How UNICEF USA unlocked 26,000 more donations

Your email worked. Someone opened it and even clicked “donate.”

But they didn’t give.

According to M+R’s 2025 Benchmarks, only 12% of people who land on a nonprofit donation page actually complete a gift. 

Here’s the thing: e-commerce figured this out years ago. Abandoned cart emails recover 10–15% of lost purchases and generate higher open rates than almost any other email type. 

Retailers have been doing this for a decade. Most nonprofits haven’t started.

The recovery playbook has two parts: catch donors at the door before they leave, and email them after they do.

UNICEF USA is doing the first. A recent experiment across 3,000+ nonprofits nailed the timing on the second.

UNICEF USA’s donation recovery plan
When UNICEF USA overhauled its digital fundraising stack, one of the features it leaned into was abandoned donation recovery. 

Using on-site reminder prompts that re-engage donors who close the checkout without completing their gift, they’ve recovered more than 26,000 donations that would have otherwise been lost.

That’s a second campaign hiding inside the one you already ran.

Their broader checkout optimization tells a similar story: Their recurring donation upsell alone generated $3 million in additional annual revenue. 

The lesson: what happens after a donor clicks “give” matters as much as the email that got them there.

The one-hour window
Fundraise Up, the platform UNICEF USA uses, runs A/B tests across 3,000+ nonprofits and millions of transactions. 

A recent experiment on abandoned donation timing caught my eye.

Here’s the setup: when a supporter closes checkout without completing their gift, a prompt asks, “Want a reminder later?” If they opt in, a follow-up email goes out. 

At baseline, 10% of donors who receive that email complete their gift.

But timing matters. They tested their standard reminder schedule (emails at 1, 3, and 7 days) against a faster cadence that added a first email at just one hour.

Over 52 days and 104,000+ visitors, the faster schedule produced a 5.7% lift in donations. 

The one-hour email didn’t annoy people into giving less. It caught them while the intent was still warm.

How to apply this regardless of your donation platform
The core principle works across different tech stacks. 

If your donation platform captures email addresses before the transaction completes, you can trigger a follow-up.

Set up a simple automation that fires within the first hour. Keep the email short: remind them what they were interested in supporting and link them back to the form. That’s it.

If your platform doesn’t capture pre-transaction emails, a retargeting pixel on your donation page could reach those same people through ads.

The bottom line
I wrote about donation page optimization back in August: smart defaults, impact copy, payment options. That advice still holds.

But even the best donation page loses most of its visitors. The recovery layer is what your program is probably missing. 

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara