As a nonprofit fundraising professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for ways to increase revenue. Whether you’re working to make fundraising events more profitable, investing in donor acquisition efforts, or are looking to improve your donor retention, you may feel like you’ve tried everything.
But there isn’t just one key ingredient to raising more for your mission. Your revenue must come from multiple sources, ensuring that if one wobbles, others will remain strong. This keeps your nonprofit on a solid financial foundation and allows for more confidence in your strategic plans.
When it comes to managing different revenue streams and keeping track of their performance, a constituent relationship management (CRM) system is the ideal tool for a nonprofit. If you choose a system that can scale as your nonprofit grows, it will prove invaluable and can actually help you raise more.
In this article, we’ll explore some tips for diversifying nonprofit revenue streams and leveraging technology to help you raise more money and increase your impact.
1. Establish Reliable Revenue Streams
To strengthen your nonprofit’s funding, you must first establish a foundation of reliable revenue. With a baseline of consistent funding, your other revenue streams can ebb and flow without affecting your ability to run your nonprofit.
Recurring donations, or sustainer giving, is the most reliable source of revenue your nonprofit can tap into because it’s predictable and consistent. When a donor commits to giving once a month, for example, you’ll know to expect that precise amount on a recurring basis.
According to CharityEngine, sustainer management is a must-have feature of fundraising software. It equips nonprofits to retain recurring donors through:
- Subscription billing technology: Rather than using the payment processing mechanisms of one-time payments, subscription billing technology combines features and tools to prevent credit card declines and help nonprofits get more monthly revenue from donations.
- User-friendly tools for donors: A positive user experience is important for encouraging repeat donations. Your nonprofit CRM should offer a donor portal where supporters can update their address or payment information, download tax forms, or even increase the amount of their monthly gift.
- A dashboard that tracks key sustainer metrics: A sustainer dashboard can show you, at a glance, the health of your program. Track the number of sustainers, giving history, projected revenue, and even lists of donors you could approach to increase their gifts. Some systems offer wealth data to enrich contact records for this reason!
In addition to relying on recurring giving for reliable revenue, consider creating or strengthening your nonprofit’s operating reserves during this phase. With a dependable source of income and an adequate emergency fund, your nonprofit will be secure enough to undertake various fundraising efforts without fear of financial instability.
2. Plan Seasonal Events
As a fundraising professional, you know that event revenue is unpredictable and unreliable. While this is true, it also makes events the perfect complement to a solid fundraising plan like monthly giving. That reliable foundation allows you to explore and have fun with some options that don’t bring in as much dependable revenue but engage certain donor segments.
A wise way to distribute both the work and the risk is to plan one event for each season. This keeps you on a schedule and helps when allocating resources. Review seasonal fundraisers to identify creative ideas that will engage your donors. Some popular ideas include:
- Holiday-themed events, like an Easter egg hunt or a Christmas concert
- Weather-appropriate activities, such as a pool party in the summer or ice skating in the winter
- Flexible fundraisers, like an auction or a car wash, could be held at any point in the year
Regardless of the type of event or campaign you choose, your CRM should provide a robust toolkit for hosting your fundraising events, including registration forms, volunteer management tools, and even ticketing features. With everything from attendee data to donation tracking housed in one centralized platform, you can easily monitor registrations, manage volunteer assignments, and track ticket sales in real-time.
CRMs also allow you to automate communication with participants, send reminders, and follow up with personalized messages post-event, ensuring no missed opportunity. Ultimately, a well-integrated CRM helps your nonprofit run events more efficiently, allowing you more time to engage your audience and maximize fundraising success.
Don’t forget the importance of year-end giving—despite the events you plan throughout the year, the most profitable time of year for nonprofits tends to be in December, when 30% of all annual giving occurs. Your CRM can come in handy when you’re planning year-end campaigns. Leverage specialized software tools, like Peer to Peer (P2P) or texting/SMS, but tap into volunteer management functionality or event software, such as for auctions.
3. Nurture Donor Relationships for Major Gifts
Cultivating and nurturing major donors requires strategy and focus, as well as organization and efficiency, which technology can provide. Your CRM can help you find potential major donors and manage relationships with them.
Donor data unlocks insights about your nonprofit’s supporters, allowing you to not just engage donors but also upgrade their support. For example, you can tailor communications to better engage monthly donors, strengthening your nonprofit’s relationship with them and encouraging them to deepen their support by increasing their gift size.
Personalize your messages to donors using the following data points:
- Their name and preferred title.
- Details about their recent gifts or a nod to their regular giving history.
- Personal details like a birthday or significant event in their lives.
- A reference to their employment, particularly if it indicates the ability to upgrade their gift or if they’re eligible for matching gifts.
The most loyal and engaged donors are those with whom you’ve built long-term, stable relationships, and these take time to develop. The best CRM system will offer fundraising tools and donor data management in one unified platform so that your nonprofit can use this data to get to know its supporters. Take advantage of all the tools in your CRM––from automation to personalization––to create a large pool of committed major gift donors.
4. Seek Matching Gift Opportunities
While each of the revenue streams we’ve covered so far come from your nonprofit’s supporters, there’s another audience your fundraising efforts should target: corporate donors. Specifically, your supporters’ employers may have corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs that include opportunities for the company to help its employees support your organization.
One such opportunity is matching gifts. Companies may offer to match charitable gifts made by their employees, meaning double the revenue for your nonprofit. An easy way to take advantage of this fundraising opportunity is to use your CRM to segment donors eligible for matching gifts. Then, send them targeted communications asking them to submit a match request to their employer along with their next gift.
Crowd101’s corporate giving statistics reveal that approximately $4-7 billion in matching gift funding goes unclaimed each year. This means matching gifts are an incredible source of potential funding for your nonprofit, but it’s up to you to make supporters aware of the opportunity. Otherwise, this revenue will continue to go unclaimed.
Diversifying your nonprofit’s revenue streams is essential to building a strong fundraising strategy that achieves financial resilience. By tapping into various sources—donors, events, major gifts, and matching gifts—you can safeguard your organization against economic fluctuations and donor fatigue.
A CRM plays a critical role in this process by providing the tools you need to manage multiple fundraising channels and donor types efficiently. It enables you to track donor interactions, monitor campaign performance, and optimize engagement efforts—all in one place. With the power of a CRM, your nonprofit can cultivate stronger donor relationships, streamline operations, and adapt more effectively to challenges, ensuring long-term sustainability and success.
Guest blog by Philip Schmitz – CEO & Founder
Phil Schmitz is the founder and CEO of CharityEngine, a complete fundraising platform powering some of the nation’s largest nonprofits and associations. Phil has developed patent-pending anti-fraud tools and industry-leading recurring payment technology that allows nonprofits to retain more sustainer revenue than the industry average; clients have raised nearly $5 billion using these tools. Phil’s passion for leveraging technology to empower nonprofits is supported by more than 20 years of experience in building successful technology and e-commerce companies.
