Donor stewardship software for major gift officers
Donor stewardship software for major gift officers should do three things: tell you who needs attention today, tell you why, and show you everything your organisation already knows about them before you pick up the phone. Gratefully does that against your own portfolio, every morning, with every answer cited to a source record.
A major gift officer's unit of work is the portfolio. Not the database, not the campaign, the fifty to a hundred and fifty relationships that are yours to move this year.
Most stewardship tooling is built for the organisation rather than for the officer. It reports on what happened, or it manages a pipeline of stages. Both are useful. Neither answers the question an officer actually has on Monday morning, which is who needs me this week and what happened the last time we spoke.
What major gift officers need from stewardship software
Four things, in the order they come up in a working week.
Who to contact now. Not a list of everyone, a short ranked list with the reasoning attached.
Why this donor, this week. A name without a reason is just another task.
What we already know. Giving history is the easy part. The hard part is the conversation from 2023, the programme they care about, the thing a colleague promised them.
What survives when someone leaves. Officer turnover is the single most expensive event in a portfolio, because the relationship context usually leaves with the person.
The daily list, with the reason attached
Gratefully's Action Center runs a full portfolio review every night, on your organisation's local time, and hands you a ranked list in the morning.
It surfaces four things: lapse risk, stewardship moments, deadlines extracted from your documents, and hidden revenue. Each is ranked by stakes, urgency and confidence, so the top of the list is the top for a stated reason rather than by date order.
One donor gets one card. No donor appears twice because two signals fired. Each card carries a one-click next step, and you can run an on-demand scan whenever your data changes rather than waiting for the overnight pass.
Alongside that, a morning priority digest and a weekly portfolio recap arrive by email, each linking straight through to the donor.
Today's Stewardship
Mon, Feb 23Illustrative example. Sample data, not a real portfolio.
The full relationship history, before the call
Ask Grace for a briefing on any donor and you get the giving record, the notes every team member has written, programme engagement, and the connections between people, assembled into one answer.
Two things make it usable in front of a donor.
Every claim cites the record it came from. Not a summary you have to trust, a sentence with the note, gift or document behind it named.
The numbers are deterministic. Anything involving a giving figure runs through an auditable query layer rather than being generated by a language model. A lifetime total is a query result, not a prediction.
What a briefing actually looks like
An illustrative example. Sample data, not a real donor.
Suggested angle: lead with the 2024 literacy outcomes. A warm re-engagement call, with no hard ask today.
Sources: Salesforce CRM, staff notes (J. Rivera, 2022), event records, programme report 2023.
Three things are worth noticing in that answer. The lapse figure is a calculated value rather than an estimate. The strongest fact in it, the connection to your CEO, came from a note somebody typed two years ago rather than from any structured field. And every line names where it came from, so you can check it before you repeat it to a donor.
Stewardship that survives turnover
When an officer leaves, the gift records stay and the reasoning goes. What they were working towards, what was already promised, who introduced whom.
Gratefully produces handover dossiers for any portfolio, combining the structured record with the unstructured context around it, viewable in the app and exportable as PDF. The incoming officer starts with the relationship rather than with the database.
Donors are also auto-classified into living segments that refresh nightly, so a portfolio that drifts shows the drift rather than looking static until someone runs a report.
Where this fits with the tools you already run
Several tools in this category are built around the officer's workflow and do it well. EverTrue publishes portfolio management, smart alerts for stale prospects, pipeline metrics and trip planning. Gravyty's Raise focuses on AI-assisted outreach and dynamic portfolio management. Ovrture generates personalised donor microsites from CRM data and feeds session-level engagement analytics back. Instil runs customisable donor lifecycle workflows.
Gratefully is not a replacement for those. It sits on top of the CRM you already run and answers questions about the donors already in it.
| Capability | Workflow tools | Gratefully |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline stages and task workflows | Yes | Not published |
| Trip planning and mobile field notes | Yes | Not published |
| Prospect research and wealth screening | Some, or via a partner | No |
| Ranked daily list with the reason attached | Varies | Yes, nightly portfolio review |
| Answers cited to a source record | Varies | Yes, on every answer |
| Donor figures calculated deterministically | Varies | Yes, auditable query layer |
| Unstructured context from notes and documents | Varies | Yes, unified into a knowledge graph |
| Handover dossiers for staff transitions | Varies | Yes, exportable to PDF |
| Published pricing | Rare in this category | Yes |
What we do not do, stated plainly. Gratefully does not do prospect research or wealth screening. If you need capacity ratings and external wealth data, that is a different category of tool and several of the names above either provide it or partner for it.
We did not set out to add another pipeline. Officers already have one. What they do not have is the reason behind the last gift, because that reason is almost never in a field. It is in a note somebody wrote two years ago, or it is with the person who left. That is what Grace was built to hold.
What it costs
Most tools in this category do not publish pricing. Ours is published in full.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 forever | - | 1 |
| Essential | $79 | $948 | 1 |
| Professional | $399 | $4,788 | 5 |
| Advanced | $799 | $9,588 | 10 |
Every new account starts on a 14-day trial of the Advanced plan with no card required, and drops to the Free plan when the trial ends rather than locking. There are no record or volume limits on any plan, including Free.
What it connects to
Live connectors for Salesforce for Nonprofits (Nonprofit Cloud and NPSP), Bloomerang and Little Green Light, with automatic sync of donor records, gift history and interactions.
Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot supply email engagement signals.
Everything else comes in through compliance-aware CSV import with smart field mapping, or document upload for PDF, Word and Excel files.
Frequently asked questions
What is donor stewardship software?
Software that helps a fundraising team maintain relationships with existing donors rather than acquire new ones. For a major gift officer specifically, that means knowing who in the portfolio needs attention, why, and what the organisation already knows about them.
What should a major gift officer look for?
Whether it works at the level of your portfolio rather than the whole database, whether it explains why a donor surfaced, and whether you can trace any figure or claim back to the record it came from before you repeat it to a donor.
Does it replace my CRM?
No. Gratefully sits on top of the CRM you already run. You keep your system of record and add a layer that answers questions across it.
Does it do wealth screening or prospect research?
No. Those are a separate category. Gratefully works with what your organisation already holds.
How is the daily list ranked?
By stakes, urgency and confidence. The Action Center reviews the full portfolio overnight and surfaces lapse risk, stewardship moments, deadlines extracted from documents, and hidden revenue. Each card states the reason it appeared.
What does it cost?
There is a free plan at $0 with no record limits. Paid plans are $79, $399 and $799 a month, and every account starts with a 14-day trial of the Advanced plan with no card required.