4 Key Ways to Bolster Your Fundraising Efforts in 2025

Nonprofits are always looking to raise more funds and connect with both new and established supporters, all with the goal of advancing their missions. To help nonprofits achieve this, they continue to innovate and evolve.

“What I see in the nonprofit space is a willingness to embrace change and to try new technologies,” Page Bullington, vice president and global managing director of customer success at Blackbaud, said Monday during the “The State of Nonprofit Fundraising Innovation Panel” at NonProfit POWER 2024. 

Despite the trend of innovation, some organizations have remained hesitant to adapt — often blaming a lack of resources to do so.

“But the thing is, it doesn’t have to be resources,” Kimberly O’Donnell, chief fundraising officer at Bonterra, said during the panel. “What resources are you talking about: people, money, whatever? It can be overcome if you’re able to identify very specifically what those challenges are toward innovation and where the blockers can be lessened in some ways so that you and your organization can really move forward as innovators.”

Here are four takeaways from the NonProfit POWER conference on which steps nonprofits need to take to push their missions forward.

1. Adapt Artificial Intelligence

While technologies of many forms have been impacting the nonprofit sector, one that has been at the forefront in recent years is artificial intelligence (AI).

“I think the ability of AI to democratize data within the organization can absolutely drive innovation,” Bullington said. “It just puts it in the hands of your team in a different way than when it’s locked up in a spreadsheet.”

However, nonprofits have raised concerns about inputting confidential or sensitive information from donors into AI systems.

“You need to have conversations about safe AI, responsible AI,” Bullington said. “... You're talking about giving your staff and your team time to understand, to make sure they're being responsible and safe, especially when you think about the data that we all steward — how valuable it is, how personal it is to your donors. Your constituents want to make sure you're using AI in a way that really honors their data, and to do that you're going to need policies, governance in place.”

Regardless of the concerns surrounding AI, the panel still expects it to become ubiquitous.

“I think at some point, whether we get two or five or 10 years from now, asking the question ‘Who here is using AI?’ will be almost as silly as saying ‘Who uses the internet?’” Michael Longenecker, strategic account executive at Fundraise Up, said.

2. Be Specific With Appeal Asks

When it comes to direct marketing fundraising, specificity and urgency should be top of mind,  David Duncan, president and CEO of American Battlefield Trust, shared during yesterday’s direct marketing session, “Making a Blockbuster Appeal: Developing Effective and Powerful Offers.” 

Duncan cited examples of how his nonprofit, which preserves U.S. battlefields and educates the public on their significance, has utilized direct mail additions like battlefield maps and handwritten notes on the envelopes to motivate its donors. Specifically, adding a printed color map in an appeal helped gross the nonprofit more than $300,000 in donations. 

“Very early on, we learned that specificity is key for raising money,” he said. “The more we could essentially present a product to them that they could see, and that was tangible to them, the better of a shot we had at raising funds.”

When it comes to urgency, matching gifts are often great motivators. The American Battlefield Trust has worked diligently over the years on matching donations. And today, thanks to advocacy efforts from its own organization, there is the American Battlefield Protection Program. This program provides the organization federal grants as long as it has a match for every dollar put toward certain pieces of property the nonprofit is trying to save.

“Everybody likes to have their motivation to be matched,” Duncan said. “Welcome to GivingTuesday, right? How many people [were] going out [yesterday] and saying, ‘Match it by $100’ or ‘Match it by $1 million.’ But it works, and we have seen it work over and over and over again. 

When striving to add specificity and urgency to your direct marketing efforts, it’s also vital to maintain authenticity to keep donors’ trust. 

“It has to be real,” Duncan said. “If you're trying to manufacture urgency, if you're trying to manufacture specificity, the donors are going to see through it. They're smart people, and so you have to take the time and do the work and talk to your clients.”

3. Center Community

In the peer-to-peer (P2P) world, nonprofits should focus on building and fostering community in all they do.

During yesterday's general session, “P2P Event Fundraising Insights for 2024 and Beyond,” Shannon Greene, vice president of peer-to-peer fundraising at Shatterproof, highlighted how the organization, which is dedicated to counteracting addiction in the United States, centers community in its peer-to-peer walk event.

“One of the first questions I like to ask is ‘Why walk? What brings you to this space?’” Greene said. “And very early on in these conversations, there was a theme that emerged: People said ‘I don’t want to feel like I’m alone; I want to know that there are others who are going through this.’”

Greene explained that retention is the focal point of the walk day, so listening to the community and adjusting the event experience to reflect what the community wants is critical.

Cassandra Koprivetz, vice president of peer-to-peer fundraising at the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, emphasized the importance of fostering community through peer-to-peer events. On a single day each year, the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network hosts 55 PurpleStride walks across the county for its community.

“Our community is interesting because pancreatic cancer most times comes on quickly,” Koprivetz said. “A lot of times, our survivors don't make it very long, their families come on very strong for our walk. You come to these events, and you have people who may have just been diagnosed — are deer in headlights, all their families are there to support them. And then the majority of our audience are actually people who have lost someone. So that makes our events very unique. It also makes them very special, [so] the biggest piece of our events is community.”

4. Encourage Recurring Gifts

Nowadays, everyone has a subscription to something. And this has helped make sustainable giving for nonprofits even more popular. 

In yesterday's session, “Sustainable Giving in the Subscription Economy,” Dave Raley, founder of Imago Consulting, unpacked how recurring giving is changing and what nonprofit leaders can do to reap the benefits. 

“It’s an opportunity that I believe is candidly unprecedented in our industry and for charities that have historically been left out of raising, resilient, strong, recurring giving,” Raley said.  

Raley broke down recurring giving into three categories

1. 1. One-to-one. The donor and beneficiary are paired up in some way.
   2. Membership. The donor benefits from services the nonprofit, like a zoo or a museum, provides. 
   3. Everybody else.

“The reality is the vast majority of charities have historically not been able to tap into really large, growing, recurring giving programs,” Raley said. “If you take the 1.5 million charities in the U.S. today, and you take the 75% of those that have historically been left behind that raise individual support, that's 1.1 million organizations that have found recurring giving inaccessible.” 

So if your nonprofit falls into the “everyone else” category, what do you do? Raley urges you to embrace the idea of subscription giving.

“Donors are using that kind of subscription mindset. I'm not suggesting it's a consumeristic behavior, by the way, but that they are behaving a lot more like subscribers and there are lessons that we can learn from that,” Raley said. 

To better understand and implement subscription giving, Raley suggested nonprofits do three things:

1. Benchmark how many recurring donors your organization has and how much they are giving right now.
2. Evaluate your donors’ experience by going on your donor journey with different types of gifts and venues, and track the experience.
3. Design your program. 

“You have to think in terms of a subscription,” he said. “If Netflix didn't think about what is valuable to people, then they wouldn't subscribe to it. We need to learn and apply those same lessons in the recurring giving space to understand what an ongoing value proposition is.” 

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Save the Date for NonProfit POWER 2025

Next year's NonProfit POWER will take place Dec. 1-3, 2025 at the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor hotel. If you're interested in attending, fill out the NonProfit POWER inquiry form.