Scaling Donor Outreach: Results Across Gravyty Clients

The scalability problem every advancement team recognizes

Most advancement teams are not struggling for want of ambition or effort. They are managing more donors than their systems were built for, with teams that have not grown at the same pace as their portfolios. The result is a familiar tension: a stewardship model that worked at a smaller scale starts to show its limits. Outreach becomes reactive, triggered by campaign cycles rather than maintained as a continuous practice. Donors in the middle and lower tiers of the giving pyramid receive sporadic contact at best, and frontline fundraisers spend a disproportionate share of their time on administrative coordination rather than the relationship work that actually drives giving.

The organizations that resolve this tension tend to share a common insight: scaling donor outreach is less about adding staff and more about changing the operational model that underlies it. When the right donor surfaces at the right moment with a draft message already waiting, the friction that used to accumulate into missed touchpoints disappears. What follows are four organizations, across higher education and nonprofit fundraising, that reached that insight and have the results to show for it.

By the numbers: What scaling outreach actually looks like

Across four Gravyty clients representing a range of institution types, team sizes, and starting conditions, the pattern is consistent: more outreach, deeper engagement, and stronger revenue, with the same teams already in place.

How different organizations got there

Each of the organizations below arrived at these results from a different starting point. Some had CRM hygiene gaps. Some had manual, episodic outreach practices. Some had plateauing participation in campaigns that had once performed well. What they shared was a need to scale outreach without scaling headcount, and a willingness to change the operational model that made it possible.

Old Dominion University: Solving analysis paralysis at scale

Old Dominion University’s five-person academic development team raises approximately $5 million per year in support of a $500 million fundraising campaign, which means individual fundraiser productivity is a genuine constraint, not simply a performance metric. Before implementing Raise from Gravyty, gift officers managed large donor portfolios while simultaneously trying to qualify a vast non-donor population, without a reliable signal to determine who deserved attention next. The experience was one many advancement teams will recognize: a daily confrontation with an overwhelming number of possible outreaches and no clear way to prioritize among them — what gift officers describe as analysis paralysis. Compounding that, donor interactions were not consistently flowing back into the CRM, which left the database missing meaningful portions of the outreach activity happening each week and made AI-powered prioritization less reliable than it needed to be.

Raise addressed both sides of that challenge at once. By delivering daily prioritized prompts with AI-generated draft emails directly to fundraisers’ inboxes, the platform replaced the open-ended portfolio scan with a clear daily plan. Through bidirectional CRM integration, every interaction flowed automatically back into the donor record without separate data entry. The more fundraisers acted on the platform’s prompts, the more current the donor database became, and the more accurate the next set of prompts were. Outreach productivity and data hygiene became the same project rather than competing priorities.

Caritas of Austin: Turning reactive stewardship into a daily practice

Caritas of Austin is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness in the Greater Austin area. Its development team operates with limited staff and a broad mandate: build and sustain meaningful donor relationships across a growing portfolio while keeping lapsed and entry-level supporters engaged alongside major gift prospects. Outreach had long happened in waves, assembled reactively when fundraising goals needed a push, rather than maintained as a consistent daily practice. Broad messages reached large donor segments, genuine personalization was difficult to sustain at volume, and donors who had not given recently were the most vulnerable to attrition because the team had no system for reaching them proactively.

After adopting Raise from Gravyty, stewardship at Caritas shifted from an episodic activity into a daily habit. Prioritized prompts arrived in fundraisers’ inboxes each morning alongside AI-drafted messages ready to review and personalize. Every fundraiser managed a clearly defined portfolio with automatic interaction logging, giving the team visibility into who had been contacted and when. Crucially, the human element stayed intact throughout: AI drafts served as starting points, and every message was reviewed, personalized, and sent by a real fundraiser before it reached a donor. Outreach became both more consistent and more personal, simultaneously.

Lustgarten Foundation: Three fundraisers, $1.27 million in AI-powered outreach

The Lustgarten Foundation is the largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research in the world, and it pursues that mission with a frontline fundraising team of three. At that scale, every hour a gift officer spends on administrative work is an hour not spent building donor relationships. The team’s existing workflow had accumulated meaningful overhead: manual CRM upkeep ran parallel to personal note-taking rather than replacing it, outreach activity was frequently not captured in the system of record, and portfolio management was harder than it needed to be as a result. Inconsistent data made it difficult to trust any tool sitting on top of the CRM.

