The major gifts playbook: Turn potential into power

Lacey Jackson: Good afternoon, everyone, or I guess good morning, depending on where you’re calling in from. Thanks for joining us today. We’re going to be talking about the Major Gifts Playbook: how you can turn potential into power. I’m going to give folks a couple of minutes to log in, but I thought I would start this morning. I’m very Midwestern. I’m in Indiana, where we have a Bloomerang office, and it’s very Midwestern to talk about the weather, but the weather has been really getting me down around here.

We always have a great chat, so I thought we could start with a little icebreaker, as I’ve seen other Bloomerang webinar hosts do. In honor of daylight saving time and the chat, let us know where you’re calling in from or joining us from, and then let us know if you are an early bird or a night owl. Diana and Brandon, I actually know your answers, but for the group, tell us which one you are.

Diana Otero: Thanks, Lacey. I’m definitely an early bird these days. What about you, Brandon?

Lacey Jackson: Oh, is that just me? Could you hear Brandon, Diana?

Diana Otero: No. Brandon, we can’t hear you.

Brandon Tremblay: How about now?

Diana Otero: Yes.

Brandon Tremblay: There we go. I’m a night owl, so I’m the opposite of you, Diana.

Lacey Jackson: I know this is a cop-out for sure, but I’m somewhere in the middle. I love the morning. I love being up early. I think I might get my best self probably in the evenings. So maybe I’m actually a night owl.

Diana Otero: It changes too. I feel like I used to be a night owl, but these days I’m an early bird, and that’s okay.

Lacey Jackson: For anyone who doesn’t know Diana personally, she’s also extremely prompt. A year early in life, I think. She’s never been late in my knowing her. We have a lot of folks from Indiana who are also nearby in the chat today. You guys probably understand my weather sadness this week. I think we’re pretty evenly split here. Very interesting.

Thank you all for indulging me on the early bird, night owl question. I will say that I also felt daylight saving time got me this year. It is very cold outside and I am very tired. Yes, Kylie, the winter blues, very much. I thought the winter blues in Indiana were gone, and they decided to come back for a couple of days. Hopefully this weekend they’ll be gone.

I think we’ve left it pretty good, and we will get started and dive into our Major Gifts Playbook: turning potential into power.

I’ll go ahead and kick us off with a few house notes. We are recording this webinar, and we will be sending out a video of this recording to everyone who attends and registers. We’ll be sharing that out later today. Just give us about twenty-four hours to actually send it. And if you have any questions, we have a great chat. As you can see already, people are just diving in to share where they’re logging in from. Please keep that energy going throughout the webinar.

If you have any questions that you want anyone from the panel to answer, please feel free to drop those in the Q&A section of the webinar. The chat is a great opportunity to engage with peers and share best practices. Shout out anyone who’s speaking during the panel today. But if you have a question that you want to hear one of us answer live, or get a written response to, please drop that in the Q&A section in Zoom.

Also, speaking of excellent ways to engage with your community, we will be at GiveCon in St. Louis in May this year. If you haven’t been to GiveCon before, it’s Bloomerang’s annual event. It’s the best in giving, and we’re going to be gathering lots of amazing folks. Diana and I will both be there. There are going to be some cool speakers from the industry. We also have a lot of resources from folks within Bloomerang. It’s a great place to connect with each other, to connect with folks at Bloomerang, to learn about what’s going on in the industry, check in on how folks are doing, and learn what’s new and what’s coming soon at Bloomerang. You’ll get some cool sneak peeks into how things are working, and learn from us and from folks who are living it every day how Bloomerang can help you do what you do best.

For today, let’s cover our agenda. We’re going to take some time to talk about how Bloomerang can help you do what you do best, but as I mentioned at the top of the hour, we’re going to be talking about major gifts. That’s what we’re all here to discuss. We’re going to kick off with a little bit of a level set, led by myself, on some of the key challenges that folks are facing today.

Then we’re going to pivot into what a new donor experience can look like. If we update what we’re doing today, what could that ideal outcome look like? What does that donor experience look like from becoming a new donor to turning into a major donor? Diana is going to lead us through some of that.

Then we’re going to wrap up— well, not wrap up, actually. We will then transition to Brandon, and he’s going to give us some key features and functionality, a look at what Bloomerang does best and how it can support the improvements that Diana and I are talking about and address the challenges. Then we’re going to go into a brief customer story. I forgot that we added that in here. That’s a really exciting way to show how the things we’re talking about today are actually being implemented by a real customer. Then we’re going to save some time for Q&A at the end. Any of those questions that you drop in the Q&A section, we will do our best to answer as long as we have time, or we’ll provide written responses.

