The Untapped Majority: Closing the Donor Gap with Autonomous Fundraising

Autonomous Fundraising was created to solve a problem every nonprofit knows well — most of an organization’s donors fall outside of gift officer portfolios. As much as teams wish they could personally connect with every donor each year, staff capacity, hiring budgets, and talent availability require reliance on broader marketing communications.

Givzey | Version2.ai recently finalized a survey of more than 100 nonprofit organizations in the United States that further validates this challenge. Across teams of all sizes, the average percentage of donors under active management is only 2.5%. The survey included organizations with just one gift officer and others with hundreds. Donor populations ranged from 5,000 to 9 million. And what was overwhelmingly clear is that regardless of size, that ratio hardly moves.

That’s the real issue. This tiny percentage of donors under management holds back pipeline growth, lengthens the timeline to major gift readiness, and weakens the genuine connection that donors want. These donors exist in the database, but without 1:1 engagement, their motivations and capacity to deepen a philanthropic relationship remain unknown. The only way to solve this problem is to build the fundraising capacity to manage more donors inside portfolios.

Forward-thinking organizations are already showing what it looks like to move beyond this limitation. With trusted digital labor and Autonomous Fundraising, it’s now possible to manage more donors, connect more deeply, and grow stronger pipelines for the future.

This is what motivates the Version2 team to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible — so technology can fully serve the world-changing missions of every nonprofit.