How to expand, scale + foster growth in your nonprofit organization

The success of any nonprofit organization relies heavily on funding, resources and volunteers. Whether you’re running a focused local charity or an international nonprofit, it’s important to nurture growth in order to increase your impact. But for many nonprofits, the challenge lies in figuring out how to do that without overburdening their existing staff and budget. That’s why leveraging powerful fundraising technology can be a great way to help scale your nonprofit efforts—both cost effectively and with minimal human input.

Here are some fundraising ideas for nonprofits, focused on how you can use fundraising technology to expand, scale and foster growth in your own nonprofit organization:

Expand your reach

If you want to grow your community, it’s important to think about whether there are people out there who could be interested in your programs and activities that you are failing to reach. If so—and for most organizations, this is the case—you need to take steps to reach them.

Here are a few ideas:

Build new partnerships

Partnering with other organizations who have similar or complementary goals to your own can rapidly and significantly grow your network. Take a look at local businesses or other nonprofits or corporations that have similar goals to yours or who operate in a similar domain. If you use a community networking tool like Community from Gravyty, you can grant members of another organization access to your networking community or use the platform to publicize your joint ventures and rally support around them.

Expand your programs

By expanding the scope and nature of your programs you can potentially expose your organization to an entirely new group of people. Is there a project you could launch that would help you tap into a new audience? Getting feedback from your community and identifying their needs and passions is crucial for meeting them where they are—the first step to building deeper connections.

Use technology to reach new audiences 

There are a host of fundraising technologies on the market designed to make it easier to expand and grow a community around your nonprofit, healthcare organization, or corporation. The trick is to select the best ones for your purposes:

• Community from Gravyty—mentioned above—offers an easy and convenient way to stay connected with a large number of people and build an active online community. 
• Gratavid from Gravyty—a personalized video creation and curation platform—allows your members to create, store, and distribute personal video messages for use in donor stewardship activities. This can be a valuable asset for time-crunched organizations that want to reach out to the community in a personal way but don’t have enough time for face-to-face meetings or personal phone calls. 
• When trying to determine which donors to contact, how to steward them, or what to ask for, Raise from Gravyty will be an enormous help. Using cutting-edge AI technology, Raise accesses your CRM, and identifies which donors to contact and what to ask for. It uses information stored in the CRM to design a personalized approach for each donor and even prompts fundraisers with a ready-drafted email that they just need to approve and send.

Steward donors at scale

As you add new members and potential donors to your CRM, it’s important to think about how you will keep them engaged and interested going forwards. Simply adding them to your database is not enough—you have to create an effective stewardship plan if you want their long-term loyalty.

This is an area where many organizations—from nonprofits to corporations to healthcare organizations—struggle. This is because donor stewardship is an intense and time-consuming activity. Research has shown how ineffective mass communications are when it comes to building warm relationships with donors

Effective donor stewardship requires a personalized approach which means that fundraisers need to stay on top of their lists, work out the right time to contact each donor, and determine the appropriate approach. If a personal call or meeting is not possible, they must try to personalize their email communication as much as possible so donors don’t feel they are part of a mass email campaign.

Looking for more tips? Check out our comprehensive nonpofit guide, Building for growth: How to expand, scale + foster a growing organization.

Ready to get started? Book a demo today to see first-hand how purpose-driven technology can help your nonprofit grow.