Raise from Gravyty consolidated outreach and record-keeping into a single workflow. AI-generated email drafts gave fundraisers a head start on every donor communication, and automatic CRM sync ensured that activity logged in the platform appeared in the donor record without additional effort. In its first year, the foundation achieved an 80% interaction rate with Gravyty-drafted emails, a figure that reflects both the quality of the prompts and the fundraisers’ confidence in acting on them. The financial results followed directly.

Lafayette College: Scaling peer-to-peer outreach without adding complexity

Lafayette College’s annual Bring the Roar giving challenge had built a strong tradition of community participation, but the advancement team recognized that growth in donor numbers had begun to plateau. Previous campaign mechanics relied on gift-size thresholds and branded incentives that, over time, had started to feel transactional to the donors experiencing them. The team wanted to expand participation and deepen the relational spirit of the campaign without adding operational complexity for a staff already managing a demanding giving season.

The solution was a peer-to-peer ambassador model called Me+3, built on the premise that personal invitation outperforms institutional outreach when it comes to acquiring new donors. Each ambassador was encouraged to recruit three donors from their own network, and the incentive shifted from gift-size rewards to community recognition. To ensure the model could scale without becoming an administrative burden, Lafayette used Advance by Gravyty as the operational backbone of the program, handling ambassador tracking, link generation, and gift attribution automatically. The results reflected what becomes possible when outreach multiplies through personal networks rather than relying entirely on staff capacity.

What these results have in common

Four organizations, different institution types, different team sizes, different starting conditions, and the same directional outcome. Looking across them, three principles explain the consistency.

The starting point does not have to be perfect

Old Dominion implemented Raise while its CRM still needed cleanup. Caritas started from a manual, reactive workflow with no existing automation infrastructure. Lustgarten had a three-person team and inconsistent data capture. None of them waited for ideal conditions before moving forward, and none of them needed to. Gravyty is designed to improve data quality as a byproduct of daily use rather than requiring clean data as a prerequisite for adoption. Organizations that delay tend to find that the right conditions never quite arrive; the ones that see results begin with what they have and let the platform strengthen the foundation as they go.

Outreach scales when the workflow does

The consistent thread across all four organizations is that Gravyty reduced the friction between a fundraiser’s intent and their action. Daily prompts delivered to existing inboxes meant stewardship no longer required a separate system or a dedicated block of time to initiate. Automatic CRM logging eliminated the documentation overhead that had previously consumed meaningful hours each week. When the workflow itself becomes lighter, fundraisers naturally do more of it, and volume builds over time without requiring additional staffing.

Consistency across the portfolio, not just the top of it

Major gift prospects tend to receive consistent attention regardless of the tools in place because the stakes of those relationships are high enough to command it. The donors who benefit most from AI-powered outreach are those in the middle and lower tiers of the portfolio: lapsed supporters, entry-level donors, and non-donor prospects who have not yet had a compelling reason to engage. Gravyty surfaces these donors systematically alongside high-priority prospects, ensuring that a fundraiser’s attention reaches the full portfolio rather than concentrating at the top. That broader coverage drives the retention and participation gains visible across all four of these organizations.

Solution spotlight: Raise and Advance from Gravyty

The results in this report reflect two products from the Gravyty platform for alumni engagement and fundraising.

Raise from Gravyty is an AI-powered portfolio management platform built for frontline fundraisers. It delivers daily prioritized donor prompts and AI-drafted outreach to fundraisers’ existing inboxes, logs every interaction automatically to the CRM, and manages follow-up reminders so donors are stewarded consistently throughout the year. Raise is designed to amplify the capacity of individual fundraisers to engage with up to four times more donors without increasing administrative overhead.

Advance from Gravyty is a digital fundraising and donor engagement platform that powers online giving, peer-to-peer ambassador campaigns, giving day programs, and pipeline development. It provides the operational infrastructure that allows participation-based campaigns to scale without proportionally increasing the staff time required to manage them.

Both products integrate with existing CRM systems and are part of a broader Gravyty platform that helps advancement teams at colleges, universities, and nonprofits scale personalized outreach, build donor pipeline, and drive measurable fundraising results.

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