For four straight years, Masterworks’ clients have acquired more new donors online than offline.
In 2021, 60% of new donors converted in direct mail. By 2025, that directly attributed response measured at 35%—a significant decline in five years.
The donors weren’t missing. The mailbox simply stopped being where more new donors converted with nonprofits.
In 2025, roughly two out of every three new donors our clients brought in arrived through a digital channel. And this was not a one-year spike. Every year for four years running (2026 will make it five years running, with 100% certainty), our clients have found more new donors online than offline.
How? We stopped treating digital media as an accessory to the mail calendar, and we started leaning into the fact that donors want choice, convenience, and control, which includes responding through their channel of choice.
For many nonprofits, digital acquisition still works the way it did in 2015. A campaign launches, digital echoes the offer, the campaign ends, everything resets, and the next one starts. Just as a prospect begins to engage, the message underneath them disappears.
Always On is how we disrupted that flawed cycle.
We decoupled digital media acquisition from the direct mail calendar entirely and built a full-funnel, multichannel program that runs continuously: awareness at the top, engagement in the middle, and an invitation to give when someone is actually ready. No resets. No starting over. Continuous optimization.
And the results were not always just incremental. One client set a five-year goal to grow online-acquired donors. They hit five times their baseline in 15 months using Always On and a robust email cultivation program, and digital has been their primary source of new donors ever since.
Reaching Christian audiences at scale is genuinely hard, and the programmatic market is not built for it. Building direct relationships with the publishers, platforms, and media environments where our audiences already spend their time gave our clients something the industry mostly does not have: real reach, real frequency, and real credibility, at a cost that makes acquisition math work.
The data is consistent—Masterworks has innovated the spectrum of digital media in ways the market hasn’t experienced until now, including stabilizing annual donor acquisition.
But this means direct mail can’t stay stagnant, and we know that, intimately. We’ve been taking big swings and rewritten the full spectrum future of direct mail.
And it’s here.
Today, direct mail can move more and faster than it ever has before. From dust to dust, the old model must be put down to pick up a new philosophy and performance to drive new donor acquisition.
Are you ready? Don’t miss part two of Masterworks’ new donor revolution!
