Raise for Annual Giving: Smarter Outreach at Scale
Annual giving teams wear a lot of hats when it comes to higher education fundraising.
They handle large portfolios, giving days, phonathons, student workers, and stewardship — all at once.
And through it all, there’s one constant pressure: donors need to hear from you consistently. The research is clear on that. But consistently reaching hundreds or thousands of people in your portfolio — with messages that actually feel personal — is nearly impossible when you’re also running a campaign, leading a giving day, or managing a team of student callers.
The problem isn’t effort. Annual giving teams are working hard. The challenge is scale. And that’s exactly where Raise from Gravyty comes in.
The core challenge: too many donors, not enough time
Ask any annual giving officer what their biggest frustration is and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: I know I should be reaching out to more people, but I don’t know where to start.
When your portfolio has thousands of donors — LYBUNTs, SYBUNTs, leadership annual giving prospects — the sheer volume creates analysis paralysis. Who do you contact today? Who’s lapsed and likely to re-engage? Who just made a gift and deserves a personal thank-you?
Most teams default to batch-and-blast email campaigns or generic phone call lists. It gets messages out, but it doesn’t build relationships. And in Annual Giving, participation and loyalty are built on relationships.
Meanwhile, the manual work piles up. Contact reports to write. CRM records to update. Follow-ups to track. All of it competes for time that could be spent on actual donor outreach.
How Raise works: AI-powered prioritization, delivered to your inbox
Raise from Gravyty is a fundraising outreach management tool that lives directly in your email. Every day when you sit down at your desk, Raise sends you a prompt with a first draft message, along with a recommendation for who you should be reaching out to today and why.
That “why” matters. Raise doesn’t just hand you a random name. It surfaces the right donor from your specific portfolio based on AI-driven prioritization, and it gives you context: when they last gave, what fund they supported, their full history of interactions with your institution. For a new fundraiser or a student caller, that context alone is transformative.
From there, you have options. You can send the AI-drafted message as-is, edit it to add a personal touch, use your own template, or pick up the phone. Every action you take — the email sent, the call made, the follow-up set — is automatically tracked back to your CRM. No manual contact reports or duplicate data entry. Raise handles it.
When you act on one prompt, the next one appears. Raise is self-paced, which means it fits however your day is structured. Some days you have two hours of desk time. Other days you’re at events or on campus meetings. Both are fine; the queue moves with you.
Targeting the right donors, not just any donors
One of the most powerful things Raise does for annual giving teams is remove the guesswork from segmentation.
Traditional annual giving outreach requires you to build lists (LYBUNT pulls, giving level filters, lapsed donor segments) before you can do any personalized outreach. That work takes time, often falls to advancement services, and creates lag between when you identify someone and when you actually reach them.
With Raise, AI is doing that prioritization continuously and automatically. You’re always reaching your best available donors for today, drawn from your portfolio, ranked by the factors most likely to lead to a successful interaction.
For teams working through a Giving Day push or a fiscal year-end campaign, Raise also gives you the tools to move faster. The donor directory allows you to filter your portfolio by specific criteria (such as donors who gave on last year’s giving day, lapsed donors at a certain gift level, constituents in a specific geography) and then send yourself a first draft for that targeted group so you can get personalized outreach out quickly.
Templates that scale without losing the personal touch
Annual giving fundraisers live in an interesting tension: you need to send a lot of messages, but generic messages don’t work as well as personal ones.
Raise addresses this through a template library that teams can build and manage themselves. You can create templates for any moment in your calendar — giving day warm-up messages, fiscal year-end appeals, stewardship touchpoints, re-engagement campaigns — and set a default template for a given period so that every prompt you work through automatically pre-populates with the right message.
The difference between Raise templates and a mass email is the delivery. These are one-to-one messages, sent personally, with merge tags that pull in each donor’s last gift date, last gift amount, and last fund — so even a templated message can feel tailored. And because you’re reviewing each one before you send, you always have the chance to add a line that makes it feel genuinely personal.
The result is outreach that feels human at a scale that would otherwise require a much larger team.
A new model for phonathon: students + Raise
The traditional phonathon model has a real problem: students sit on the phone waiting for someone to answer, burning through lists with no guidance on who’s most likely to respond. Turnover is high, morale is low, and the ROI is increasingly hard to justify.
Raise gives student callers a better experience and better results.
Students are assigned a portfolio of donors with a goal of reaching each person four times a year. Instead of a static call list, they receive the same AI-prioritized prompts professional fundraisers do, with full donor context and the flexibility to reach out however makes the most sense — email, text, call, or a Gratavid video introduction.
St. Olaf College replaced their traditional phonathon with Raise and found that personalized emails sent by students through Raise achieved three times the open and response rates of broader marketing emails. The human touch made all the difference.
And beyond the results, students are getting real fundraising experience, learning how to read engagement history, personalize outreach, and think strategically about a portfolio. It’s a talent pipeline hiding in plain sight.
Engagement tracking that actually captures everything
One of the quieter but genuinely important benefits of Raise is what it does for your data.
Many annual giving programs have historically tracked only substantive actions (major gifts visits, formal asks) while phone calls, quick emails, and informal check-ins went unrecorded. That leaves a significant gap in the engagement history for a large portion of your donor base.
Because Raise automatically logs every action back to your CRM — whether it’s an email sent, a call completed, or a follow-up scheduled — teams using Raise are capturing a far more complete picture of donor engagement than they were before. That data becomes more valuable over time, especially for segmentation, personalization, and demonstrating the ROI of your annual giving program.
Built for how annual giving actually works
Annual giving is all about pivoting. Your priorities can shift week to week — a Giving Day, a matching gift opportunity, a new leadership initiative. You need tools that move with you, not tools that require a week of setup every time something changes.
Raise is designed for that reality. The donor directory gives you flexible filtering so you can build a focused outreach list quickly when a new priority emerges, travel plans can be generated based on where your best donors are located, and follow-ups auto-surface in your inbox so no one falls through the cracks.
And because Raise is connected to your CRM, every interaction stays in sync. You’re not managing a parallel system, you’re working faster within the system you already have.
The bottom line
Annual giving teams don’t lack effort or dedication. What they’re often lacking is a smarter way to direct that energy, one that scales personalized outreach, removes administrative friction, and ensures the right donors are getting the right attention at the right time.
Raise makes that possible. Whether you’re a director of annual giving managing a large portfolio, a student caller working through your first touchpoints of the year, or a leadership officer trying to stay ahead of fiscal year-end, Raise gives you the tools to do more of what actually moves donors — without doing more manual work.