Now, I’m obviously going to be sharing the stage today. We’ve got some other folks on the call. Diana, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Diana Otero: Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Diana Otero. I am with our product marketing team, working closely with Lacey, so that’s a nice treat for me in my day to day. I’ve been working at Bloomerang and with nonprofits for over ten years now, so I’m very excited to share with you all today what we’ve learned throughout the years and how it can help you.

Brandon Tremblay: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. I’m Brandon Tremblay. I’m on the solution consultant team with Bloomerang. My day to day is showing nonprofits like you the Bloomerang platform and doing product demonstrations. As Lacey mentioned, I’ll be the one walking you through what it actually looks like in Bloomerang today and showing you that side of things.

Lacey Jackson: Thank you both. Also, Diana, I think you’re saying that just getting to work with me is a treat. That’s what it sounded like. Love that.

So we do have some experts here to be able to actually answer questions. They’re going to be amazing as we walk through that new donor journey and what Bloomerang can do to implement it. I myself, your emcee here, am Lacey Jackson, and I’m a senior product marketing manager here at Bloomerang, again working very closely with Diana on the product marketing side. I focus each day mostly on Bloomerang Volunteer and our services, like our coaching, consulting, and data conversion offerings, as well as our integrations.

But for today, I will be diving into the challenges of the Major Gifts Playbook and how we can turn that potential into power. I am going to ask a few questions as we go through the presentation. Please keep your hands poised over the chat and keep the conversation going, because I want to hear from you all and see what the status of things is.

Here are the key challenges fundraisers like you are facing today. Donor behavior is shifting. Thank you, Diana, for adding that into the chat here. We have fewer donors giving annually. Teams are stretched super thin, and it’s harder than ever to understand where to focus very limited time. If this is the environment we’re operating in, it really makes insight-driven strategy essential.

As I can see, everyone’s trying to track some of these questions here. My first question for you all is: how confident are you that you know which donors are the most ready to give? I’ve seen a lot of Bs and Cs in here. B is a pretty good answer. Obviously not a lot of As, which is what we’re here to talk about. We’ve got some Cs and Ds in here as well. It’s a good opportunity to get a baseline of where everyone is. Of course, there are no wrong answers. I really appreciate having that opportunity to level set. A lot of people are answering the exact same way, which tells me you’re in the same area of what we’re trying to accomplish and understand: where those major donors might actually be.

You might have heard of the Pareto principle. It says that 80 percent of outcomes come from 20 percent of your effort. Fundraising can really follow that same pattern. A pretty small group of your donors is driving a rather big share of your revenue. The ultimate challenge is that most teams can’t actually see, as we’re hearing in the chat today, who those donors are. In a system where everyone roughly looks the same, it’s really hard to identify who is actually ready to give, who’s ready to grow, who could be your next major donor. If they all look the same, the right people might not be getting the right attention at the right time. It’s a delicate balance. If they’re not getting the personalized cultivation that helps them move up the giving ladder, what we ultimately see is a plateau. Almost every nonprofit hits that plateau point at some point. There’s only so much you’re able to get done in a day without a little bit of an assist.

What’s interesting is that you’re not missing data. Most of you probably already have the information and the signals that you need. That information is just scattered across different tools and spreadsheets and notes, or it’s locked inside someone’s head. When things are set up like that, it’s really hard to act on the signals you’re receiving consistently. Again, we have that plateau, and growth stalls not because of the effort being put in, but because the insights you need are hard to get to. If you’re flooded with data, the information that matters most, who’s warming up, who’s engaged, who is ready to give more, is hidden.

We have this visibility gap. You have the data that is [inaudible]. It’s very frustrating. You can see giving history, engagement, all of these pieces, but if I asked you right now who in your database is ready to give more, things get a little bit tricky, because those signals are buried in systems and spreadsheets and, again, inside someone’s brain. That’s not an ideal place for these things to be living.

There’s a clear need for prioritization as well. I find myself in my daily life saying a lot: if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. If everything looks the same in your CRM, how are you able to decide who to focus on this week? Where do you actually spend your time? Without clear tiers, everything is seen at the same priority level, and it’s very easy for your team to spread yourselves very thin.

A key component that we’re very much here to talk about today is the system you’re using. It remains very common, across industries and across different types of organizations, for folks to be working in very disparate, siloed systems. When those systems are disconnected and don’t speak to each other, you ultimately lose context. The way you’re cultivating is inconsistent, follow-ups slip through the cracks, and momentum is very difficult to build on.

This is why this whole conversation around major gifts matters, and why converting people to major gift givers matters, because major gifts are your biggest growth lever by far. They drive higher lifetime value, stronger relationships, and way more predictable revenue. The big idea here is that it doesn’t take hundreds of donors to change your trajectory. It just takes the right handful, if you can identify them and grow them.

