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Engagement and donations platform: Ultimate guide to purpose-driven software

Best purpose-driven technology

Energize, mobilize + steward your community with the Gravyty engagement and donations platform

Any organization is only as good as its people. Whether you are a school, nonprofit or corporation, it is the community of people that work for you, surround you and support you that make the difference between a merely ‘good’ organization and a great one. These are the people that you will turn to for help, whether for financial donations or volunteering their time. Establishing a thriving community around your organization, either online or around a central location where members can interact with one another, network and mutually support each other in multiple ways is a great asset. A fully-branded and virtual engagement and donations platform can enable your organization to build an inspired and fruitful community.

While nothing beats in-person events for relationship-building, the capabilities of an engagement and donations platform mean that building a thriving virtual community is now more possible than ever before. Whether you want to solicit donations or volunteers, thank community members for their efforts or create engagement in other ways, a powerful engagement and donations platform will simplify the process and provide extra functionality to help you achieve, and often exceed, your goals.

At Gravyty, we are your partners in creating technologies that equip organizations to engage with their communities authentically, increase fundraiser capacity and personalize digital fundraising efforts. In this buyers guide, we’ll show how our powerful ecosystem of solutions is built to help you engage, ask and thank your network.

The alumni and donor cycle intersect in ways an engagement and donation platform is uniquely equipped to address. Engage, ask and thank!
The alumni and donor cycle intersect in ways an engagement and donation platform is uniquely equipped to address.

3 benefits of using an engagement and donations platform

An engagement and donations platform can offer several benefits for individuals and organizations looking to enhance their fundraising efforts and engage with their audience. Here are three key benefits of using such a platform:

  1. Streamlined and Convenient Donation Process: An engagement and donations platform simplifies the donation process for both donors and organizations. It provides a centralized platform where individuals can easily make contributions and support causes they care about. With user-friendly interfaces and secure payment gateways, these platforms eliminate barriers to giving, making it convenient for donors to contribute. Organizations can also benefit from streamlined administrative tasks, such as donor data management, automated receipts, and reporting, which saves time and resources.
  2. Enhanced Audience Engagement: Engaging with supporters is vital for building strong relationships and fostering long-term commitment. An engagement and donations platform offers various tools and features to boost audience engagement. For instance, it may provide options for personalized communications, such as email newsletters, updates, and notifications, to keep donors informed about the impact of their contributions. Additionally, platforms may enable organizations to create fundraising campaigns, share progress updates, and interact with supporters through comments and social media integration, fostering a sense of community and involvement.
  3. Data-Driven Insights and Decision Making: An engagement and donations platform collects and analyzes valuable data about donors, campaigns, and engagement metrics. These platforms generate insights that can inform strategic decision making, fundraising tactics, and campaign optimization. By accessing detailed reports and analytics, organizations can gain a better understanding of donor behavior, identify trends, and adjust their strategies accordingly. This data-driven approach helps organizations target their outreach efforts effectively, tailor messaging, and create personalized experiences, ultimately leading to improved fundraising outcomes.

Fundraise at scale

Our jobs are harder than ever. People have gone through a global pandemic, social unrest and economic uncertainty. Organizations are also struggling with staffing and resources. It’s time to make technology work for you so you can accomplish more in your day without having to onboard and budget for new staff.

Gravyty’s fundraising ecosystem works as an extension of your team, built to energize, mobilize and steward your donors at scale.

Advance: Digital fundraising made smarter (and easier)

Purpose

Advance is your force for digital fundraising. It gamifies your digital fundraising platform and the giving experience, allowing you to host and promote Giving Days online and design custom crowdfunding campaigns to promote new causes or support active fundraising initiatives. Advance also helps turn your constituents into an army of ambassadors to amplify all of your efforts.

What is it?

Advance is a platform for managing all of your digital fundraising initiatives, including Giving Days, crowdfunding campaigns and annual giving, featuring modern gamification tools and sharing capabilities to spark excitement and engagement.

The platform also allows you to manage volunteers, leverage powerful built-in marketing and e-commerce functionality, choose from 150+ payment processors, including mobile wallets, and benefit from unmatched analytics and reporting to help improve the performance of your campaigns. 

Who is it for?

Advance is an ideal solution for higher education and K-12 institutions, nonprofits and foundations.

Get the full guide

Ultimate guide to purpose-driven software

Why Advance?

Digital fundraising is the name of the game in today’s online space. The goal of digital fundraising is to use all available digital channels in an integrated way to reach and expand audiences, facilitate engagement and expand giving opportunities.

Many organizations use their primary website, email and social media channels to generate awareness for fundraising initiatives, but a designated platform like Advance pulls it all together and elevates your entire digital fundraising presence. It streamlines all of your efforts, from coordinating volunteers and communicating with stakeholders to promoting campaigns and collecting and analyzing data. No more guessing at the reach and results of your fundraising campaigns.

