How Caritas of Austin increased retention 100%+ & scaled donor stewardship

About Caritas of Austin

Caritas of Austin is a long-standing nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing and ending homelessness in the Greater Austin, TX area. They believe that when every person has a stable place to call home, they can reach their full potential and contribute to the wider community. To build wellbeing, Caritas provides safe housing alongside services that help people access healthy food, find jobs with reliable wages, and learn life skills that support long-term stability.

Challenge: Scaling personal stewardship with limited capacity

Like many mission-driven organizations, Caritas of Austin is deeply committed to building meaningful donor relationships, but doing so consistently at scale proved difficult with a small team and growing demands.

Donor outreach was largely manual and reactive. If fundraising goals fell short, the team pulled lists, sent mass mailers, and worked through follow-up by hand. While well-intentioned, this approach made stewardship feel episodic and transactional rather than continuous, leaving little room for proactive relationship-building.

Personalization was also hard to sustain. Broad, one-size-fits-all messages went out to large segments of the donor base, making it difficult to tailor outreach based on individual giving history, interests, or past engagement. Over time, this meant that donors who hadn’t given recently, especially lapsed or lower-level supporters, were more likely to fall out of the pipeline altogether.

Competing priorities only added to the challenge. With limited time and bandwidth, fundraisers often had to spend more energy on administrative tasks than on engaging donors directly. Touchpoints were harder to track, documentation was inconsistent, and portfolio ownership lacked clarity.

The result was a growing risk to donor retention and long-term pipeline health, not because of a lack of care or effort, but because the team didn’t yet have a system designed to support consistent, scalable stewardship.

Solution: Human-first, AI-powered portfolio management

Caritas of Austin adopted Raise, Gravyty’s AI-powered portfolio management platform, to move donor stewardship from a manual, reactive process to a consistent, daily practice embedded directly into fundraisers’ existing workflows.

Rather than introducing another system to manage, Raise delivers daily, prioritized donor insights and outreach prompts straight to fundraisers’ inboxes. This approach made stewardship easier to act on, and harder to postpone, allowing meaningful donor engagement to happen in small, manageable moments throughout the day.

With Raise, the team shifted from chasing new donors during revenue shortfalls to proactively re-engaging existing supporters. Each fundraiser now manages a clearly defined portfolio, ensuring that every donor has clear ownership and consistent follow-up.

More importantly, automation never replaced the human element. AI-generated prompts act as a guide, but every message is reviewed, personalized, and sent by a real fundraiser. This human-first approach reinforced trust internally and ensured outreach remained authentic, on-brand, and aligned with Caritas’s mission and values.

As a result, Raise didn’t just help streamline outreach, it encouraged better data hygiene, clearer accountability, and more intentional portfolio management, strengthening the foundation for long-term donor relationships.

Everyday use: Turning prompts into action

In day-to-day practice, Raise powers most of Caritas’s ongoing donor outreach while fitting seamlessly into how the team already works.

Fundraisers use daily email prompts to quickly identify who to contact and why, directly from their inbox. Outreach actions are automatically logged, making it easier to track engagement, document touchpoints, and set clear next steps for each donor.

Just as importantly, Raise adapts to individual work styles. Some fundraisers engage during short gaps in their day, others first thing in the morning, and some during scheduled weekly focus time. This flexibility made consistent stewardship achievable across a busy, multi-role development team, without requiring rigid processes or additional administrative overhead.

A balanced outreach strategy

While Raise powers daily stewardship, Caritas of Austin continues to maintain a balanced, multi-channel engagement strategy that reflects the diversity of its donor relationships.

Personalized emails are complimented by campaign mailings, hand-signed letters from leadership, and phone calls for higher-level donors. Seasonal campaigns remain thoughtfully segmented by giving level, with Raise supplementing stewardship in between campaigns to ensure donors don’t go months without personal contact.

Technology enhances efficiency, but empathy and human connection remain at the center of every interaction. Raise enables the Caritas team to scale personal outreach without losing the authenticity that donors expect and value.

Outcome: More impact through smarter stewardship

Since implementing Raise, Caritas of Austin has transformed how its development team engages donors, driving significantly more activity while reducing the manual effort required to sustain meaningful stewardship.

What changed wasn’t just volume, but consistency. Stewardship became a daily habit rather than a reactive push, allowing fundraisers to stay connected to donors across the entire pipeline.

Measured Impact (April–August 2025)

• 968 AI-generated email prompts created
• 360 personalized emails sent
• 100%+ increase in recorded fundraiser actions
• Higher donor return rates, reflected in weekly gift reports showing more repeat gifts driven by personalized outreach

These results validated what the team believed to be true: consistent, personalized touchpoints, delivered at the right time strengthen donor relationships and keep supporters engaged over time.

Beyond the numbers

In addition to measurable activity gains, Raise delivered meaningful qualitative outcomes that reshaped how the team works.

Donors at every giving level now receive timely, personal outreach, not just major gift supporters. Lapsed and entry-level donors, once easy to overlook, are consistently stewarded and re-engaged. Weekly gift reports provide clear visibility into which fundraisers are driving engagement, reinforcing accountability while also boosting morale by making progress visible.

Perhaps most importantly, the team reclaimed time. What once required hours of list pulling, review, and manual tracking now happens in minutes each day, directly within existing inbox workflows, freeing fundraisers to focus on building, and sustaining, relationships.

Solution spotlight

Gravyty empowers institutions to deliver smarter, faster, and more personalized engagement at every step of the student and donor journey. With solutions for 24/7 student support, alumni engagement, fundraising and stewardship, Gravyty helps teams scale their impact, break down silos, and provide always-on support without burning out staff.

Raise from Gravyty significantly amplifies the capacity of fundraisers to engage with up to four times more donors, leading to improved outcomes. By leveraging AI technology, Gravyty creates a sustainable and scalable pipeline for donor discovery, integrates digital giving data, and ensures comprehensive portfolio saturation through omnichannel outreach.

The smart prompts, video messaging, and AI-drafted donor communications provided by Raise enables fundraisers to reach the right donors at the right time, enhancing both donor engagement and fundraising success.