I have another question for the chat. There are some things I might miss in the chat, so again, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the Q&A section and we can type up responses. Everybody’s jumping on it. Let’s get into that playbook, but before that, I want to hear from you. How would you describe your major donor strategy today? Trying to be a B, Megan, love that. There’s a lot of Bs and Cs in here. We actually do have some As. There are probably some people in the chat today who have pro tips. As we go through the presentation, feel free to share, or add anything you have. We would love to hear it in the chat, for there to be discussion and a meeting of the minds here.

But just to level set, of course, nobody’s really thinking this, but the goal isn’t to move from D to A, and definitely not to become an A overnight. What we want to talk about today is your first step forward. Eamonn is talking about finding a new program, currently at D but very much with an A mindset, which we love to see. What is the next step?

The first step is to start with who you already know. Your best major prospects are people who are already in your database. The challenge is knowing who is ready. That’s where predictive insights come in. I talked about this a little at the top, but predictive insights are able to really help, because looking at both engagement and giving behavior together is where the value is. You want to make sure you’re not sleeping on key groups. [Inaudible] volunteer, and I think volunteers are ten times more likely to give than anyone else. That is a key group. Make sure you’re not sleeping on your volunteers, your board members, and your employee referrals. Those are folks who often already have a very strong connection to your mission. Instead of starting with cold calls, which no one wants to do, you’re able to start by building on your warm relationships, which is way easier.

Okay, we have another one for you. How many donor relationships are you personally managing right now? Just drop in the range, A to E. This one is always really interesting, because there are a lot of Es. It sends a chill down my spine, because folks are spread so thin. A lot of Ds, a lot of Bs in here, and being the only fundraiser. This is exactly why prioritization matters so much. Once you know who has potential, if you’re looking at 100-plus people, you really need to be able to identify where to focus your time.

Yeah, being the only fundraiser is really tough. Where do you actually focus that time? Prioritization is just so crucial, because not every donor is going to need the same approach. So we’ve outlined here an easier way to think about it, dividing into segments. In segment one, we’ve got high capacity, high readiness. These are folks who are your top priority. They need highly personalized messaging. Maybe you’re calling these folks, meeting with these folks. In segment two, you’ve got either capacity or readiness. These are folks who maybe need consistent, thoughtful touch points, where you may be able to automate some of that work. Then you have segment three, longer-term folks, definitely great candidates for more automated, scalable nurtures.

A framework like this is how you protect your time and your team’s time, and still move people forward and keep things going. Again, prioritization: if everything’s urgent, then nothing is urgent. Prioritize folks so that you’re spending your time on the people who truly have the most opportunity to become major gift givers.

This is really the heart of it: relationships. Major gifts aren’t about one big ask, they’re about building relationships. That means consistent touch points, asks that match where the donor actually is, asks that really understand where the donor is at and what they might be willing to give, and really personalized gratitude. That ultimately builds trust, and that trust is what drives long-term growth. I think a lot of people are in this nonprofit space because of building relationships, and a lot of people who are really good at that make some of the best fundraisers. Being able to understand who is in your database and talk to the right people at the right time is foundational, and a great way to help you reach 100-plus people and give them the personalized outreach that will meet them where they are.

At this point, we’ve talked through the strategy. Everybody has been so great in the chat, sharing information and level setting on where we’re at. But let’s do an additional gut check, because for major gifts to actually work, you need the right systems behind you. What does that look like? First off, can you clearly see who’s able to give more? Some people might have a vibe check, a list in someone’s head, but what I’m asking is whether you have a way to see real signals like engagement, loyalty, and readiness, and to decide which people are ready to give more.

Second, are you able to prioritize based on that list? Donor behavior changes all the time, so are your priorities updating with how donor behavior is changing? Or is everyone still looking the same when you sit down to plan your week and think, “Okay, I actually just need to make 100 phone calls today”?

Third, once you’re able to spot an opportunity, can you easily act on it? Can you plan outreach, track touch points, and manage follow-ups without having to jump between different tools or spreadsheets, which would ultimately lead to you losing context along the way and getting derailed? Are things slipping through the cracks? Do you have missed follow-ups or delayed outreach because something was manual? That does make it easy to forget. Trust me, I’m the sticky note queen and I put sticky notes everywhere, but sometimes those sticky notes go missing.

If we zoom out even more, do you have one place where you can actually see the full donor relationship, a 360 on an individual donor? Their history, their engagement, the next steps, any activities that have happened, seeing all of that together. That context is so important. For some, it’s spread across different systems, and when those pieces aren’t connected, even a really strong strategy is going to stall and you ultimately hit that plateau.

That’s really the question. Then I’m going to pass the mic to Diana to get into that next. We wouldn’t be talking about things today if we didn’t have a solution, a way forward. A better way does exist. So with that, I’m going to pass the mic to Diana.

