The DonorPerfect Fundraising Guide

40+ free resources to use DonorPerfect to its fullest potential

Whether you’re new to DonorPerfect or a seasoned user refining your strategy, our Fundraising Guide is packed with tools and tips to grow your impact, from relationship-building to reporting.

Simplify tasks, strengthen connections, and make the most of your DonorPerfect system:

• Improve donor retention with smart outreach and automation
• Launch or expand a monthly giving program
• Steward major donors with personalized engagement
• Communicate your mission through targeted storytelling
• Clean up your data for more effective reporting and segmentation

Donor retention

Cultivate: Unlock the Power of Lasting Donor Relationships

Building strong, long-term connections with your donors starts with meaningful engagement, and DonorPerfect equips you with the tools to make it happen. By properly documenting every interaction, from emails and phone calls to in-person meetings and social media outreach, your team can ensure a seamless, personalized experience for each donor. 

The Contact Manager allows you to maintain a comprehensive history of past communications and helps you schedule, assign, and follow up on future outreach. This level of coordination promotes consistency across your organization, even as staff or roles change, ensuring no donor falls through the cracks.

With powerful features like Scheduled Donor Outreach, SmartActions, and Selection Filters that help you pinpoint the right donors for reports, mailings, and targeted outreach, DonorPerfect goes beyond basic Listing Reports. You can receive real-time alerts about upcoming or overdue touchpoints, automate follow-up tasks, and trigger actions based on donor activity, such as sending an acknowledgment email for a major gift. 

These smart, proactive tools make it easier than ever to stay on top of open contacts, oversee portfolios, and keep donor relationships warm and active. By leveraging DonorPerfect’s integrated features, your organization can transform routine interactions into meaningful moments that foster trust, loyalty, and ongoing support.

Retain: Understand the Power of a Monthly Giving Program

Monthly giving programs are one of the most effective ways to build reliable, long-term funding streams while deepening relationships with your supporters. With DonorPerfect’s Monthly Giving tools, you can seamlessly process recurring donations via credit card or bank account, giving donors a convenient way to support your mission regularly and giving your organization a predictable revenue stream. From membership dues to ongoing pledge payments, monthly giving reduces the need for repeated outreach, cuts down on manual data entry, and significantly boosts donor retention. Need more help convincing your team to support a monthly giving program? Check out our Monthly Giving Calculator to demonstrate how impactful these programs can be.

DonorPerfect makes it simple to promote and manage recurring gifts with user-friendly online forms, built-in automation, and secure payment processing through the SafeSave Gateway. You can even set recurring giving as the default option on donation forms, encouraging donors to commit to ongoing support. Automated features like thank-you emails and receipts help you acknowledge gifts instantly, keeping donors engaged and appreciated without manual effort. Whether you’re just starting or looking to scale your existing program, DonorPerfect provides all the tools you need to launch, grow, and sustain a successful monthly giving initiative with minimal staff or budget.

Sustain: Maximize Major Donor Impact

Major donors are mission-critical partners, and cultivating their continued support requires thoughtful, personalized engagement. With DonorPerfect’s powerful suite of tools, including integrated wealth screening, custom reports, donor journey mapping, and portfolio management, you can ensure your top supporters feel seen, valued, and invested. 

By centralizing and automating key aspects of your major gifts strategy, like setting giving goals, tracking engagement stages, and sending real-time alerts to solicitors with SmartActions, you empower your team to build stronger relationships with less guesswork. Calculated Fields allow you to surface critical insights, while Selection Filters help you quickly segment donors for targeted outreach and reporting. With a clear view of each donor’s history presented in detailed financial reports, your team can act with confidence and clarity, turning casual supporters into lifelong champions of your cause.

Appreciate: Build Donor Loyalty Through Gratitude

Gratitude isn’t just good manners, it’s one of the most powerful tools nonprofits have to retain donors and build lasting relationships. DonorPerfect makes it easy to thank your supporters quickly, personally, and at scale, so every gift feels valued. 

Whether you’re sending one heartfelt message or thousands of customized thank-yous, DonorPerfect’s receipting and acknowledgment tools streamline the process, allowing you to automate thank-you emails, generate printed letters, and even create personalized templates tailored to each donor’s giving history.

