The Nonprofit of 2030
At GiveCon this May, I asked the room to imagine it's 2030. What does your organization look like?
Most people in that room are running lean, managing board expectations, and trying to hit this quarter's goals. Burnout is real. Half the sector reported more job vacancies after COVID than before, and turnover hasn't stopped since. When you're in that, four years feels less like a horizon and more like a luxury.
That's exactly why I asked the question.
The nonprofit sector has a habit of underselling itself. Not because the ambition isn't there, but because the day-to-day leaves little room to look up. So before we get into the data, I want to ask you to do something.
Imagine your organization in 2030. Not a larger version of what exists today. Something fundamentally different. An organization that raises more, serves more, and does so with a level of sophistication that would have seemed out of reach a decade ago, or even now. One that made hard choices during a period of pressure and came out stronger because of them. That's the organization I want to talk about. And my argument is that it's closer than you think.
Total U.S. charitable giving reached $592.5 billion in 2024, up 6.3% over the prior year. Giving as a share of income has held at 1.8% for decades. We don't have a generosity crisis. The generosity is there. What determines whether it flows to any particular organization is whether that organization is ready to receive it. That's what 2030 is about.
The forces that are already in motion
Five things are reshaping the sector right now. None of them are speculative.
- The wealth transfer
An estimated $124 trillion in assets will move from Baby Boomers to younger generations through 2045. Some projections put $18 trillion of that toward charitable causes. The organizations that capture a disproportionate share won't be the ones that market hardest when the transfer happens. They'll be the ones that started building relationships with the inheriting generation years before.
At GiveCon, I made a point that I want to make again here. This money isn't going to strangers. These people exist. They're already on this planet, and most of them are one connection away from your organization. A lot of them are already in your database.
- Shift in giving
The second force is the shift in how people give, driven by the generational wealth transfer. Millennial household giving grew 22% in 2024. Gen Z donors are entering the workforce with strong charitable instincts and a preference for cause-first, digital-first engagement. Cryptocurrency gifts to Fidelity Charitable hit $786 million in 2024 alone. The giving infrastructure is changing. Organizations that can accommodate new assets and new channels will capture giving that others can't.
- Changes in technology
The third is technology, specifically AI. 85.6% of nonprofits are now exploring AI. Only 24% have any kind of strategy. This gap is a risk. Large organizations with data science resources will compound their advantage. Smaller organizations that don't have a plan will fall further behind. But the urgency isn't just internal. The next generation of donors is AI-savvy. They expect the organizations they support to meet them with the same sophistication they bring to every other part of their lives. Adopting AI isn't a choice nonprofits get to defer..
- The importance of proof
The fourth is the rising expectation for proof. Younger donors and major philanthropists require demonstrated impact. They want to know what their gift actually did. Outputs aren't enough. The organizations that can connect contributions to specific, visible outcomes will earn second gifts. The ones that can't will lose donors they could have kept.
- Need will always remain
Need doesn't contract. It grows. Workforce displacement is accelerating, and the communities that nonprofits serve are feeling it first. The organizations built to respond to that pressure aren't government agencies or corporations. They're nonprofits. The addressable market for doing good isn't static. It expands with every structural shift in the economy. What changes is who is positioned to channel the generosity that already exists toward meeting that need, and whether they've built the capacity to meet the moment when it arrives.
What the organization looks like when it gets there
The nonprofit of 2030 has a multi-generational donor base it built deliberately over the preceding decade. It has relationships with the donors who've given for years and with the millennial and Gen Z donors who came in first as small-dollar contributors or volunteers. It has a planned giving pipeline. It's engaged with the families of its major donors, not just the donors themselves.
Its technology works for its team, not the other way around. AI surfaces the donor who needs attention today. It flags the relationship that's cooling before the fundraiser notices it in the data. It drafts the thank-you note and prepares the meeting brief. The fundraiser reads it, decides what to use, and makes the call.
The platform shows its work. Your team decides what to do with it.
Its impact storytelling is specific. First-time donors hear what their gift actually did. That's not a small thing. The sector's 19% first-time donor retention rate is partly a measurement failure. Most first-time donors never got a clear answer to the question they were implicitly asking: did it work? The nonprofit of 2030 answers that question every time.
Its staff stays. It's invested in salaries, in development, in culture. The retention rates show it. And its board is engaged in strategy, not just oversight.
The path from here
What I said at GiveCon, and what I'll say again here, is that the distance to 2030 isn't measured in dollars. It's measured in decisions. Ours included.
Bloomerang's job is to make sure the technology does the work so you can focus on the relationships. That's not a tagline. It's a commitment, and GiveCon was where we put our money where our mouth is. Here’s how we’re building towards the nonprofit of 2030 today:
- Intelligent donor prospecting
The first thing we announced at GiveCon was our partnership with Bloomerang with Dataro, which brings intelligent donor prospecting natively into the platform. Most nonprofits focus their energy on the top 5% of donors. Dataro surfaces what's buried below that. Every donor in your database is on their own journey, and the partnership identifies which ones are ready for a second gift, a mid-value upgrade, or a major gift conversation, along with how much to ask for. It also pulls prospect research from across the web into a single view inside Bloomerang, so a development director preparing for a major donor meeting has capacity, affinity, recent news, and giving history in one place without logging into anything else.
- Conversational reporting
Reporting has always been the thing that steals the Tuesday afternoon that could have been a donor call. It requires knowing the right filters, building the right queries, and waiting for something that might not answer the question you actually had. Conversational reporting changes that. Describe what you want to know in plain language and the report is created in seconds. No filters, no query builder, no waiting.
- Fundraising Innovation Lab
The third thing we announced at GiveCon is something we're building. We're not just running tests in a lab somewhere. We're building a fundraising innovation lab as an operational capability, one that continuously runs experiments across thousands of nonprofits, feeds that learning back into the platform, and gives you the information to make the best decisions for your donor experience.
What worked on Giving Tuesday doesn't work on a random Tuesday in June. Donor behavior shifts, device behavior shifts, and a 15% improvement in conversion rate that was real six months ago may need to be earned again. You shouldn't have to commission your own study or wait six months for an A/B test to resolve. We do the work. You get the results.
Conclusion
Alexis de Tocqueville observed nearly 200 years ago that Americans respond to challenges not by waiting for institutions to act but by organizing, giving, and working together. That quality has survived every disruption since. It's present in the $32.5 million that flowed to Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene and the $650 million to California wildfire relief, and in the record $592.5 billion Americans gave to charitable causes in 2024 alone.
Public funding will rise and fall. Community needs will continue to grow. But one constant remains: Americans' willingness to help their neighbors. The opportunity now—as it has always been—is for nonprofits to meet that generosity with equal ambition, and turn it into the real, lasting impact that communities need.
The organizations that get to 2030 in the strongest position won't be the ones that waited to see how things shook out. They'll be the ones that treated this moment as a brief to build differently. You're not alone in that work. We’re here building towards that vision for you.
If you want to see the full vision in action, the GiveCon 2026 opening keynote is worth your time. We walked through what the nonprofit of 2030 actually looks like inside the platform, live on stage.
Watch the GiveCon 2026 keynote:
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