your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) dashboard—ASAP. A GA4 dashboard gives you invaluable insights into audience behavior on your website. It tells you where visitors are clicking from to get there, what they’re clicking when they arrive, and where you’re losing them.
Those insights let you fine-tune everything from button placements and content topics to headlines and design. It’s your ticket to relevance, which means it’s your ticket to SEO gold.
Check out our full resource listing for GA4.
2. Content practices are falling behind
Across the board, nonprofit content is suffering. Nonprofits are failing to adequately target, publish, and plan their content. This is making it harder to reach audiences with the relevant messages they need to hear.
Effective content is about serving up your value on a silver platter. You need to know exactly what your audience’s challenges are, how your work solves their challenges, and communicate it all to them in words they understand.
The self-reported use of a content or editorial plan dropped 8.5 points from last year’s score. Similarly, when nonprofits should be a strong, authoritative voice for their mission, their confidence in thought leadership dropped 6.2 points.
Our recommendation
Improve the content you already have with a content audit. Some of those blog posts you’ve been publishing for years might still have legs. Some of it might just be taking up space on your site. A content audit can help you see which posts are worth revising and republishing, and which posts can be archived.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing a post’s title and a few key words/phrases. This is a lower lift than writing a bunch of new posts, and it helps you tidy up your blog.
Check out our website content audit template.
3. Nonprofit marketing is even more underfunded than ever
When the economic going gets tough, the tough budget decisions get going. As nonprofit leaders tighten the purse strings and reallocate dollars, marketing teams are left with less resources at a time when their audiences need the most help.
Without large enough budgets, nonprofit marketing teams feel less able to execute projects and campaigns. But strong marketing raises money. When things are tough economically, marketing becomes more important, not less.
Our recommendation
Establish KPIs and metrics for leadership buy-in. When you establish the right KPIs and metrics, you can better demonstrate the ROI of your efforts with solid data. This helps you make a strong case to leadership for more marketing dollars. Show them, in plain terms, how every marketing dollar leads to more fundraising. Or, what your nonprofit stands to lose if your budget shrinks.
Learn which fundraising metrics matter, and download our campaign template.
Take the Mighty GPS assessment, then see where you stand
Not sure whether our trends and takeaways apply to your nonprofit? Start with a good, earnest gut check in the form of our Mighty GPS self-assessment. It takes around 6-7 minutes to complete and automatically returns your custom score report with strategic recommendations.
Then, download our 2025 Benchmarks Report for Nonprofits to see how you compare to your peers. By taking the GPS, you’ll also contribute to our data for next year’s benchmark report.
And if your nonprofit’s challenges are just too big to tackle on your own …
Don’t be afraid to reach out. We’ve been helping mission-driven organizations improve their marketing for over 25 years. Many on our team have direct nonprofit experience of their own, and 100% of us can’t wait to offer some solutions.