Diana Otero: Thank you, Lacey. That was a lot of great information, and I hope you all picked up a couple of new things from that. Don’t worry if you haven’t been studiously scribbling down notes. This is being recorded, so you’ll get a link to the recording afterwards, and that’s going to go to everybody.

Thank you so much, Lacey. I wanted to say again that we’ve been talking about systems, and that’s very important, because at the heart of it all, it’s really about donor relationships and that donor connection. When donors feel close to your mission and see their impact, they are more likely to give again and give more. That’s why it’s important for you all to have those insights. Today’s donors expect seamless, personalized experiences, but nonprofits like you are trying to deliver that with limited time and resources. That gap is what makes a connected system really important.

Now, let me know in the chat: how many tools are you currently managing, between your CRM, your fundraising, your volunteer, maybe a separate email tool? From your day to day, what does that look like? How many different tools are you managing? I’ll give a moment for people to respond. I’m seeing threes, fours, one, four to five. Good spread. Five to seven.

Okay. Based on some research that we’ve seen, most nonprofits are juggling ten to fifteen different tools. That’s a lot. Even at four to five, sometimes even at three, that can be quite a bit. Yes, somebody said easily ten to fifteen. Every extra system adds friction, creates blind spots, and increases the chance that donor opportunities are missed.

So I want to take a look at what a donor journey could look like today. Let’s look at Maria. She starts as a first-time donor and has all the signs of someone who could become a major supporter over time. Her first gift comes in, but the data has to be entered manually. Her thank-you is personalized, but it takes a lot of manual effort. She gets invited to an event, she attends, she gives again, but that data also has to be reconciled manually. After that, you’re able to deepen that engagement with her and she becomes a monthly donor. Later on, she becomes a strong major gift prospect, and so you set off a cultivation campaign and do some personal outreach. Again, a lot of that still takes time. You want it to really be personalized and really resonate with Maria. Then eventually she does become a major donor.

Fantastic. Her journey is full of promise, but the process behind it is pretty fragmented and very time-consuming. When you take a step back and look at how much time all of this took, maybe it goes from a year to two years, maybe a little bit more. If you count up all the hours, it takes about fifty hours. At every step, the relationship is growing, which is fantastic, but so is the administrative burden. As you move Maria through that funnel, the burden on your team increases as well.

The outcome is great. It’s fantastic. But the process is not scalable, because this journey is only for one donor. This is only for Maria. If we go back to what Lacey said earlier about the Pareto principle, 80 percent of results comes from 20 percent of effort. How do we do this for 20 percent of our donors? This process is just not scalable, and that’s the real problem. Many donors won’t stay in that motion for very long. They may never become a major donor. You might not even have the insights to let you know that they’re ready for a major gift ask. They may never have become a monthly donor. You may never have invited them to your gala, or they might not have bubbled up as a good candidate to invite to your gala. If you really have disconnected systems, they might not even get to that thank-you. And possibly we don’t even know if they would get to that first gift.

Delayed follow-up, disconnected tools, and incomplete visibility can stop that momentum before a donor ever reaches their full potential. That’s why so many teams like yours work hard but still feel stuck.

The good news is this does not have to be your experience. There is a better way, one where the journey is connected, automated, and easier to scale. Now imagine we’re still talking about Maria, but instead of that long, winding road to becoming a more deeply engaged donor and then a major donor, you are using one connected system. It’s the same journey, but it’s one connected system. The data flows automatically. The donor signals are surfaced at the right moments, and campaigns can trigger automatically based on their behavior. That means less manual work for you and your team, and faster movement from first gift to deeper engagement. When those touch points are connected, Maria gives sooner, she gives more, and she has a better experience along the way. That’s the promise of a unified platform.

This is where everything comes together. Every gift, every event, every interaction makes fundraising smarter by connecting your fundraising, your volunteer activity, your CRM, and all of those insights, all of the wonderful things you know about your donors that help you make decisions and build relationships. It’s all in one place. The result is less guesswork, better timing, and stronger donor relationships, without forcing your team to overhaul how you already work.

Now this ties us back. This is great. You’re bought in. You love what this does, and you really need the right system for it. A lot of you earlier said you’re kind of in the Bs and Cs when it comes to the strategy, but strategy alone isn’t enough. Your system needs to support it as well. You need to know who is most likely to give more, prioritize outreach based on that readiness, and move from insight to action without losing time in disconnected tools, without prolonging that donor journey unnecessarily. Consistency is what drives results, and it’s that system that makes consistency possible.

To show us how that system could look for you, Brandon is going to show us what the unified giving platform looks like.

Brandon Tremblay: Amazing. Thanks, Diana. I might have to get you to stop sharing. There we go, and I can take over.

