Donor stewardship goes beyond securing a one-time gift; it’s about building donor relationships, deepening their loyalty, and encouraging recurring support. Strong donor relationships mean your nonprofit has a steady base of support, making it easier to grow and withstand market fluctuations that can interrupt strategic plans.  

A Donor Stewardship Matrix is an effective tool for prioritizing and personalizing engagement with donors, ensuring that your organization builds meaningful relationships and maximizes donor retention. It categorizes donors based on two key dimensions: 

1. Level of Giving (e.g., major gifts, mid-level gifts, recurring gifts, one-time gifts)
2. Engagement Level (e.g., active involvement, event participation, responsiveness to communications).

Each donor falls into a quadrant or segment, allowing you to tailor strategies based on their behavior and contributions. This guide explores how your nonprofit can create a donor stewardship matrix in five steps and how it can help you attract more gifts. 

Storytelling is a powerful tool for any nonprofit's communication strategy. The stories we tell resonate, build connections, and inspire action. 

Beyond telling stories about your cause or beneficiaries, there's a goldmine of potential in sharing the stories of your donors. These narratives not only showcase the impact of their contributions but also inspire others to get involved as donors.

In this blog post, we'll explore how you can effectively capture and use donor stories to enhance your nonprofit’s marketing and communication efforts. Consider this your quick guide to making the most of the stories your donors have to tell.

Once your nonprofit receives a major gift, it’s your job to maintain that relationship by showing appreciation and communicating the donor’s impact. You might steward major donors by sending program updates, inviting them to VIP events, and publicly recognizing their support. All of these efforts are effective, but you can make them even more impactful by incorporating storytelling. 

Telling stories is vital to successful nonprofit communications, even in the stewardship phase. Use these strategies to fine-tune your approach and improve major donor relationships through the power of storytelling.

Your nonprofit likely tells plenty of impact stories — on your website, in conversations with major donors, through program impact reports, and during your donor acquisition and volunteer recruitment efforts. Demonstrating your organization’s impact through storytelling is a powerful way to engage your stakeholders and prove the value of your work.

But for your stories to inspire real action from your audience, they must be grounded in data. In this article, we’ll explore a few steps you can take to infuse data into your stories, helping you earn more support for your cause, steward donors, and improve relationships with funders.

Attending the Nonprofit Innovation and Optimization (NIO) Summit last month was an unforgettable experience! 

The energy was electric, and the opportunity to connect with other nonprofit leaders was invaluable. The summit spared no detail with an incredible Indiana Jones-themed production titled "Generosity Jones and the Holy Grail of Fundraising"—a fun and memorable touch.

And very fitting - don’t you feel like fundraising is always an adventure of its own?

While the summit was packed with insights, one message stood out: optimizing the donor journey is critical, especially as we approach year-end fundraising. Read on to discover a breakdown of some of the things we learned and simple steps you can take to maximize your year-end success.

Major campaigns, like capital or comprehensive campaigns, are no small feat. Before you can successfully engage your community and guide your organization to new fundraising heights, you must ensure your stakeholders are ready for such a monumental undertaking. 

That’s where feasibility studies, also known as campaign planning studies, come into play. In this guide, we’ll walk through five fundamental steps your nonprofit must take to plan and carry out a successful feasibility study.

Many fundraisers think of cash when it comes to donations, but there's another valuable asset many overlook: gifts of stock. 

And no, we’re not talking about livestock! 

For savvy donors and nonprofits alike, stock donations present an incredible opportunity for giving that benefits both parties.

In this article, you will learn how stock donations benefit your nonprofit, the types of donors to focus on for this type of gift, and the tax advantages (and considerations) for both your organization and the donor.

Securing a major gift for your organization is no small feat, and your achievement should be celebrated! But don’t let the celebration distract you from the fact that your work isn’t done yet. Major donor relationships are delicate and highly valuable to your nonprofit, meaning you need to approach them with care every step of the way—even after you receive a donation.

Once you receive a major gift, move to the next integral part of the major donor fundraising cycle: donor stewardship. In this guide, we’ll cover four steps you should take post-solicitation to steward and sustain your major donor relationships long-term.

When hosting a capital campaign, year-end campaign, or other significant fundraising initiative, it’s crucial to be strategic about the fundraising process. While smaller campaigns and fundraising efforts should still entail thoughtful planning, larger endeavors with lofty fundraising goals require more attention to the giving process and the specific donations you’re expecting.

That’s where gift range charts come in. These resources help set major campaigns up for success. The tips in this guide will help your team build an effective gift range chart that steers your campaign in the right direction.

The free flow of information between departments helps organizations thrive. Without it, projects hit standstills, ongoing activities get bogged down in redundancies, and strategic priorities suffer.  

This is especially true for nonprofit organizations. For nonprofits, missed targets and ineffective workflows can very quickly make the difference between a healthy bottom line (and more support for constituents) and budget shortfalls that set its mission back.

Let’s say you’re conducting a university capital campaign. Different departments take on different tasks during this complex project. Development and marketing oversee their respective activities but fail to communicate effectively both internally and with each other. Your campaign messaging becomes diluted, prospects get solicited twice, outreach becomes ineffective, relationships are damaged—several missteps combine, and you miss critical campaign benchmark goals. But this doesn’t have to be the case! 

Communication silos should and can be actively identified and broken down to ensure your organization will keep growing smoothly and reaching its goals.