Parents give more than alumni. Then their child graduates.

At the median reporting school, roughly half of everything raised comes from three donors. That is not a criticism of major gift work, which is doing exactly what it is supposed to. It is a description of how much now rests on a small number of relationships, and how expensive it is when one of them goes quiet without anyone noticing.

Worth saying plainly: a median is not a typical school. Funds received across participants ranged from $830 to $187.7 million, and donor counts from 1 to more than 8,500. If your numbers look nothing like these, that is normal.

Worth its own section because it is the only source that rose in all four years.

DAFs went from 8.7% of funds in 2022 to 12.2% in 2025, and in 2025 they overtook foundations for the first time. The median number of households giving through a DAF rose from 46 to 55, and the total number of such households across participating schools reached 25,781, up 31.4% in a single year.

The practical problem is that a DAF gift can arrive without the donor's name attached in a way your database recognises, so the household you should be thanking is not obviously the one on the transaction. Schools that handle this well keep the connection recorded somewhere a person can retrieve later. Schools that do not thank a sponsoring organisation and lose the family.

Most of what these findings point to is not software, and we would rather say so.

Broadening the donor base, building a culture of giving among current parents, deciding whether to chase the gift pyramid's top or rebuild its bottom, keeping parents engaged after their child graduates: those are strategy and staffing decisions. No tool makes them for you.

Two things here are different, because they are retrieval problems rather than strategy problems.

Knowing which relationships are going quiet while there is still time. When roughly half your income sits with three households and a quarter of your base has a leaving date, the cost of noticing late is high. That is a question with a correct answer sitting in records you already own.

Keeping what your team knows. With one to three people raising money, a single departure can remove most of the institutional memory in the building.

If you are choosing between a tool and another fundraiser, hire the fundraiser. If the people you have are spending their week deciding who to contact rather than contacting them, that is the gap this closes.

Since this page opened with the graduation cliff, it would be dishonest to skip past it here. We do not track enrolment status, so nothing in Gratefully will tell you that the Hendersons have a senior and will age out in June. Your database already knows that, and a report from it is the right tool.

What Gratefully catches is the version of the problem you can actually see in giving behaviour, which usually moves first.

On a Monday the list is already built: the family whose recurring gift stopped in September, the household that moved from $500 to $5,000 and got the same acknowledgement letter as everyone else, the giving anniversary falling on Thursday, the first-time donor from a fortnight ago who has heard nothing since. Each carries the reason it surfaced and the records behind it, so the morning is spent deciding what to say rather than working out who to say it to.

For a school where roughly half the money sits with three donors and one to three people cover everyone else, that second group is where the risk actually lives. The top relationships are already worked. It is the next hundred families where a lapsed recurring gift goes unnoticed until the annual review, and where the parents who quietly kept giving after graduation were never thanked for it.

A person still writes the notes. That part should not change.

There is no migration and no data project. Gratefully connects directly to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP, Bloomerang and Little Green Light, syncing automatically overnight, plus Mailchimp, CSV import and document upload. Every integration is included on every plan, including the free one.

Worth being straight about what that means for a school: none of those three is a school-specific system. If you run Raiser's Edge NXT, Veracross or Blackbaud Education Management, you are working through CSV export and document upload rather than an automatic sync. That is a real limitation and the most likely reason we are not right for you today. Test it with one export before you decide.

School advancement records are not ordinary contact data. They carry giving histories, family circumstances, staff notes, and in many schools they sit alongside information covered by FERPA. Consumer AI plans do not come with the agreements those obligations require.

Identifying details are removed before anything reaches a language model, your data never trains anyone's AI, and each school sits in an isolated tenant. Treat student records as out of scope unless you have decided otherwise and written it down. If you are setting rules for your own team first, our AI acceptable use policy template is free and ungated.