I’m excited because I’ve seen some great questions in the chat about what this looks like in Bloomerang, so let’s take a deep dive. Where we’re going to start, to set the stage, is a screen you might recognize if you’re working in Bloomerang. If you’re currently not using Bloomerang, this is the home screen, the dashboard. Whenever I show this to people, something usually catches their eye, and it’s not my super overdue task from last April. It’s this graph at the top that says major, mid, and general. This graph shows me where my fundraising revenue is coming from and which segments it’s coming from. In my case, a lot of my fundraising is coming from major donors, but I also have a little bit of mid and a little bit of general.

What is a major donor? How does Bloomerang define a major donor? The nice thing is we have this giving settings page. This is where you’re able to customize and decide for your nonprofit where those giving levels sit. What is the threshold where we consider a donor a major donor, or maybe a mid-level donor? We leave it up to you to decide, because every nonprofit is unique. Once you change it in there, it automatically takes effect across the entire database, so you’ll see it properly represented on that graph.

Now that we understand what that graph represents, what if I wanted to find which constituents are major donors, or maybe in that mid-level tier that we want to start cultivating? Bloomerang has a really powerful segmentation tool called groups. Groups can be created by you, but Bloomerang makes your life a lot easier because we have some premade, automatically updated groups for you. For example, we have this current group, which shows you all of the constituents who have given a gift in the last thirteen months. We have some nice graphs at the top here, but if we scroll down, these are all 121 constituents who meet that criteria.

We can see some really nice columns in here to easily identify if they’re in that mid level, or if they’re a major donor. We see their lifetime giving total. We can access their predictive giving insights in here, their generosity score, which DonorSearch pulls from, and their engagement level, meaning how engaged they are with the organization. We also have this really important field here, relationship manager, and you can see a lot of my major donors are actually missing a relationship manager. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen, so I’m going to show you in a second how you can automate that process.

If I go into Cynthia here, Cynthia is a really good example of someone who might be in your database and fits within that segment two: someone with either high readiness, through that engagement level, or a high generosity score. You can see here that Cynthia is on fire. Cynthia’s engaging with the organization. She’s warm. Maybe she volunteers. She’s given to the organization. We can see her average gift size is around $250. But we also see that her generosity score is on fire, which means Cynthia has potential for a major gift. DonorSearch has verified that Cynthia has given a donation of $5,000 or more to another organization.

Great. We want to cultivate Cynthia. We want to make that ask. We probably don’t want to do that on an individual basis, even though you could. We want to make our lives a little easier, work more efficiently, and find more Cynthias in the database so we can create a cultivation campaign. So how do we find people who fit into segment two, who are like Cynthia, with either high readiness or high engagement, or, sorry, a high generosity level?

If I tab into reporting here, if you’ve never seen Bloomerang reports, we make it very easy. We have a lot of premade reports that are ready to go for you, built on best fundraising practices. The report we’re going to focus on here is this high potential donor report. This shows everyone in my database who has an engagement level of hot or on fire, or a generosity score of hot or on fire, so again, that segment two category. In this specific example, we’re only looking to cultivate mid-level donors, so we’re going to apply an additional filter in here, and using our giving levels, we’re able to easily find people in that mid tier. We want to do that again because we have an “or” statement in there, so we want to make sure it’s taking effect on the generosity score as well. That gives me a list of everybody who meets that criteria, again, those mid-level donors within segment two. The last thing we’d want to do in here is change this from household to constituent, because we want to see the individuals. Down below, we can see we have twelve constituents who meet this criteria.

Typically, when I talk to nonprofits, they’re stuck doing it the disconnected way that Diana was talking about. You want to reach out to these individuals and cultivate and steward them properly, but you might be stuck doing a lot of the steps manually. Let’s look at how Bloomerang can make that journey a lot more automated for you.

The first thing we’d want to do with these individuals is add them to a group. I already have my segment two group created. We can see the high capacity or high readiness group, so we’re going to select that and add these individuals to it.

Now this is where the magic happens, so to speak. We have what we call journey automations in Bloomerang. Like the name suggests, it’s a way to automate journeys. I have a lot built out. This is kind of my personal playground, so I have to scroll down to find the example I want to show you. But you can see I have a built-out one called Segment Two. Let’s break down step by step how this works.

With journey automations, you select an entry source. If I go into mine, you can see I’m targeting those individuals I just added to that segment two group. Those twelve individuals are all going to be part of this journey. We talked about the relationship manager field, and a lot of my constituents were missing a relationship manager. Journey automations can automatically assign a relationship manager, so you don’t have to go into each individual profile and assign it yourself. Once that relationship manager field is assigned, it’s going to automate an email going out to those constituents, making that ask.