What you can do with Advance

Flexible fundraising—From robust Giving Days and crowdfunding campaigns to Annual Giving sites and the simplest of Giving Forms, Advance delivers the tools to make any initiative a success.

Content management system—Create a unique digital experience and properly showcase your unique brand with a simple yet powerful content management system, enabling you to deliver an impactful story with stunning visuals. Even better, our dedicated team of experts will support you with strategy, hands-on website design services and campaign execution at no additional cost.

Powerful gamification + marketing tools—Increase excitement and engagement around your campaigns through sophisticated and highly visual leaderboards that generate friendly competition, goal thermometers, regional heat maps and more. Drive awareness and donations with automated and modern e-commerce functionality, behavioral-based emails and social sharing tools. 

Recruit + manage ambassadors—Enlist your passionate constituents to help support your fundraising initiatives, beyond donating. Enable them to promote campaigns with unique referral links, build dedicated ambassador leaderboards to provide motivation, plus easily communicate with them and share progress reports directly from your dashboard. 

Payment processing—Choose from 150+ payment processors, including mobile wallets, to easily collect money from various campaigns in the way that is most convenient for you and your constituents.

Analytics + reporting—Leverage the most powerful and flexible analytics and reporting tools in the industry. Visualize email campaigns in a comprehensive, graphical display, while utilizing our embedded Google Analytics chart builder to track a massive number of KPIs in real time. View standard reports or easily build custom queries that can be automated and shared with your team to dynamically track progress toward your goals, reconcile gifts and provide insights to optimize future campaigns.

Raise: The best kept secret in fundraising

Purpose

Raise is your force for AI-powered fundraising. Raise enables fundraising teams to personally engage and inspire 4x+ more donors and sustainably drive philanthropic outcomes throughout the giving pyramid.

What is it?

Raise is a modern and patented fundraising tool that streamlines and personalizes donor relations from the research stage all the way through qualification, requesting donations, thanking and stewarding donors, maintaining strong relationships and improving donor retention.

Who is it for?

Raise is perfect for higher education and K-12 institutions, healthcare organizations, foundations and nonprofits looking to scale their donor outreach and eliminate time spent on administrative tasks in their fundraising efforts.

Why Raise?

Modern fundraising is about building personal relationships with donors and potential donors and actively maintaining these relationships over time. This level of stewardship requires significant effort and time, not only while communicating with the donors themselves but also when performing behind-the-scenes research such as learning about donor interests, finding out personal details including birthdays and anniversaries and understanding capacity and giving history.

The reality on the ground is that, due to the heavy-lifting involved, most gift officers can only manage a relatively small number of one-to-one relationships effectively. Raise changes that by using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with all forms of donor engagement, enabling each fundraiser to significantly increase the number of relationships they can handle.

What you can do with Raise

Boost fundraiser capacity—By allowing AI to organize, prioritize, and automate portfolio activity, each fundraiser can accomplish more.

Increase accuracy + efficiency—Quickly and easily identify the donors and prospects you need to contact each day. Receive a tailored email draft to send them with the first AI-powered email for frontline fundraisers that learns and replicates your unique communication style within days.

Enhance outreach—Raise’s AI-powered algorithms identify the best time to reach out to donors and recommend a specific ask amount.

Move donors through the pipeline—Improve qualification and disqualification and enhance the overall moves management process by proactively suggesting ways gift officers can optimize their portfolios.

Automate record keeping—Save time by automatically writing back your meaningful action entries and contact reports directly into your CRM.

Plan activities better—Proactively request or automatically receive recommendations of which donors and prospects to visit or the optimal areas to plan events based on demographics and location-based data.

Expedite onboarding—Streamline integration and learning for new fundraisers by delivering complete donation details and history, along with proactive prompts which offer a more complete picture for each assigned donor.

Gratavid: Make your community + donors feel special (so they keep coming back)

Purpose

Gratavid is your force for personalized video messaging. Gratavid enables effective and personal constituent outreach at scale using the power of video. 

What is it?

Gratavid is a community-centric video creation and management platform that enables your team to effectively reach out to their prospects, constituents and donors at scale by leveraging personalized video for engagement purposes, including congratulations messages, event invitations, donation requests, appeals, thank yous, birthday wishes, reunion announcements, and many other major milestone recognition.

Who is it for?

Gratavid is an ideal tool for higher education and K-12 institutions, nonprofits and foundations, and corporations looking to give a human touch to recruitment, community engagement, retention and donor relations. 

Why Gratavid?

