Why Corporate PAC Participation Keeps Sliding (and How to Increase It)

Corporate PAC participation is stuck below 10% for most PACs for three reasons: recruitment stalled in 2021, engagement drops sharply below the executive tier, and many PACs still rely on a single annual ask. Here’s what the data shows and how PAC directors are closing each gap.

66% of business PACs report an overall PAC participation rate under 10% of their eligible employees. That’s from the National Association of Business Political Action Committees’ (NABPAC) 2025 survey of employee-funded PACs. Not one respondent reported participation above 70%.

On paper, many PACs look healthy. Leadership giving is strong. Average gifts are rising. Programs are more professional than they were a decade ago. But a smaller group of donors is carrying more of the load each year.

If that sounds like your PAC, you’re not alone. And the cause isn’t a mystery. Three gaps are driving the decline, and each one has a fix.

The pipeline broke, not just the giving

Most people remember that corporate PACs paused political giving after January 6, 2021, and that the money mostly came back. In a NABPAC member poll, nearly 70% of PACs reported halting PAC operations at least temporarily, according to Bloomberg Government. By the end of 2021, more than 75% of the PACs that had paused were giving again, according to a Conference Board and NABPAC survey reported by Bloomberg. For many PACs, that meant months when the normal rhythm of recruiting new donors simply stopped.

The dollars recovered faster than the habit did. A recruitment cycle interrupted in 2021 doesn’t just cost that year’s receipts, it costs a cohort of eligibles who were never onboarded as donors in the first place. Five-plus years later, that gap is still working its way through PAC rosters.

Participation falls off a cliff below the executive tier

Here’s where the NABPAC data gets specific. Executive committee participation is strong, with 43% of surveyed PACs reporting 100% participation at that level, and CEOs signing solicitation appeals, hosting donor events, and maxing out contributions at high rates. But move down one layer, to VPs and other direct reports, and participation drops hard: nearly one in five PACs report less than 30% participation at that tier. NABPAC’s own read on this is blunt: “Executives are all-in; middle management is not.”

That reframes the retirement problem PAC directors have been feeling for a while. It’s less that senior donors are aging out and being replaced by disengaged juniors, and more that engagement was always concentrated at the very top, and as that top layer turns over, there’s a thin bench underneath it. The Public Affairs Council’s recent coverage of KOCHPAC’s “Young Leaders Club” is a useful proof-of-concept here: rather than recruiting harder with the old pitch, they built a program specifically for employees 40 and under around networking, treating PAC involvement as a career benefit, not a civic ask. The goal was 33 participants, and 62 employees met the Young Leaders Club criteria, nearly double the target.

There’s a deeper dynamic underneath the age gap worth naming plainly. Younger employees increasingly treat political identity as something they don’t leave at the office door. One recent Indeed and Harris Poll survey found that nearly 40% of workers ages 18 to 34 would leave a job over political differences at work, and Deloitte found that 44% of Gen Zs have rejected an employer based on their personal ethics or beliefs, and 86% say purpose is key to their job satisfaction. For a generation that doesn’t separate personal politics from professional life, a PAC pitch built around institutional loyalty rather than personal conviction starts from a weaker position than it did a generation ago.

The job-hopping story is murkier, and worth being honest about. Surveys widely cite that a large majority of Gen Z workers see themselves as job hoppers seeking roles that match their values, but more recent labor-statistics research pushes back, arguing younger workers have always changed jobs more than older ones while finding their footing, and that economic opportunity, not generational temperament, is the real driver. Either way, the practical effect on a PAC is the same: a shorter average tenure per employer leaves less time to convert a first-time donor into a habitual one before that eligible employee moves on.

That points to the real problem hiding underneath both dynamics: PACs are, in effect, running a donor-retention program, and the broader nonprofit sector’s own data on first-time donors is not encouraging. First-time donor retention runs somewhere between 19 and 25 percent sector-wide, meaning most new donors give once and never again, largely because organizations treat that first gift as a completed transaction rather than the start of a relationship. For a cohort that is both more values-driven and more mobile than the ones before it, the PACs that hold onto younger donors are the ones that treat the first contribution as the opening move in a relationship, not the end of one.

PACs are talking to eligibles through channels they’ve left

The third piece is more fixable than it looks. NABPAC’s survey found only 4% of PACs use social media to communicate with donors, and just 26% used any video in their 2024 communications, while email, unsurprisingly, remains near-universal. Peer-to-peer fundraising, which NABPAC’s analysis flags as reliably boosting participation, is used by only about half of PACs, and new-hire outreach is often an afterthought: nearly half of PACs only reach newly eligible employees through the regular annual campaign, with no dedicated onboarding touch.

