What Advancement Teams Can Do About the Donor Capacity Gap Every advancement team knows there are more donors in the database than there are gift officers to manage them, and no amount of hiring closes that gap fast enough. This leaves the top donors getting personal attention and everyone else to mass outreach. Version2.ai surveyed more than 100 nonprofit organizations, putting a hard number on the donor capacity gap — the space between the donors an institution has and the

Rethinking Planned Giving Beyond the Seasonal Campaign During the month of August, an initiative teams often leverage for their planned giving campaigns is Make-A-Will-Month. Though it's a natural hook for fundraisers to lean into, the message can fall flat when it’s an impersonal checklist or a beneficiary reminder that donors are left to make sense of, largely on their own. The awareness around planned giving isn’t what donors are missing. It’s the next step. Rated prospect

Identifying who should stay in a portfolio and who should be removed, is a difficult decision frontline fundraisers have to make. Once removed, it's unlikely those rated, known prospects will receive one-to-one engagement again. But that one-to-one engagement is exactly what these donors need to move through the pipeline. This is the common pain point across advancement: not enough capacity to reach the volume of rated and known donors who could make a real impact on the miss

Less than 3% of donors have a prospect manager. At an institution with 250,000 solicitable donors, that can mean upwards of 50,000 rated, giving donors with no assigned gift officer. Mass communication can check a box to reach those donors, but it can't replicate what one-to-one engagement does for retention, upgrades, and lapsed donor reactivation. Traditionally, to reach more donors and solve the capacity problem, organizations have had to add more people, but there are nev

Over the last few months, several fundraising reports have analyzed last year’s philanthropy, with Giving USA's annual report among the most recent. The common thread as I’ve read through them: philanthropy continues to grow. But anyone who's spent time inside a development office knows that a topline number rarely tells the full story. Most organizations have more donors who deserve individual attention than staff allow. That gap has always existed, but with each new report

There's a particular feeling that sets in around this time of year. Emails return vacation auto-replies more often than responses. The event calendar skips ahead to fall. The only thing gaining momentum is the summer slump, and your donors' attention is much harder to earn. For organizations on a July-to-June fiscal year, it feels impossible to "start the year strong" until September. For everyone else, momentum plateaus. Teams stretch thin, take well-deserved vacations, and

Caps and gowns are packed away, campuses have quieted down, yet for many advancement teams, the clock is ticking on the final stretch of the fundraising year. The Ask That Wasn't an Ask Commencement season isn't just a milestone for graduating students. For fundraising teams, it's one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the alumni relationship, a time when many reflect on their institutional connections and the impact it made on their lives. This spring, VEOs across o

Introducing PHI Detection for Healthcare Partners A grateful patient reaches out to your institution. When sharing why they want to give, they mention their diagnosis, their physician, and the treatment that changed their life. It's a deeply human moment, but a data liability. Human gift officers face this every day. Over time, they develop judgment about what goes into the CRM and what doesn't. They know when to document and when to leave something out. They understand, with

When thinking about unmanaged donors, it's often assumed that these supporters are unrated or unknown. But thousands of donors in databases have demonstrated real generosity, real loyalty, and real connection to the institution — and never hear from a gift officer. Some of these donors have six and seven-figure capacity. Yet a majority are giving smaller amounts, and would give deeper if given the opportunity. Our team has had the opportunity to work with Macalester College a

Over the last few months, we've shared updates about the many Giving Days Virtual Engagement Officers have supported this spring, and if you've ever held a Giving Day, you know how much goes into it. But what comes out of it is just as exciting, and as we wrap up the Giving Day season with nearly 70 completed campaigns, the data tells a story that goes beyond the totals. As Autonomous Fundraising becomes a strategic part of Giving Day success metrics, the ROI is undeniable. A

Virtual Engagement Officers have sent over one million personalized messages to thousands of previously unmanaged donors. What's come back isn't just giving or engagement data. We're seeing an actual window into how donors think, what moves them, and where most cultivation falls short. More and more, I've been asked by fundraising leaders how we as humans can learn from analyzing the engagements and millions of dollars raised by the VEO. I'd like to share three things that A

Virtual Engagement Officers have been busy this spring supporting 67 Giving Days, and the results thus far are nothing short of incredible. Across the participating organizations, VEOs raised $1.74 million from 6,600 gifts, which is more than 5X what we saw a year ago. Nearly 40% of that total revenue was net new revenue from upgrades and lapsed recaptures. More than 1,300 donors increased their giving, totaling $488K, and 755 lapsed donors renewed their support, contributin

Autonomous Fundraising for lapsed donor re-engagement It's a universal experience: you pull up a donor record and see years of consistent giving in meaningful amounts, demonstrating real affinity for the institution. Then, the giving just stops. There's no explanation in the donor's record. No response to direct mail, email, or event invitations. Just silence, and a gap in the database that gets harder to close the longer it sits. This is the lapsed donor problem, and it's on

The past couple of weeks have been an exciting whirlwind for our team, attending conferences across the United States and Canada. We’re so grateful to have shared the stage with our wonderful partners, presenting their achievements through Autonomous Fundraising. From those results, there is a consistent story being told: the biggest opportunity for deeper engagement and increased revenue comes from donors who are known and give annually or have recently lapsed. At the CASE I

Since February, Virtual Engagement Officers across our partner network have supported more than 50 Giving Days and raised over $1.1 million for these campaigns so far. This success is a direct result of the opportunities VEOs are being given to drive tangible outcomes for their organizations. VEOs aren’t just focused on this one singular Giving Day opportunity. They're engaging these donors holistically to make sure Giving Day becomes a milestone in their donor journey, not

For small fundraising teams, the math rarely works out. The donor list grows, goals increase, but staff capacity stays the same. Italian Home for Children, a Boston-based nonprofit serving some of Massachusetts' most vulnerable youth and families, knew this tension well. With a lean advancement team and no shortage of mission urgency, they started asking a different question: how do we show up more consistently and thoughtfully for our donors? They weren’t looking for a tech

As Planned Giving Departments Face a Capacity Crisis, the Gap Between AI-Assisted and Fully Autonomous Widens Givzey | Version2.ai , the pioneering company that invented Autonomous Fundraising and deployed the first Autonomous AI fundraisers in the world, announced the Virtual Planned Giving Officer (VPGO) 3.0 . While the broader fundraising technology industry is just beginning to introduce AI assistants that require human oversight to function, Givzey | Version2.ai is rele

When the Medical University of South Carolina team was thinking through their Autonomous AI Fundraising strategy, there were two clear use cases: a clinical segment and an alumni segment. Carley Houseman, Director of Annual Giving, shares the results her team is seeing so far and what’s on the horizon. Q: You launched two Virtual Engagement Officers simultaneously — James for clinical donors and Emilie for alumni. How did MUSC land on launching two VEOs? A: It actually start

There's a segment of donors in almost every advancement portfolio who are giving reliably, but haven't been asked to do more. They often give at the leadership annual level, and they give year over year. And yet, they're sitting in a mass communications stream alongside tens of thousands of others, receiving the same emails, the same appeals, the same gift receipts, and nothing more. These donors are ideal upgrade opportunities. Their connection and giving history is active.

A majority of an organization’s donor base will receive mass communications only. But broadcast outreach treats every donor the same, which means the signals that distinguish a warm donor from a cold one — the responses, the questions, the quiet indicators of renewed interest — go unnoticed. For Giving Day campaigns, this hinders what’s possible. Somewhere in that mass appeal list is a donor who would have done more to support Giving Day. Organizations with Virtual Engagemen