Next, we’re going to be a little more intentional. Instead of an email being sent out, we’re going to create a task list for these twelve individuals. If I go into my task, we’re going to do a little bit of research. We want to see how these individuals are giving, maybe if they’re giving through a DAF, for example. We also want to see where they’re giving. Do they have a favorite cause that we can lean on? It’d also be nice to know what emails they’re opening. Are they opening our newsletters? Are they opening the more personal touch points we send them? We want to get a clear understanding of that.

The reason that’s important is that our next step is to create another task for us to call these constituents on an individual basis, and have a direct outreach, a phone conversation, to make it personal. If they still haven’t given a gift after this, we’re going to put a time delay on here. Before anything else takes place, we’re going to wait twenty-one days. Then we’re going to send out our final email, making that final ask, and that’s the end of our journey.

This gives you an idea of how you can start creating those journeys, tailor them to your cultivation strategies, and there’s a lot of capability in here that you can use to work more effectively.

If I go to another example here, as we think about our segment three individuals, it’s the same idea. We want to put these constituents in more of a long-term nurture campaign. They might already be major donors, so we want to make sure we have a good retention strategy set up for them. Similar to what we just saw, we’re going to make sure all those major donors have a relationship manager assigned to them. Maybe we send out an email automatically, and then we get creative, but also intentional. We create a task for our CEO to call these individuals and maybe personally thank them for the impact they have on the organization. Lastly, maybe you’re sending out quarterly impact reports to these individuals, so you want to make them understand the impact they have on the organization, and this is a really automated way to do so. As you think about getting away from those disconnected journeys that Diana was talking about and bringing it all into an automated way, it’s going to save you a ton of time. It also allows you to create some really intentional fundraising strategies to nurture individuals or to make that ask for a major gift.

I think, hopefully, we can all agree that this is really great. We can take this to the next level within Bloomerang, and I’m really excited to talk about this piece. Bloomerang has very recently released an AI fundraising assistant called Penny. It’s different from what you might be thinking of with ChatGPT. It was built on best fundraising practices, and it actually lives on top of all of your data within the system. Penny is able to analyze all of the data points in your system and show you information you might want to see, but also come up with strategies and actionable next steps, rather than relying on you or your team to be a data analyst, analyze all the data points, and create the strategy yourself. Penny does the heavy lifting for you.

This is an example prompt we can use for Penny. We’re lagging behind on our capital campaign. We want Penny to help create a strategy. We want to focus on reengaging lapsed, at-risk, or at-risk lapsed major donors. We also want Penny to create a priority-based strategy and provide data on the potential impact of each strategy. Then we put our goal at the bottom: we’re looking to raise another $50,000 by the fall of 2026, because we’re looking to start our building project.

That’s a lot to put into Penny, so let’s take a look at what Penny’s able to do. Things go pretty quick here, so I might pause and explain what’s actually happening. We put in our prompt, and Penny analyzes that information. If I pause it, you can see Penny highlights the opportunity. It’s able to create the phased approach that we asked for. If I stop it here, we can see Penny analyzes the goal. We want an additional $15,000 from this phase two, from upgrades and new prospects, and it spits out a probability analysis. This gives you all of the information you need to put that strategy in place. Again, it comes up with strategies based on best fundraising practices, so it’s really good for creating strategy.

It’s also really good for doing some of the, I guess, boring work you might be doing in the CRM. In my example, I went to the reports, pulled a list of people, and added them to a group. Penny can actually do that for you as well. We’re going to ask Penny, “Please create groups for each of those priority areas that we specified, so we can then take action on them.” Penny highlights all of the members being added to each group. In this case, we have priority one a group, and Penny highlights the action you’re supposed to take next. So rather than spending time going to reporting and adding people to groups, you can have Penny do the heavy lifting for you. You can see in a second what that group looks like once Penny’s done. All those priority groups are built out and those members are added to them.

Penny is a really effective way to build fundraising strategies. I could probably talk about Penny all day. If you’re interested in learning more about Penny, we’re doing a webinar on March 31st, at the end of the month, that will be Penny-focused, so I definitely recommend attending. That’s my spiel. I’ll hand it back to Lacey.

Lacey Jackson: Yes, okay. I will take us through the end before we get into some of the questions that have been submitted. We’ve had some great questions, so definitely keep those coming, as well as your chats and anything else you need to drop in there. I’m going to share my screen again here, and just round us out.

When we step back and look at everything we’ve covered, it comes down to bringing things together, with Bloomerang and the systems you’re implementing, not just as software but as the process you’re putting behind it, in the way you’re segmenting and making sure you’re paying attention to those things. You have a complete donor engine there. You’re attracting new supporters with high-converting forms and peer-to-peer campaigns without adding a manual lift to your team. You’re building personalized, meaningful relationships through things like journey automation, and you’re able to move folks from that first gift to long-term stewardship. And it’s all powered by unified donor data, giving you clear visibility into engagement and generosity so you can focus on the right people at the right time. Then you’re activating those supporters in more ways, whether that’s through volunteering, monthly giving, or peer-to-peer fundraising. These pieces are all connected and working together to help you grow your donor base and deepen relationships, ultimately driving more impact over time.

