Consultants, this one’s for you.
As a nonprofit consultant or strategic partner, your reputation is built on results. Your clients trust you to spot what’s holding them back—and to guide them toward smarter, more sustainable decisions.
Today, many nonprofits are struggling with plummeting retention rates, disconnected systems, and technology stacks that simply aren’t built for the way they work. And while these challenges show up inside the organization, they often start with the tools and recommendations surrounding it.
If you advise nonprofits for a living, you’re uniquely positioned to help them move beyond “good enough.” Below are five critical mistakes that commonly sabotage nonprofit success—along with modern solutions you can bring to the table to help your clients grow with confidence.
Your nonprofit clients are drowning in complexity when they have to manage separate systems for online donations, CRM, events, and peer-to-peer fundraising. This dependency on third-party integrations creates data silos, increases costs, and leads to manual data entry errors.
We see this all the time with early-stage and fast-growing nonprofits.
City of Good is a great example. Founded in March 2020 in response to COVID-era food insecurity, the organization launched quickly—but without a centralized system to manage donors, volunteers, or engagement. Supporter data was scattered, donor retention hovered around 10%, and strategic growth was difficult to sustain. After moving to a unified giving platform, City of Good transitioned from crisis response to intentional, relationship-driven growth—bringing donor management, fundraising, and volunteer tracking into one system. The result: a tenfold increase in budgeted revenue to $2.1M, donor retention quadrupled to 45%, and more than 250 active volunteers powering expanded programming.
The Fix: Bloomerang’s unified CRM, fundraising, and donation tools eliminate the need for patchwork systems, giving your nonprofit clients a single source of truth for donors, volunteers, and engagement. For you as a consultant, that means recommending technology that reduces complexity, unlocks insight, and sets your clients up for long-term success—not constant cleanup.
With reporting that is too basic for advanced analytics, fundraising insights are limited. Organizations struggle to maintain and grow donor engagement due to basic tools that track retention.
GAP Ministries is a powerful example of what’s at stake when reporting falls short. Before adopting a purpose-built CRM, donor data lived in accounting systems and spreadsheets, making it difficult to even know when gifts arrived—let alone understand donor behavior or follow up meaningfully. Once GAP gained access to clear, real-time reporting and donor insights, everything changed. At-a-glance dashboards showed who was new, retained, or ready to deepen their support, enabling consistent stewardship and smarter decisions. The result: a 60% donor retention rate, an 18X increase in their donor base, and contributions that grew more than eightfold—proof that better reporting doesn’t just reveal insights, it fuels growth.
The Fix: Bloomerang offers intuitive, drag-and-drop custom report generation with filters that make it obvious what to change.
Nonprofits face mounting pressure to raise more with fewer resources. Donor expectations are rising — they want personalization, transparency, and meaningful engagement. At the same time, staff burnout and turnover cause organizations to lose institutional knowledge, slowing growth and stalling momentum.
The Fix: Penny is a AI fundraising partner built directly into the Bloomerang Giving Platform. Penny provides natural language queries, proactive insights that continuously monitor the donor base, and surfaces risks and opportunities in real time.
Many prospects explicitly describe their current systems as “old, outdated, archaic and not cloud-based.” This suggests they’re looking for a more modern, accessible solution with real-time updates and remote accessibility.
The Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital Foundation learned this the hard way. Running on Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge Database View, their team was stuck with a system that was difficult to navigate, expensive to maintain, and offered little to no meaningful support. Reports were hard to run, online donations didn’t integrate cleanly, and even basic tasks felt heavier than they needed to be. As Foundation Coordinator Taylor Hohlen put it, “I felt like I was using software from the 1990s… nothing about it felt streamlined.” For a one-person shop managing a $6M portfolio, those inefficiencies added up fast.
Once the foundation moved to a modern, cloud-based giving platform, the difference was immediate. Everyday work—from donor and event management to online giving and year-end reporting—became faster, simpler, and far less stressful. Features like self-service recurring donations and GiftAssist unlocked new revenue, while guided coaching sessions turned reporting from a months-long chore into a matter of minutes. Perhaps most importantly, Hohlen no longer felt alone. “It felt like gaining a team of 50, even though I’m a team of one,” she shared.
The Fix: Bloomerang offers a modern, intuitive platform that’s easy for anyone to learn and use, with continuous innovation and updates, plus dedicated support with most tickets resolved within 24 hours.
According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, the average retention rate among donors who have only given their first gift to a nonprofit 14% – that means 8 out of 10 first-time donors never give again. Most nonprofits treat first-time donors the same as everyone else, missing the critical window to convert them into long-term supporters.
The Fix: Bloomerang’s First-Time Donor Calls feature automatically prioritizes your top 5 first-time donors based on donation attributes, engagement level, and generosity score. Research shows that first-time donors who get a personal thank you within 48 hours are four times more likely to give a second gift, and a thank you call from a board member within 24 hours will increase their next gift by 39%.
Your nonprofit clients deserve better than fragmented systems, basic reporting, and industry-average retention rates. Bloomerang’s all-in-one platform brings all data together in one place so every team is on the same page, with a more intuitive, feature-rich experience that simplifies fundraising efforts.
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