Forty-six percent.
That is how much the average US sports family's spending on one child's primary sport rose between 2019 and 2024, reaching $1,016, according to the Aspen Institute Project Play's National Youth Sports Parent Survey. That figure covers registration fees, travel and lodging for non-local competition, and individual coaching or camps.
It is a measure of what families pay to participate, not of what they donate. The survey does not track how much of that reaches the organizations running the programs, and we are not going to claim it does.
What it does tell you is that there is money moving through youth sports, and that the families spending it are already committed to the thing you are funding. Turning some of that commitment into support is a different exercise from raising participation fees, and the reason it often stalls is not that organizations 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 problem with that instinct. First-time donor retention is a major challenge across the sector. Track how many donors acquired in one defined period give again in the next comparable period, and compare that rate with a benchmark using the same definition.
An event is an acquisition channel. Running another one pours new donors into whatever system you already have for keeping them. If that system is not there, 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
The donor most likely to disappear is the one who has given exactly once, and the sector has not solved that step. The FEP Q1 2026 report puts it plainly: stabilization in donor counts was “led by growth among existing donors, while new donor counts continued to decline,” and it names converting new donors into repeat givers as the more urgent priority.
Treat that as a sequence rather than a table. Getting a first- time donor to give a second time is the step that turns an acquisition into a relationship. Measure it on your own list, over your own defined periods, rather than against a sector-average number that may not be measuring what you are.
What recommends this lever is its cost rather than a measured return: converting donors you already have 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
Recurring giving can improve revenue continuity, but it still requires stewardship, payment recovery and retention monitoring.
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.
Eligible nonprofits can receive up to $10,000 per month in in-kind Google search advertising through the Google Ad Grant. It is not a cash award or guaranteed fundraising revenue; actual ad delivery and results vary, and participation depends on continued eligibility and policy compliance. 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. The short version is that many private and corporate programs require recognized charitable status or allow applications through an eligible fiscal sponsor, and requirements vary by funder.
If the answer is no, it is worth addressing, because it affects what each of these three routes looks like for you. It does not close them off entirely: sponsorship is a commercial conversation that any organization can have, some programs fund groups without their own charitable status, and a fiscal sponsor can open others. 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. Be careful how you talk about tax: treatment depends on the payment and the benefits provided, so do not promise a charitable deduction for an advertising package, and have a qualified tax adviser review your sponsorship structure and acknowledgement language. 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 first-time donor retention: how many donors acquired in one defined period gave again in the next comparable period. Your 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 clearest measure of whether you are building a base or running a treadmill. Compare each one against a benchmark using the same definition and the same kind of period, or the comparison tells you nothing.
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. 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: the average US sports family spent $1,016 on one child's primary sport in 2024, up 46% since 2019, per the Aspen Institute Project Play National Youth Sports Parent Survey (published March 2025, conducted with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University; 1,848 parents of children aged 6–18 surveyed November–December 2024). Sector fundraising trends from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project Q1 2026 report (published 29 July 2026). Reviewed 18 September 2026.