I wanted to share, like I said at the top, a customer story where we can see what’s possible when a major gift strategy is backed by stronger insight into your donor base. We’ve got Tyler Bradshaw here. I know, from the chat, this will resonate. He was a team of one, managing daily fundraising while working to unlock a $1 million matching gift before the end of the year. Tyler is actually using Penny, which Brandon just shared. I definitely saw some interest in Penny in the Q&A section. With Penny, he was able to identify stronger major donor opportunities and prepare for donor meetings in a much more detailed way, so that he could approach the asks he was making with more confidence and understanding. Of course, Penny is extremely useful for Tyler as a team of one, but it’s not just for small shops. It’s an opportunity and a resource that can help you scale, whether it’s one person managing the work or a larger team dividing up a large portfolio. Across the board, better donor insights help organizations focus on the right prospects and make major gift fundraising more strategic.

I think we’ll launch a poll here so that you can share whether you need some additional information, if you want to learn more, or if you want someone to reach out to you about Bloomerang. But I’m going to stop sharing here, and I think we can dive into some of the Q&A.

Actually, I did forget one thing that I’ll shout out really briefly: we do have some other webinars. This one’s actually passed, I think, but this webinar series does go on, so keep an eye out for different webinars that are coming up. I’ll drop in the chat a link to some resources that will also support your major gifts playbook. This is a webinar series we are consistently doing, so you can see me, Diana, and Brandon always coming around to chat about things and, again, answer questions.

Let’s look at the Q&A section. Brandon, there are definitely some in here for you that came through during your demo. I’ll pull one up. We had one question: the majority of our mid giving levels are tributes for a loved one. How do we navigate contacting them for more when the gift was made in memory of a loved one or a friend who has passed?

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah. To be honest with you, I’m not sure on the best practices for that. My recommendation initially would be to almost change the framing of it and frame it as legacy, not an obligation. When you do make the ask, position it almost as an opportunity to honor the loved one’s memory through continued impact, not so much as “we need more from you.” I think language like that, and changing the framing, could really help.

Lacey Jackson: Anything to add there, Diana? I just saw you nodding as well.

Diana Otero: Yeah, I agree with that. That’s a tricky situation, and you’re not alone. That happens to everybody with tribute gifts. I think it’s really that invitation. It’s a celebration of this person’s life. You never know if, by virtue of their connection with that person, they now have a connection to your mission. If you don’t invite them into that, you’ll never know. So start out by definitely sending them the thank-you. If you happen to send another email, they are able to manage their own email preferences, and that can give you some signals. Are they opening your emails? Are they responding to your emails? Do they opt out? That gives you a clearer signal. And especially like Brandon said, you’re not necessarily looking for that next ask right away, but work on building that relationship with them.

Lacey Jackson: Thanks, guys. We have a lot of questions about Penny and Penny access. We might not be able to answer all of these here today, but how do folks actually get ahold of Penny? I don’t know if we have the answer here.

Diana Otero: If you are able to see... I think it’s a sparkly icon. Is that what that icon is called? On the top right of your Bloomerang CRM. That’s how you access Penny. I will say, though, that not everyone has access to Penny yet, because as we’re rolling Penny out, we want to make sure she’s able to handle all of the wonderful questions coming in. If you don’t have her yet, it might just not have gotten to you. We’re very excited that you’re excited for Penny as well. So at this point, it’s thank you for your excitement, and we’ll let you know when Penny is available for you.

Lacey Jackson: Thank you for that, Diana. Oh, I know we have a Penny expert peeping in here too.

Katie Gaston: Special guest: there is a person behind the Bloomerang webinars. Surprise, surprise. Yes, I just wanted to add on. Thanks, Diana, for handling that. We are targeting the full Penny rollout likely in the next couple of weeks, so if you don’t have Penny yet, you should have her soon. Just look at that top right corner. And what I would encourage you to do, since we shared the link earlier in the chat, is register for the webinar. That’s a great opportunity to learn more about what Penny can do. Thanks.

Lacey Jackson: Thank you, Katie, for being our little surprise guest and Penny expert in here. That will answer a couple of the Penny questions we had in the chat as well.

Reading through a couple of these. Brandon, this one might be for you as well. This is pretty particular. It’s from Erica, who saw a demo of a Bloomerang CRM workflow where a relationship manager could easily see everyone in their portfolio and work through tasks on one screen, donor by donor. This might not be a feature that is currently available, but she was asking if that currently exists. Her challenge is not in identifying major donors and prospects, but in operationalizing major donor engagement.

