The Social Impact Solutions Podcast · Social Impact Solutions

Unlocking Fundraising Success with Carly Berna

·56 min·3 clips

Recurring donors at Carly's organization also gave about $1 million in extra gifts.

The episode stays close to the numbers. The host introduces Carly as the fundraiser-in-residence at Virtuous CRM and sets up the new benchmark report as a way to understand meaningful growth. Carly explains why the report is built around metrics that actually move organizations, not vanity signals. She keeps coming back to acquisition and retention as a core tension. New donor acquisition is one of the main examples. The report found that about 29% of an active donor file is made up of new donors. That share has dropped by roughly five percentage points since 2020 and by two points since last year. Carly says that trend does not surprise her. She points to a few possible reasons, including fewer donors giving more and organizations spending less on acquisition. The conversation then turns to cost. The key question is not just how many new donors arrive, but what it takes to bring them in. Carly notes that CRM data alone cannot answer that. You need the financial side too, and QuickBooks comes up as part of that conversation. Without both sides, the math stays incomplete. She adds that customer acquisition cost is a familiar idea in professional services, where a figure like 3,500 dollars is not unusual. That same scale is hard to map onto nonprofit giving, especially when the average gift is much smaller. The result is a grounded conversation about why benchmarking matters and where it still hits a wall. Rather than pretending the answer is simple, the episode keeps showing where the data is strong and where it is thin. That makes it useful for teams that need a practical way to think about donor growth, not just a headline number.

As heard by us

A clear read on what fundraising growth actually costs.

The episode treats fundraising growth as a measurement problem as much as a money problem. It stays close to Virtuous's new benchmark report and Carly's practical read on the numbers that matter most, especially donor acquisition and retention.

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Why you'd press play

You want donor-growth clarity without the fundraising fog today, in practice.

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