With features like automatic monthly giving and receipting, batch processing, and intelligent data syncing from donation forms, your team can thank donors within hours, not days, boosting retention and deepening engagement. For monthly givers, DonorPerfect’s Automatic Processing ensures gifts are received and acknowledged consistently, while the Fundraiser Bot and AI-powered writing tools help you craft thoughtful, mission-driven messages in record time. Expressing appreciation doesn’t need to be time-consuming or impersonal. With DonorPerfect, gratitude becomes a strategic advantage that amplifies your fundraising success and shows donors just how much their support means.

Donor engagement

Engage: Tap into the Art of Donor Storytelling

Great storytelling connects hearts to missions, and with DonorPerfect, you have the tools to make each story personal and powerful. DonorPerfect offers the features necessary to make your storytelling efforts targeted, efficient, and impactful.

Start by using reporting filters and segmentation tools to identify donor trends and group supporters by shared characteristics, then set up your Scheduled Reports so you can automatically receive storytelling opportunities straight to your inbox. From there, you can use the built-in integration with Constant Contact to sync your segmented and dynamic email lists with your email marketing tools, ensuring your donor outreach always resonates with its specific audience. Constant Contact also offers dynamic lists that automatically update as donor information changes. Together, these features, along with our Fundraiser Bot,  empower your team to craft targeted, compelling communications that resonate with donors and strengthen your community of support.

Looking to bring your print materials into the digital world? The QR code generator makes it simple to link flyers, letters, or event materials directly to your online donation form or story-driven landing pages. These tools help you deliver personalized, mission-driven content that inspires action and builds lasting donor relationships.

Nurture: Mapping Donor Journeys for Stronger Connections

Every donor interaction is an opportunity to deepen engagement, and DonorPerfect gives you the tools to guide supporters along a thoughtful, strategic journey.

With the new Donor Journeys service, you can build a customized path within DonorPerfect to move donors from first gift to long-term retention through intentional, well-timed outreach. Each journey is powered by tools like SmartActions, Scheduled Reports, Constant Contact, and Calculated Fields to help automate meaningful outreach at just the right time. 

Whether you’re welcoming a new donor, nurturing a mid-level giver, or re-engaging lapsed supporters, DonorPerfect empowers you to make every step of the journey meaningful—and measurable. Using mail merges, email segmentation, and Selection Filters, you can tailor messages to segmented audiences based on giving behavior, engagement level, or lifecycle stage. With contact tracking and task assignments built right in, you can coordinate follow-up across your team, ensuring no opportunity for engagement is missed. 

Analyze: Transform Data into Meaningful Donor Engagement

Your donor data holds the key to more strategic and personalized engagement, so we make it easy to turn that information into action. With tools like Scheduled Reports and detailed giving statements, DonorPerfect equips you to achieve personalization at every level, whether you’re planning a targeted appeal or identifying top engagement opportunities. You can also measure the results of your campaigns to establish benchmarks, refine your strategies, and drive greater impact over time.

Selection Filters allow you to sort, segment, and spotlight the exact records you need. Wondering when to use a filter or a full report? Think of filters as the who and reports as the what and how—they work hand-in-hand to ensure your strategy is both focused and informed. With tools like our advanced financial reports, easy custom reports,  and sidebar filtering, you’ll always have the flexibility to dig deeper and act faster.

To ensure your strategy aligns with your donors’ needs, we created four modern frameworks (called “engagement models”) to help you move beyond transactional outreach methods. Donor Engagement Models for the Digital Age is a free resource that explains how to drive stronger retention and increased support by valuing connections over contributions.

Optimize: Strengthen Your Fundraising with Clean Data

Accurate data is the foundation of successful fundraising. When your records are up to date and well-organized, every outreach effort becomes more strategic and effective. Clean data, starting with code maintenance, helps you personalize communications, avoid duplicate outreach, and analyze fundraising results.

In DonorPerfect, codes power everything from donation tracking to segmentation and reporting. That’s why it’s so essential to create a naming system that reflects your current strategy and can grow with your organization over time. With additional features like code activation/inactivation, bulk deletion, and Global Update, you can quickly clean up inconsistencies and prevent future errors. 

Use these tools alongside reports like the Counter Report or Cross Tabulation Report to spot gaps or miscoded data, and make proactive corrections that improve your output and keep your data clean and well-maintained. Lean on our Clean Data Checklist, a free resource you can customize to your organization. This step-by-step guide helps you build a healthier database that supports stronger donor relationships and smarter decisions.