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah, that’s interesting. I can’t speak to the roadmap too much, because honestly, I’m not in charge of it. What I can say is that, from the sounds of it, I think the journey automations we looked at today could be a good solution. I’m looking at the question here: you have a busy executive director who really just needs the tasks of the people they’re in charge of. With journey automations assigning that relationship manager, they’ll get notified and have that task automatically created. So your executive director or anyone else on your team will have a personalized task list for all of those tasks that they can just work through one by one.

Lacey Jackson: Thank you. Let’s see if I’ve missed anything here. I know several questions have been answered in the written answers. Diana, do you see any others?

Diana Otero: Have we answered Giles’s question about the giving levels?

Lacey Jackson: No? Okay.

Diana Otero: Giles is asking, and I hope I’m saying that correctly, he knows where to edit the giving levels and has left them where Bloomerang has them set. They’re wondering more about evaluating the levels and whether they should increase or lower their numbers. I’ll start now, and I invite the panel if they have additional thoughts as well.

The levels that are currently in there, the defaults, are based on FEP’s giving levels for general, mid, and major. You can keep it at that. I think that’s a nice way to put it: if you want to benchmark against what FEP has, that’s a great starting place, or even aspirational. But you can also take a look at it from the point of view of what a major gift looks like for your organization, because that could be different. In the same week I had two customer calls where, for one organization, a major gift is $1,000, and for another, it was $25,000. So that also depends on where you are. My advice at this point is, with the defaults, look at the mix you have right now. What percentage are in your general, mid, and major? Does that feel right to you for where those giving levels should be? Or are there certain donors you’re thinking of, like, “Oh, this person is a major donor”? How are they being classified under the default classification? That can give you a good starting point for where you might adjust. Anything to add from our panelists?

Brandon Tremblay: I think that was well said, Diana. The only thing I would add is on the peer benchmark strategy: if you know other nonprofits in your sector, contact them and see how they’re aligning their giving levels. That could also be a really good way to benchmark things.

Lacey Jackson: OK. We can add that that’s done. We do have a longer one here from David. I don’t want to skip over that one. Brandon, you might have seen that. Is that something we want to answer live? We can also follow up.

Brandon Tremblay: It might be worth following up afterwards, David, so we can give you a more personalized answer on that one. I definitely recommend maybe booking a product demo so we can dive deeper into those specific use cases you mentioned and show you what it would look like within Bloomerang. At first glance of reading your question, I would say yes to both of those, but without digging a little deeper and understanding the full context, we’ll have to find out.

Lacey Jackson: I think we have one question left, which was on Penny: is it a part of the fundraising platform, or is it a separate option or an add-on? I think we might be getting a written answer to that, but it is a part of CRM. That’s where you’ll find her. Katie, I don’t know if you want to add, our special guest.

Katie Gaston: Bloomerang webinars back again. I’ll just add. I put that in the Q&A and in some of the chat, but just so everyone knows, Penny is currently in a beta state. As you get access to Penny over the course of the next couple of weeks, like we mentioned, everyone who has access to Bloomerang CRM will currently have access to Penny. [Inaudible.] We’d love you to experiment. We learn more as you learn, to see what you’re using Penny for, and that’s really the objective over the next few months: to just learn more. So as of now, everyone does have access.

Lacey Jackson: Okay. I think that’s all of the questions that came through on the Q&A side. Oh, well, I will say we did have one additional question just pop in. Sorry. Is everything we learned today only for CRM, or for fundraising too? We talked about a lot of things, but the idea here is that we’re speaking across the Bloomerang platform, not even just CRM and fundraising, but Volunteer as well. We obviously did a lot of demoing of CRM features today. If there are additional fundraising or volunteer questions, we’re almost at the top of the hour, but we’re always happy to answer those as well.

Diana Otero: Lacey, I just wanted to add to what you said. You saw a lot of the CRM today, but really, that’s where all the data is brought together. So even though we saw a lot of the CRM today, it has data from fundraising and it has data from volunteer. It’s really all of those pieces working together.

Lacey Jackson: Yeah, that’s a great addition, Diana. Again, a key piece of what we’re talking about is making sure you have insight across the board, and that the tools are all working together to show you a full 360-degree picture of your constituents. That’s not just the donors. It does include the volunteers. They obviously have a special place in my heart. Your fundraising information and your volunteer information are all being filtered into CRM. Wise words to leave us on today, Diana. Thank you all for such great questions and engagement in the chat. I think with that, I will let everyone go. What perfect timing. Have a great afternoon, everyone.

Diana Otero: Bye. Thanks.