Top 4 reasons to incorporate AI into your nonprofit donor engagement, outreach + major gift campaigns
Rachel Bowden, Sales Director, Nonprofit Solutions @Gravyty
Here at Gravyty, I work closely with many nonprofit professionals and their teams. As a nonprofit organization, fundraising is an essential part of achieving your mission. While every donation counts, major gifts can have a significant impact on your organization’s ability to make a difference in the world. For nonprofits, major gift campaigns are essential for raising significant funds for their programs and initiatives. But how can busy fundraising teams like yours prioritize prospective major donors for outreach?
Some of the ways that can help you maximize your efforts is by analyzing your donor data, providing personalized messaging and tracking progress with detailed analytics. All of these things can be done with AI-powered fundraising enablement technology like Raise from Gravyty, helping you streamline your major gift campaigns, donor engagement and outreach. In this blog post, we explore how AI and Raise can help your nonprofit achieve greater success with AI-powered tools.
1) Identifying major donors with ease
Identifying potential major donors can be overwhelming for any nonprofit. With so many prospects to choose from, it’s difficult to determine who should be prioritized. Raise can help simplify this process by using AI to seamlessly analyze donor data and identify those who are most likely to make a donation. That way, your organization can focus on those donors who are most likely to give, making your outreach efforts more efficient and effective.
“Connecting with people in our database who had the potential to be long-term supporters of our organization was our number one priority. With Raise on our side, we are reaching and retaining more of these critcal donors.”
– Katie Hammer, Strategic and Planned Giving Officer at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana
Learn more about how Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana and The Greater Chicago Food Depository used Raise for their donor engagement + growth in times of crisis.
2) Engage + cultivate: Maintain long-lasting donor relationships
For a nonprofit, connecting with your donors is an ongoing priority after identifying them. With Raise, you can access personalized AI-generated messaging that is tailored to each individual donor based on their giving history and other factors. This messaging is more effective than generic, one-size-fits-all messages, as it resonates with donors on a personal level. By providing relevant and personalized messaging, your nonprofit can build stronger relationships with your supporters, leading to higher engagement and increased giving.
3) Beyond the “thank you”: Stewarding donors with AI
Successful donor connection and cultivation through the year is one of the best ways to grow support and increase revenue from donations. Stewardship, however, is one of the most time-consuming jobs on a fundraiser’s plate and often gets pushed to the back burner.
“With Raise, stewardship is much easier and quicker. Personalized emails are generated and sit in your inbox awaiting your attention and approval. All you need to do is spend half an hour a day reviewing and sending those emails, and you can easily hit your stewardship targets.”
– Nicole McShane, Vice President of Philanthropy, Big Brothers Big Sisters of New Hampshire
Learn more about how Big Brothers Big Sisters of New Hampshire scaled their donor outreach + cultivation with Raise and reached 5X more donors after one year!
Whether you have one large annual appeal or several smaller fundraising events throughout the year, there is a constant ongoing need for donor stewardship. This means not only thanking donors when a gift is received but also reaching out to share news, impact stories and testimonials. It is also important to acknowledge donor birthdays and other milestone events and generally stay in touch without necessarily asking for a gift.
4) Track + monitor your fundraising progress
It’s important to track your fundraising progress and make data-driven decisions about your outreach efforts. This is where Raise’s detailed analytics and reporting tools come in handy. With Raise, you can monitor your fundraising progress and assess the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
You can track important metrics such as donor retention, donation rates, and campaign ROI to inform future fundraising strategies. This ensures that your nonprofit is making the most of your resources and maximizing your impact.
Another thing to consider is the fact that despite your best efforts at producing timely, personalized communication, not all donors will respond even after repeated attempts at outreach. Circumstances and priorities do change. If it becomes clear after a period of time that someone is no longer interested in engaging with your organization, it’s probably best to remove them from the database so as not to waste excessive resources on them.
Without an automated tool, keeping track of the necessary information and remembering to reach out with personalized communications at the right time can mean spending hours looking for information in the CRM. Because Raise tracks every interaction, you can use it to help you maintain a clean and relevant database which will help your fundraisers do their job properly going forward.
“To anyone considering Raise, it’s a no-brainer! Since using Raise, we’ve had over 95% major donor retention. We’ve doubled our major donors, and we’ve raised nearly $325,000—over $100,000 of which was new gifts.”
– Angela Crossley Ferraez, Executive Director of the Mississippi Public Broadcasting Foundation
Learn more about how The Mississippi Public Broadcasting Foundation (MPB) creatively stewarded their donors year-round with Raise.
Donor engagement + major gifts made easier with AI fundraising technology
Major gift campaigns are crucial for nonprofits that need to raise significant funds for their programs and initiatives. But identifying and prioritizing potential major donors can be challenging and time-consuming.
Raise can help your nonprofit maximize the impact of your major gift campaigns by analyzing donor data, providing personalized messaging, and tracking progress with detailed analytics. With Raise, your organization can focus on those donors who are most likely to give, build stronger relationships with supporters, and make informed data-driven decisions about your outreach efforts.
Ready to get started? Let’s talk.
