Major Gift Fundraising Success With Bloomerang

New Data Reveals Bloomerang Customers Raise More Major Gifts

In addition to monitoring improvements in donor retention rates, we at Bloomerang are always interested in seeing other ways that we are impacting customers.

Exciting new research taken from thousands of actual donor databases within our Bloomerang family of customers suggests that major gift success is attainable, especially for small and medium-sized nonprofits.

The Big Data team at Bloomerang recently pulled fundraising performance metrics from over 5,000 organizations that have been using Bloomerang for at least one year.

We found over two-thirds of organizations using Bloomerang for at least a year saw an increase in gifts over $1,000 compared to the 24 months prior to using Bloomerang.

Of those two-thirds, this is the average of those increases by database size:

Each database size cohort saw an increase in gift size per month, total annual major gift revenue, and amount of major gifts (any gift over $1,000) per year. These figures represent a 50-80x return on investment for the cost of the software!

Furthermore, the revenue increases amount to almost $31MM raised from an average increase of 150 major gifts in a single 12 month timeframe!

Why Are Bloomerang Customers Successful? Top 4 Key Reasons:

Anytime outstanding results are found in research such as the ones above, the first question asked is “what are the key factors causing the results?”

The research itself has not explored to this depth, but all of the team at Bloomerang who work daily with these customers believe there are four key factors in play here.

Let’s explore each of them.

First

Bloomerang, the company, provides extensive product and fundraising best practices training in the form our Bloomerang Academy classes, the product’s extensive online knowledge-base, and the free educational resources we offer through our website (daily blog posts, weekly webinars, downloadables, templates, etc.)

Of particular importance is the fact that every new purchase of Bloomerang in 2019 and 2020 included a free seat to The Fundraising Standard, a remarkable eight week fundraising training course. Such training vastly improves the ability to put major gift fundraising best practices in play. Using best practices ultimately improves results!

Second

making the commitment to actually use a professional database such as Bloomerang means proper tools for relationship building are in use. When combined with personal implementation help, and outstanding day to day customer support, the chance for proper use and thereby improved donor relationship building is vastly increased.

Third

Bloomerang allows, through an extensive integration with a key partner, every customer to see a Generosity Score for each constituent right on their summary screen. This score is continuously updated during off hours, so as to reflect the actual giving to other charities and the potential for major gifts! Note: This video features our old user interface and branding however it’s still helpful.

The use of the Generosity Score when combined with the Engagement Meter below allows any fundraiser the opportunity to
pinpoint their best major gift prospects.

Fourth

the most important criteria in determining if a donor should be asked to upgrade their giving and move into the major gift classification is the level of their engagement with your cause.

Bloomerang provides a continuously updated Engagement Meter so this important criteria can easily be tracked and utilized. A multitude of factors come into play such as communication responses, interactions with your team, participation, giving, volunteering, and even just visits to your website.

The guesswork of who to ask has been removed and the results bear this out!

Please help me share with others so such best practices can be commonplace across our wonderful sector!