Forty-six percent.
That is how much more families are spending on youth sports than they were five years ago, according to the Aspen Institute's Project Play.
Almost none of that increase has reached the organizations running the programs.
The money is in the ecosystem. Most sports nonprofits are not capturing it. And the reason is not that they ask too little. It is that they ask the same people, once a year, and start from zero every season.
This is about the four levers that change that. None of them is a new event.
Why another event will not fix this
When donations are flat, the instinct is to add a fundraiser.
Here is the number that should stop you. Donors who have given exactly once are retained at about 19%, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Four of every five people who give to you once never give again.
An event is an acquisition channel. Running another one pours new donors into a system that loses four of every five of them. You will be busier in the spring and no better funded in the fall.
For most youth sports nonprofits, flat donations are not an acquisition problem. They are a retention problem and an infrastructure problem, and both are cheaper to fix than acquisition is to repeat.
Lever one: the second gift
That 19% is the bottom rung of a ladder. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project tracks retention by how many times a person has given, and it climbs steeply. One-time donors, about 19%. Two-time donors, 38.5%. Donors who have given three to six times, 62.5%. Donors who have given seven or more times, 87.3%.
Read that as a sequence rather than a table. The fragile donor is the one who has given exactly once. Move that person to a second gift and their odds of staying roughly double. Move them to a third and the relationship starts holding itself together.
Nothing else available to you this season returns as much as converting one-time donors into two-time donors. It costs no new event, no new volunteers, and no new audience. The second-gift system is worth reading in full, because the mechanics matter more than the intent.
Lever two: recurring gifts, timed to your season
A recurring donor is a retention problem you solve once.
Most sports nonprofits ask for recurring gifts the way generic nonprofits do, on a calendar year, in December, alongside every other charity in the country. That is the worst possible moment to compete for attention and the least relevant moment in your own year.
Your organization does not run on a calendar. It runs on a season. Ask when the season makes the ask obvious: at registration, at the first home event, at the moment a parent has just watched their child play. Mapping campaigns to the season rather than the fiscal year is the difference between asking into noise and asking into attention.
Lever three: the revenue you are already eligible for
Before optimizing anything, answer one question. Is your organization a registered 501(c)(3)?
If it is, three sources of money are sitting there whether or not you claim them.
The Google Ad Grant is up to $10,000 a month in free Google search advertising, awarded to eligible nonprofits and renewed indefinitely while you stay compliant. Most youth sports organizations that qualify never apply. Here is how the Ad Grant works for sports nonprofits.
Employer matching gifts are the most overlooked money in youth sports. A parent on your roster works somewhere that will match their donation, and often nobody has ever asked them to check. Matching programs almost always require the recipient to be a nonprofit, which is one more reason the status matters.
Grants are the third. Where youth sports grants actually are, and what it takes to win one is a longer subject, but the short version is that most of the landscape requires 501(c)(3) status to enter at all.
If the answer to the question is no, that is the first thing to fix, because it gates all three. The step-by-step process for forming one is more procedural than most boards expect.
Lever four: corporate partnerships, asked properly
One local business can outraise a full season of small sales, and a business that sponsors you once will often renew without being asked twice.
The reason this underperforms at most organizations is not that businesses say no. It is how they are asked. A photocopied letter carried by a player is a donation request. It gets treated like one, which means it gets treated as optional.
Ask as the marketing sale it actually is. Show the business exactly who sees their name, how often, and for how long. Offer a small number of clear tiers with prices attached. Make the yes a decision rather than a favor. If you are a 501(c)(3), the sponsor also gets a deduction, which moves the conversation from goodwill to budget. The companies that already sponsor youth sports, and how to reach them is a practical starting list.
Putting the four on your season's clock
These levers are not a menu to pick from. They are a sequence, and the season tells you the order.
Pre-season is when corporate partnerships are sold, because the banner is about to go up and the value is about to be delivered.
In-season is when recurring gifts convert, because that is when a parent has just watched the thing you are funding.
Post-season is the second-gift window. The people who gave this year are closest to caring about the result, and that proximity decays fast.
Off-season is for the infrastructure nobody wants to do in August: the Ad Grant application, the matching-gift audit, the grant calendar for next year.
Run in that order and each piece feeds the next. Run them as four disconnected campaigns and you get four disconnected results.
What to measure
Total dollars raised is the number most boards look at, and it hides everything that matters.
Track three instead. Your own one-time-donor retention, which is the 19% figure measured against your own list. Repeat-donor retention, which is what compounding looks like when it is working. And the share of your revenue that renews without a new campaign, which is the only honest measure of whether you are building a base or running a treadmill.
Who this will not work for
If your organization raises everything it needs from one reliable source, a single major donor or a parent-funded registration model that covers the budget, none of this is urgent. Systems are for organizations with many small relationships to compound, not for organizations with one large one to protect.
If you have no donor records, no email list, and no way to tell a first-time giver from a seventh-time giver, start there. Every lever above assumes you can tell those people apart. Without that, you are not running a retention strategy, you are guessing.
Where to start
Do one thing this month. Pull last season's donor list and count how many gave for the first time. Then count how many of those gave again.
That ratio is your real fundraising problem, stated in your own numbers rather than the sector's. Most organizations have never calculated it, and most are surprised.
If you want the system built and run rather than described, that is the work we do, and we do it only for nonprofits powered by sport and movement. A 30-minute diagnostic call will tell you which of the four levers is actually costing you the most, and we will tell you if the answer is none of them.
Book a 30-minute diagnostic call
Sources: Aspen Institute Project Play, 2025 youth sports family spending survey (46% five-year rise). Donor retention figures from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, most recent year-to-date data, by gift count: 19% one-time, 38.5% two-time, 62.5% three-to-six, 87.3% seven or more.