Practical guidance for development teams: donor acquisition, AI, stewardship, online giving and moving to better fundraising software. Find clear summaries, useful checklists and sources for further reading.
To attract more donors, widen the front door and fix the back door at the same time. Make it easy for people already connected to you (members, event attendees, volunteers, customers) to give for the first time, then convert that first gift into a second one within 90 days. Organizations that only chase new names keep losing most of them: fewer than one in five first-time donors give again the following year.
AI for fundraising means using machine learning and generative AI to find likely donors, personalize outreach, automate stewardship and answer questions about your data. Almost every nonprofit now uses AI somewhere, but very few get real results from it. The difference is whether AI is connected to donor data and built into repeatable workflows, or used ad hoc in a chat window.
Donor retention rate is the percentage of last year's donors who gave again this year. The sector average was 43.3% in 2025, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. The average hides a sharp split: roughly 59% of repeat donors give again, but fewer than one in five first-time donors do. Improving first-year retention is the fastest way to raise the overall number.
Associations turn members into donors by asking at the moments members already feel connected to the profession: when they join, renew, register for the annual meeting, earn a credential or win an award. The most effective associations give members a cause tied directly to the field (scholarships, research, workforce development, disaster relief for members), route gifts through a 501(c)(3) foundation so they're deductible, and see every member's engagement and giving on one record.
Predictive donor analytics uses the data you already hold (giving history, engagement and relationships) to estimate how likely each person is to give, give more or stop giving. The output is a ranked list: who to call this week, who is ready for a bigger ask and who is drifting away. It matters more than ever because fundraising growth now depends on a narrowing group of larger donors, and teams can't afford to spend time on the wrong people.
A monthly giving program turns one-time donors into supporters who give automatically every month. It is the most reliable way to stabilize revenue and lift retention: in the 2026 M+R Benchmarks study, monthly gifts made up 27% of online revenue for the average nonprofit, and about 71% of new monthly donors were still giving after 12 months. To build one, you need a name and a clear promise, a donation page that makes monthly easy, a conversion plan for existing donors and a system that recovers failed payments.
AI can write a solid first draft of a fundraising appeal in seconds, but a good appeal still needs three things AI doesn't have: a true story, your organization's voice and specific knowledge of the donor. The winning process is to give AI those inputs, let it draft and vary, then have a person edit for truth and tone. Teams that work this way produce segment-specific appeals in an afternoon instead of a week.
Donor stewardship is everything you do between gifts to thank donors, show them their impact and deepen the relationship. A scalable stewardship program has four parts: an acknowledgment and receipt for every gift within 48 hours, a stewardship plan by gift level, automated journeys for new and monthly donors, and AI that drafts personal touches for staff to send. Get these right and retention follows, because most donors don't leave over money. They leave because they feel forgotten.
A strong 2026 year-end campaign comes down to five weeks of work: clean your data in early November, launch GivingTuesday on December 1, run a three-touch December appeal, push hard December 29–31, and thank every donor within 48 hours. This year has one new twist. For the first time since 2021, donors who don't itemize can deduct charitable gifts, and almost none of them know it yet.
Donors increasingly ask AI assistants questions like "what are the best charities supporting veterans in Texas?" or "which professional association offers scholarships for nursing students?" To appear in those answers, your website needs clear, specific, well-structured pages that state who you serve, what you do, where, and with what results, backed by facts other sites can confirm. This practice is called generative engine optimization, or GEO. It builds on good SEO rather than replacing it.
A fundraising software migration moves your donor records, gift history, pledges, recurring gifts and reporting from one system to another. Done well, it takes three to six months for most small and mid-size organizations and runs in six phases: decide, clean, map, test, cut over and stabilize. The two things that most often go wrong are recurring gifts that stop charging and reports that no longer match finance. Both are avoidable with planning.
A donor database migration succeeds when you complete 40 specific tasks across six stages: contract and planning, data inventory, cleanup, mapping, testing and cut-over. Use this checklist with your project owner and your new vendor. Each item is phrased so you can tick it off. For the reasoning behind each stage, read the complete migration guide (post 11).
Migrating off Raiser's Edge NXT is very doable, but it rewards early planning. Start at least six months before your renewal date, confirm your data export rights, plan how recurring gifts held by Blackbaud Merchant Services will move, and simplify your constituent codes, attributes and fund/campaign/appeal structure on the way out. Most organizations take four to six months end to end, because Raiser's Edge databases tend to be large, old and heavily customized.
If you run Salesforce's Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), you have three realistic options: stay on NPSP for now, re-implement on Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, or move to a purpose-built fundraising platform. NPSP remains supported with no announced end-of-life, but Salesforce's new nonprofit features are going into Nonprofit Cloud. Because moving from NPSP to Nonprofit Cloud is a re-implementation rather than an upgrade, many organizations are using this moment to compare all three paths.
You've outgrown your donor database when your team spends more time working around it than working in it: exporting to spreadsheets for reports, reconciling with accounting by hand, re-keying event and membership data, or paying for add-ons to do basics. For Kindful customers the question is more urgent, because the standalone product is being sunset and organizations are being moved to Bloomerang. Either way, a forced or chosen move is a chance to pick a system that fits where you're going, not just where you've been.
Move from spreadsheets to donor management software when you have more than a few hundred donors, more than one person entering gifts, or any need for tax receipts, recurring gifts or reliable reporting. The move itself is straightforward: consolidate your spreadsheets into one, clean and standardize it, map the columns, import a test batch, check it, then import everything. Most small organizations finish in four to six weeks.
Clean your donor data before you migrate, not after. A good pre-migration cleanup covers seven areas: duplicates, addresses and contact preferences, households and salutations, soft credits and splits, codes and custom fields, gifts with missing details, and a baseline report of gift totals. Cleaning first makes the migration faster, the new system more trustworthy and AI features like scoring and segmentation far more accurate.
You can migrate recurring donations without asking donors to re-enter their payment details. Your old payment processor securely transfers saved card and bank data to your new processor through a PCI-compliant process, you recreate each recurring schedule in the new system, and you switch charging over on a single planned date. Done this way, donors notice nothing. Done badly, they're charged twice or not at all, and many quietly lapse.
Associations should run fundraising inside their association management system (AMS) when the same people are members, attendees and donors, and when the foundation's books need to tie to the association's. One platform gives you one record per person, one payment and accounting flow, and no nightly sync to break. A separate donor database still makes sense for some organizations, but for most associations and their foundations, consolidation removes the most common causes of lost data, duplicate outreach and missed donors.
The real cost of switching fundraising software is the subscription plus four one-time costs (migration, cleanup, staff time and training) and a temporary dip in productivity. The real cost of staying is usually bigger but harder to see: renewal increases, add-on fees, extra systems, manual reconciliation and donors lost to weak stewardship. A good business case compares both over five years, not just year-one license fees.
Good stewardship is consistent, personal and manageable. Start with accurate records, assign the next action and close the loop with donors about the work they support.
A recurring giving program needs more than a monthly option. Give donors clear expectations, an easy way to manage their support and meaningful updates after they join.
Reliable reporting starts before a dashboard. Agree on definitions, keep donor and gift records consistent and review exceptions with finance on a regular schedule.
By EvolveFundraising editorial team ·
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