Administrators, executives and fundraisers want to imbue their interactions with that personal touch every time they interact, but this is not always possible. For example, it can be a challenge to get a hold of the person they want to speak with even after repeated attempts, plus location or time differences can make it nearly impossible to schedule a live call or in-person meeting. 

Gratavid makes it easy to prepare a personalized video message ahead of time and send them out individually or via automation at scale. The Gratavid platform enables users to manage and store video messages and request messages to be created by other stakeholders, such as a certain department head pre-recording a personalized welcome, invitation, appeal or thank you video. 

What you can do with Gratavid

Steward donors and prospects with personal messages—Create and streamline personal video messaging to donors, alumni, volunteers and community members.

Request videos—Request videos individually or in bulk from staff, students, board members or advocates via email, text or a link. You can also create custom video templates to make this easier. 

Automate sending—Automatically send stewardship videos when a donation is made and recorded. You can even set the system to send thank you videos in bulk. 

Drive engagementIncrease engagement efforts by using video messaging for giving days, reunions, membership drives, birthdays and more. 

Manage the process—Make it easy to manage, assign and create personalized videos for your community.

Drive community engagement

In a world upturned by a years-long pandemic, people long for community and belonging. Changes in how we work are driving people to leave their jobs in droves in search for a better balance.

It’s more crucial than ever for organizations to engage with their members to make them feel welcome, seen and connected to their community.

Gravyty’s community engagement ecosystem is designed to facilitate connection and engagement amongst prospective members, current members and alumni alike, making people feel valued and aligned to your cause.

Looking to dive deeper? Get the full guide:

Ultimate guide to purpose-driven software

Graduway: Student + alumni engagement for educational institutions

Purpose

Graduway is your force for building and sustaining online communities. Its goal is to help K-12 schools and higher educational institutions unleash the full power of their community.

What is it?

community across its constituents’ lifecycle. Graduway allows schools to engage alumni with a state-of-the-art virtual networking experience, find alumni who are willing to volunteer, provide college and career guidance, scale their mentorship programs and automate the matching of mentors to mentees using smart matching algorithms.

Overall, Graduway helps educational institutions cultivate deeper relationships and increase engagement with students and alumni (which often leads to more donors). Graduway is an online platform that is hosted in a gated area on the school’s website. Alumni are asked to sign up and provide up-to-date contact and career details in order to enjoy its many benefits.

Who is it for?

Graduway is an ideal community-building solution for K-12 schools and higher educational institutions.

Why Graduway?

These days it is not enough to be a good school or to have a reputation for academic excellence. Parents and prospective students want to be assured that after studying in their chosen institution, they will be able to build good careers and will be supported in their endeavors to do so.

Being an alumnus of a school is akin to joining an exclusive club consisting of all former alumni. Students want to know that they can reach out to other alumni for advice, mentoring and even employment opportunities.

Graduway helps schools maximize this potential by taking all programming online where it can be accessed by any alumnus anywhere in the world, regardless of geographical or time constraints. 

What you can do with Graduway

Alumni engagement—Move alumni engagement initiatives from the physical to the digital space with a virtual platform that can be used to engage alumni anytime and anywhere. The Graduway platform provides one central location from which members can access a state-of-the-art virtual networking experience, a personalized feed, and a directory to connect with their peers and attend virtual events. Schools can customize Graduway to reflect their brand better and to suit their community’s specific needs.

Mentoring programsOffer mentoring, career opportunities, careers-related advice, and professional guidance through one central hub. Mentors can indicate their willingness to volunteer and mentees can browse profiles and self-select the right mentor for their needs. The mentor-mentee matching process can also be automated if desired. Users can schedule meetings at their convenience through the platform and use real-time video networking capabilities to run their sessions.

Support community + alumni businesses—Provide a place where community and alumni businesses can showcase their business and receive support from the alumni community. Allow community and alumni businesses to access a pool of alumni job seekers to find suitable candidates. Promote corporate sponsors and donor-run companies within the school’s network and offer exclusive offers and benefits for students and alumni.

Drive DEI in alumni engagement—Give alumni access to a diverse and willing network of exclusive professional connections to ensure a more equitable playing field. Offer networking connections to a diverse community to break down barriers and extend equal opportunities for all.

An engagement and donations platform helps you cultivate deeper relationships with your community, building lasting connections for a lifetime.
An engagement and donations platform helps you cultivate deeper relationships with your community, building lasting connections for a lifetime.

Community: The exclusive social network for foundations, nonprofits + corporations

Purpose

Community is your force for digital member communities, helping nonprofits and corporations unleash the full power of their community.

What is it?

Community allows nonprofits and corporations to engage their community with a state-of-the-art virtual networking experience, a personalized feed, a directory to connect with their peers and virtual events, all in one place.

Who is it for?

