Nonprofit fundraising has gotten harder. Donors have more choices than ever, budgets are tight, and you’re expected to do more with less staff. Effective fundraising in 2025 and beyond requires teams to be creative and agile, responding quickly to breaking news that creates urgent fundraising opportunities.
But some organizations are still thriving—advancing their missions and exceeding their fundraising goals despite these challenges
These organizations aren’t just asking for money more often. They’re being smarter about who they ask, how they ask, and when they ask. They’re using integrated technology to personalize the donor experience, track what works, and scale successful approaches—turning one-time donors into lifelong supporters.
This guide will show you 9 specific strategies nonprofits are using today to raise more money and build stronger donor relationships. You’ll see how the right platform can turn these fundraising ideas from wishful thinking into your daily reality—and how strategic improvements compound exponentially for sustainable growth.
Optimize Every Donor Interaction to Raise More Money
Raising more money for your nonprofit isn’t just about asking more people. It’s about optimizing every step of the donor journey and making sure the people who want to give actually complete their donation.
Marketers learned years ago that most prospects need multiple touchpoints before making a purchase decision, so they built re-engagement strategies to guide customers to the finish line. Nonprofits have learned to apply the same thinking: they map out their entire donor experience and create multiple access points for giving.
Mapping the donor journey is a foundational strategy for any nonprofit fundraising campaign, but it should be frequently revisited, tweaked, and tested to ensure that it’s performing optimally.
1. Build Donation Pages That Stand Out and Convert
Your donation forms and landing pages are where good intentions become actual revenue. Too many potential donors abandon these pages because they’re confusing, slow, don’t work on mobile devices, have limited payment options, or look identical to every other nonprofit’s generic templates.
Modern fundraising strategies involve leveraging technology to:
- Continually test different donation amounts and page layouts
- Suggest personalized giving levels based on past donations
- Create symbolic gift catalogues that let donors “purchase” specific program benefits
- Make sure everything works perfectly on mobile devices (where 44% of donations are completed, according to M+R Benchmark Reports 2025)
- Let people pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo, or whatever’s easiest
- Express their unique mission through custom branding and messaging
Standard tools like FundraiseUp make every donation form look identical. Worse, they analyze performance data across their entire customer base and apply those “best practices” to everyone on the platform—optimizing for what works best across all nonprofits on average rather than what works for your organization’s unique audience and mission. Charities and businesses alike have long known that every audience is different, yet these platforms force you into a system that treats all nonprofits the same.
Meanwhile, Engaging Networks gives you complete control to optimize your donation pages. Use drag-and-drop templates for quick launches or custom HTML & CSS for detailed customization.
This flexibility becomes crucial during crisis campaigns. While other organizations are stuck with generic “emergency appeal” templates, you can create authentic, branded campaigns that launch in minutes and feel genuinely connected to your mission.
When you can see what’s working in real-time, you can make changes that significantly boost conversion rates, including one-click donation features that remove barriers to giving.
2. Build a Monthly Giving Program That Turns One-Time Donors into Recurring Supporters
Recurring donation programs are your secret weapon for predictable revenue.
According to Neon One’s Recurring Giving Report: Data-Backed Insights for Sustainable Generosity, the average recurring donor gave $941.11 in 2022 and had been donating for over 8 years. This shows that building a strong recurring base rivals the impact of courting major one-time gifts, with the added benefit of greater stability.
But many nonprofits treat monthly giving like an afterthought—just a checkbox at the end of a donation form, rather than demonstrating the greater impact of a donor’s continued support. According to NonProfit Pro’s 2024 Nonprofit Fundraising Study, 56% of nonprofits don’t have any donor engagement strategy.
Meanwhile, the organizations raising serious money use proven monthly giving strategies to make recurring donations feel special:
- They send monthly donors exclusive updates about impact.
- They engage donors through in-person events as well as online.
- They automatically suggest upgrades when donors are most engaged.
- They catch donors who might stop giving before they actually cancel.
It’s about genuine relationships, not just transactions. Engaging Networks enables personalized follow-up and conditional thank-you messages that make each donor feel valued. And by automating much of this strategy, you can easily implement these donor-first approaches at scale.
Case Study:
Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada grew their monthly donor base by 175% in their first year using Engaging Networks’ automation and segmentation capabilities. The organization’s success was supported by our hands-on onboarding process, which included strategic planning and comprehensive transition support. What’s more, 55% of recurring donors upgraded their monthly gifts during this period.
3. Leverage Multi-Channel Marketing
These days, nonprofits can generate revenue with a number of creative fundraising strategies, such as:
- Peer-to-peer campaigns (P2P fundraising)
- Ticketed events
- Branded merchandise
- Corporate partnerships
- Symbolic gift catalogues
- Multi-channel online fundraising including SMS, email, and social media
Effective marketing for nonprofits today means managing these diverse revenue streams across multi-channel fundraising campaigns—but that’s a challenge when each one requires separate tools that don’t integrate with each other. Peer-to-peer fundraising lives in one platform, symbolic gift catalogues in another, while your email marketing, social media, and digital ads operate from yet another system.