There’s a related tool that sits in the same underused category: matching-gift programs. The Public Affairs Council’s 2025 PAC Benchmarking data found that PACs offering a match pull in a median of $839,889 in total receipts, compared to $433,144 for PACs that don’t, nearly double. And solicitation itself is often a single moment rather than an ongoing relationship: 38% of corporate PACs run just one short solicitation campaign a year. Put together, the pattern looks less like eligibles saying no and more like PACs asking once, through a narrow set of channels, without the incentive structure that’s shown to move the number.

Layer onto that a finding from a national worker survey by TLC Political: roughly 4 in 10 American workers can’t accurately define what a PAC is in the first place, but support rises measurably once they understand how voluntary, employee-funded PACs actually work. That’s not a persuasion problem. It’s a literacy gap, and it compounds every other issue on this list.

What this means for your PAC

None of these three reasons require accepting that participation decline is permanent. They point to specific, addressable gaps: rebuilding the recruitment habits that Jan. 6 interrupted, investing deliberately in the management layer below the C-suite rather than assuming it will follow, and meeting eligibles on the channels, and with the basic education they actually need. The PACs bucking the trend aren’t doing something mysterious. They’re doing the unglamorous work of treating participation as a program to be built, not a number that shows up on its own.

Where the right tools make this easier

Fixing these three gaps is mostly a program-design problem, not a software problem, but the right platform removes friction PAC directors don’t have time to fight manually.

A dedicated PAC website built for employee education, not just contribution processing, closes some of the literacy gap directly. Automated onboarding, syncing eligible and restricted-class records the moment someone becomes PAC-eligible, means new hires aren’t waiting for the next annual campaign to hear from the PAC at all.

There’s also a structural fix worth naming: many PACs run as a program adjacent to, but disconnected from, the rest of their government affairs team’s work. Eligibles are asked to give to a PAC whose purpose, supporting the officials who shape the regulations and legislation that actually affect their jobs, is rarely made visible to them in any concrete way. A government affairs platform that houses PAC alongside legislative tracking changes that. When PAC communications can pull from the same bill tracking, regulatory monitoring, and policy intelligence the GA team uses to engage officials day to day, donor outreach stops being an abstract ask for money and starts being able to show the actual policy work the PAC’s giving supports, the same legislation and regulatory fights the eligible class already cares about.

Reporting matters here too. PAC directors juggling limited staff time need to know where to spend their limited outreach hours, not just what the topline participation number is. Auto-updating dashboards that visualize participation by tier, by department, or against benchmarks, rather than static spreadsheets rebuilt for every board update, let a PAC director see the executive-to-middle-management cliff NABPAC’s data describes at a glance, and spend the next solicitation cycle’s time where it’s actually needed instead of recreating the picture from scratch.

None of this replaces the relationship-building and program-design work described above. It’s the infrastructure underneath it, built so it doesn’t create the very gaps this data highlights.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. NABPAC, 2025 Survey of Employee-Funded PACs: Topline Results (member survey data).
2. Amie Adams, Dunn Associates / NABPAC Help Hotline, 2025 NABPAC Insight Surveys: Key Findings Across Business PACs, presentation, February 24, 2026.
3. Bloomberg Government, “PACs Toughen Criteria as They Move to Resume Political Donations,” 2021.
4. Bloomberg, “Corporations Resume Political Contributions After Jan. 6 Pause,” January 4, 2022.
5. Public Affairs Council, “How the 2026 Outstanding PAC Award Winners Turned Culture into Growth.”
6. Public Affairs Council, 2025 Corporate PAC Benchmarking Insights webinar.
7. Indeed and Harris Poll, workplace politics survey, cited in HR Dive, “Workers Would Quit Over Political Differences,” August 2024.
8. Deloitte, “Deloitte’s 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey,” May 15, 2024.
9. ResumeLab, cited in HR Dive, “83% of Gen Z Workers Consider Themselves Job Hoppers, Study Suggests,” September 2023.
10. National Institute on Retirement Security, “Debunking the Job-Hopping Myth: A Data-Driven Look at Tenure and Turnover Among Younger Workers,” September 2025.
11. Fundraising Effectiveness Project (Association of Fundraising Professionals & Urban Institute), donor retention benchmarks, cited via AFP Career Center, “Donor Retention Strategy for Fundraising Teams (2026)”.
12. TLC Political, Today’s American Workers: Attitudes + Attributes (2024 general population survey on PACs).
13. Public Affairs Council, “Corporate PAC Profile: Data from the 2019 PAC Benchmarking Survey,” 2019.