Community is the ideal tool for nonprofits and corporations who want to leverage the power of their communities, maintain good relationships during and after their tenure at the company and offer employment opportunities, mentorship and high-level networking capabilities.

Why Community?

It isn’t just schools and educational institutions that need to build good relationships with their communities; corporations and nonprofits also stand to gain from investing in their people and maintaining relationships over time.

Whether they want to improve employee retention by offering career advancement opportunities, stay in regular touch with employees and former employees, provide networking opportunities or promote the interests and activities of their wider community, any investment in community building is sure to pay dividends.

What you can do with Community

Build a community of mentors—Use Community’s mentor feature to invest in personnel development and fulfillment and build a fully virtual mentor network to nurture relationships at scale. Access a suite of tools to automate matching and provide volunteer opportunities for your members, professional guidance and support through formal and informal virtual volunteer options.

Increase employee retention + maintain connections—Community opens up multiple opportunities for companies and their alumni, whether they are developing new expertise, working at another organization or running their own business. Community allows organizations to publish open positions to former employees, allowing them to acquire talent referrals or hire employees back. They can also retain good contact with alumni and keep track of their activities.

Drive diversity, equity + inclusion programs—Companies can give their community access to a diverse and willing network of exclusive professional connections to ensure a more equitable playing field. Promote inward DEI through organizational culture content and outward DEI by highlighting and reinforcing values.

Highlight community members’ initiatives—Showcase community members’ businesses and achievements to drive engagement and morale. Provide members with opportunities through networking with the larger community.  

Prove success + ROI with analytics—See the impact of user engagement on organizational strategy and mission with smart analytics dashboards and surveys. Dive into key performance indicators like engagement metrics, willingness to give, job post success and virtual chat usage. Explore deeper insights through a custom Google Analytics account. Supplement analytics reporting with surveys to understand member sentiment.

PeerPal: Connect prospective students + families with your top supporters

Purpose

PeerPal is your force for ambassador programs, helping schools and educational institutions amplify word-of-mouth, authentic ambassadorship for their institution.

What is it?

A purpose-built online platform designed to enable schools to run authentic peer-to-peer ambassador programs.

Who is it for?

PeerPal is the perfect tool for any school or educational institution wanting to expose prospective students and families to genuine authentic ambassadors from their community in the most convenient and intuitive way. 

Why PeerPal?

Authenticity is the order of the day in admissions. Parents respond better to first-person accounts from existing parents and students at the school than they do by getting information from school employees. They also often ask more personal and in-depth questions of ambassadors than they would of the school staff. Often, it is these genuine interactions—and not the staff-led events—that facilitate final decisions.

By giving prospective families relevant peer-to-peer access to parents and student ambassadors, PeerPal can help schools offer the more authentic experiences that are sought after today. PeerPal can also be used to help admitted families feel special and welcome via their ambassadors and to streamline ambassador programs and make them run efficiently online.

What you can do with PeerPal

Amplify word-of-mouth recruitment—Connect prospective students and parents with a community of student, alumni, faculty, and parent ambassadors willing to answer questions in real-time. Send personalized communications through emails, calls, and video.

Save time + streamline ambassador programs—Access and update ambassador profiles at scale. Track and measure peer-to-peer outreach and impact. Request specific ambassador outreach, approve video messages, and ensure connections are made in a timely manner.

Help admitted families feel special and welcome—Empower the school’s passionate network of ambassadors to engage with prospective parents and students through personalized digital messages and powerful video greetings. Continue authentic and meaningful connections along the entire admissions lifecycle—prospective, applicant, admitted, enrolled, and matriculated.

Highlight equality, diversity + inclusion—Appropriate representation is a key factor during the school research process and application decision. PeerPal can help schools make inclusion a hallmark of their institution by empowering prospective students and families to connect with ambassadors on a familiar and personal level. Schools can also support initiatives surrounding diversity and extracurricular interests by inviting individuals from all backgrounds to represent their community.

Empower your community—with a little help

It is impossible to underestimate the power of community, no matter what organization you are running or what specific goal you have. You have now seen a selection of powerful tools that can help you leverage your network in a fast, efficient and user-friendly way. 

Whether you want to solicit, steward or engage your community, Gravyty’s engagement and donations platform can help you achieve (and even exceed!) your goals in a short amount of time.

Team of experts

Gravyty’s engagement and donations platform was developed by industry experts who have been in your shoes and understand your pain points. In addition to a powerful donor engagement and fundraising platform designed to solve your particular problems, Gravyty provides a dedicated team to work with you throughout the implementation and onboarding process, offering comprehensive support, customer webinars and ongoing professional development.

  • Strategic account management
  • Dedicated professional services
  • Global partner support team
  • Engaged product management

Ready to get started? Get a demo today.

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