Engaging Networks connects everything in one system. When someone registers for your 5K run, signs a petition, and then makes a donation, you can see their complete engagement history and use advanced marketing automation to suggest relevant next steps.
With built-in tools that can show each donor’s last gift date and amount, you can tailor every ask appropriately without manual slicing-and-dicing, IT bottlenecks, and red tape.
That kind of personalization dramatically improves donor lifetime value and creates authentic supporter journeys that feel connected rather than fragmented.
Expand Your Donor Base With Integrated Online Fundraising Tools
Growing your supporter community requires more than simply hoping people find your website. Modern strategies like P2P fundraising, multi-channel marketing campaigns, and regional optimization can help you advance your nonprofit’s mission across the globe—but you need the right tools to use these strategies effectively.
4. Leverage Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Fundraising for Explosive Growth
Peer-to-peer fundraising is one of the most powerful donor acquisition strategies available. P2P supporters don’t just donate money; they introduce your mission to new audiences who trust their personal recommendation.
Engaging Networks offers a sophisticated peer-to-peer fundraising platform where supporters can create personalized fundraising pages, track their progress, and share across social media—all while showcasing your unique brand and mission.
The impact is dramatic: 80% of people who give to a peer-to-peer campaign are brand new to the organization, according to GoFundMe’s fundraising data. This means that every supporter who creates a fundraising page potentially brings dozens of new donors into your community.
More than other new donors, P2P donors need to be thanked and cultivated—but other systems that lack integrated messaging tools make it difficult for you to do so. With Engaging Networks, you can automatically add your new peer-to-peer donors to marketing automation journeys so they receive a better introduction to your organization and learn how their gift made an impact.
5. Reach New Audiences Through Integrated Lead Generation
The most effective way to grow your supporter base is to reach people where they already spend time online.
Tools like Google Ads, Facebook’s Lead Generation ads, and Care2’s petition platform can help you convert millions of new donors—but the challenge has always been getting those new supporters into your system. Often, using these tools means manually downloading your new contacts and loading them into your database, creating delays and data gaps.
Engaging Networks eliminates this friction with direct integrations that automatically sync new supporters into your database in real-time. When someone engages with your Facebook ad or signs a Care2 petition, they’re immediately added to your system and can enter marketing automation sequences.
This means you can thank them, share impact stories, and make asks while their interest is still fresh—turning new audiences into passionate advocates.
6. Expand Globally Without Losing Your Local Touch
If your work spans multiple countries, your fundraising needs to adapt to different cultures and currencies. Multi-language donation pages are just the start—you also need different payment methods, appropriate donation amounts for each region, and messaging that resonates locally.
Engaging Networks supports over 140 languages and processes payments in multiple currencies with localized payment methods. More importantly, you can customize the entire giving experience for different regions. What works for donors in New York might not work for supporters in Mumbai, and your platform should handle those differences automatically.
When you can create authentic local experiences while maintaining your global brand, you can tap into entirely new donor markets that other nonprofit organizations often overlook.
Use Data Intelligence to Make Better Decisions
Most fundraising teams are stretched thin, managing data across multiple disconnected systems that create integration headaches and missed opportunities. It’s not that nonprofits don’t understand the value of their donor data—it’s that fragmented tools make it nearly impossible to use effectively.
The organizations raising the most money use integrated platforms to predict what donors want, when they want to give, and how much they’re likely to donate.
7. Connect All Your Data in One Place
Right now, your donor information probably lives in multiple silos: your CRM, your email platform, your event software, and your donation processor. When a major donor visits your website, your fundraising team has no idea what emails they’ve opened, which ads they’ve clicked, or what they’ve donated in the past. That’s a missed opportunity for personalized follow-up.
And yet, it’s still a challenge to bring all this data together in your CRM. For example, nonprofit fundraising software Classy forces another 40 fields into your Salesforce instance, rendering your existing reporting structure useless. And Fundraise Up is phasing out its Raiser’s Edge integration, despite the fact that Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and BBCRM still dominate the nonprofit CRM market.
Engaging Networks, on the other hand, is designed to work with your existing CRM:
- We can help you sync data in near real-time (and in both directions) so everyone on your team sees the complete donor picture.
- You can map data to any custom field or object in your CRM.
- We use time-tested integration tools and have strong relationships with our integration partners, including Raiser’s Edge.
- Our personalized, high-touch onboarding helps you get the most out of your entire digital marketing ecosystem.
This level of data integration becomes crucial for nonprofit email marketing, which remains the most reliable channel as AI search and unpredictable algorithms reduce organic reach. With Engaging Networks’ built-in segmentation tools, you can use data like a donor’s last gift date or amount to tailor every ask appropriately and maximize the impact of your email fundraising campaigns.
Integrated data also enables powerful reporting—comprehensive metrics that demonstrate campaign performance and strategic impact without having to gather data from multiple systems.See how seamless the switch can be in our Migration Without Disruption guide, which outlines key steps for transferring data safely and effectively.
Case Study:
Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse organization, grew their supporter list by over 6,000% in just 3 years after switching to a unified digital platform. Their integrated approach enabled rapid campaign launches and real-time response to current events.
Read how unified platforms drive explosive growth →
8. Let AI Find Your Next Major Donors and Optimize Campaigns
Most nonprofits struggle to predict which supporters are ready for the next step in their donor journey and which messaging will be most effective. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can help remove the guesswork and maximize the impact of your campaigns.
Through our partner Accessible Intelligence, Engaging Networks offers fundraising AI tools specifically designed to tackle your nonprofit fundraising challenges:
- Converting one-time donors to monthly giving
- Turning non-donor activists into donors
- Reactivating lapsed supporters
- Increasing activism participation
- Maintaining long-term audience engagement
Unlike generic AI tools that use industry benchmarks, these nonprofit AI models analyze your specific supporter data—donation history, email engagement, petition signatures, and other interactions—to identify the most promising prospects and messaging for each campaign goal.
Case Study:
Mercy Home for Boys & Girls achieved a 1,994% higher conversion rate when using Accessible Intelligence’s AI models to convert one-time donors into monthly contributors. From October 2022 to June 2023, the organization sent AI-curated emails to donors, dramatically outperforming their traditional in-house marketing efforts.
9. Optimize Campaigns While They’re Running
Most nonprofits send out campaigns and then wait weeks for final reports to see how they performed. By then, it’s too late to make improvements. However, with the right technology, organizations can monitor their campaigns in real-time and make adjustments on the fly.
When breaking news creates an urgent fundraising opportunity, you want to see immediately which messages are resonating with your audience. Engaging Networks’ built-in A/B testing tools let you test different subject lines, donation amounts, and page layouts while campaigns are live, so you can double down on what’s working and fix what isn’t.
Beyond individual campaigns, the platform also provides actionable insights about broader fundraising health—like monthly donor retention trends and prospect engagement patterns—helping you optimize your overall strategy.
This kind of real-time optimization used to require expensive analytics tools and dedicated staff. Now, platforms like Engaging Networks include these capabilities as standard features, allowing your team to do more with less.
Nonprofit Technology With a Human Touch Leads to Sustainable Growth
Your nonprofit technology platform should feel like a partner in your success, not just another tool your team struggles to use. The best platforms provide comprehensive training, ongoing strategic support, and enterprise-grade security that grows with your organization.
At Engaging Networks, we prioritize your long-term success over profit margins throughout your entire relationship with us. This starts with a fully customized onboarding that includes:
- Goal setting
- Baseline metrics
- Strategic planning for your organization’s specific goals
- Hands-on training for conversion optimization and donor engagement best practices
Beyond personalized onboarding, we provide ongoing strategy sessions focused on your specific goals, recommendations based on your performance data, and access to resources like the Engaging Networks Academy, our online Community, and our knowledge base. You will also have direct access to a number of Engaging Networks staff, including an incredible support team with an average customer satisfaction rating of 4.9 out of 5, as well as a dedicated Account Success Manager.
We also provide the reliability you need: enterprise-grade security that follows the strictest global data protection standards, keeping us ahead of US regulations; transparent pricing without hidden fees; and reliable infrastructure that keeps campaigns running smoothly even during major fundraising moments.
Case Study:
Oxfam America integrated Engaging Networks with Salesforce and HubSpot for real-time data sync across platforms. Their team can now view complete donor information anywhere in their system without manual data transfers. “The migration of our recurring donors was outstanding… They really cared for that process,” noted John Abdulla, Director of Constituent Product.
See the complete integration story →
Start Using These Strategies Today
Organizations are revolutionizing their nonprofit fundraising by using these proven donation strategies right now. The key is having a platform with the features that will allow you to implement them effectively.
More importantly, these strategies build on each other to maximize nonprofit ROI, even on a budget. Better data leads to better targeting. Better targeting leads to higher conversion rates. Higher conversion rates lead to more revenue that you can reinvest in growth. It’s a virtuous cycle that starts with having the right foundation in place.
Ready to Get Started?
The next step is to explore how these strategies would work specifically for your organization. Schedule a demo to find out how Engaging Networks can help you implement these proven approaches and start seeing better results.
The team will work with you to understand your current challenges and show you exactly how the platform can address them. This isn’t a generic software demo—it’s a strategic conversation focused on your specific growth needs and opportunities.
Your next breakthrough campaign is waiting. Let’s build it together.
Contact Engaging Networks today to schedule your demo and transform your fundraising approach.
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