From Outreach to Outcomes: A Connected Fundraising Framework with Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and More

Tanya Fitzgerald

Successful fundraising is more than just tracking donations; it’s about building real connections. Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® helps you focus on aligning your goals, managing your budget, engaging donors, and using data to identify what’s working and where you can improve.

The enhanced Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Packages features in Raiser’s Edge NXT provide a smooth, connected fundraising framework in web view. You can plan your efforts, customize your outreach, simplify tasks, and monitor progress, all in one place. With updated tools, smarter insights, and the upcoming Goals features, fundraising becomes more straightforward and effective.

A Connected Fundraising Framework

Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Packages each play an important role in helping you manage your fundraising efforts:

• Campaigns help you focus on the purpose behind your fundraising by organizing initiatives and setting clear goals.
• Funds show exactly how donations are used and how they contribute to your organization’s mission.
• Appeals let you track the ways you’ve connected—whether through direct mail, email, events, or other outreach.
• Packages help you measure the success of specific appeals, giving you clear insights to understand which approaches drive the strongest outcomes.

These tools work together to align fundraising, donor engagement, and financial strategies for efficient outcomes. Linking a fund to a campaign or appeal in web view simplifies your data entry and keeps revenue goals on track.

Faster Insights at Your Fingertips

The refreshed Campaign, Fund, and Appeal records deliver a simpler, more user-friendly design that brings the most important information to the forefront.

• Switch easily between quick overviews and deeper dives without losing your place thanks to a new layout that organizes details into focused tabs, rather than displaying everything all at once.
• Gain better insights into your campaigns and donor connections with built-in analysis views.
• Access gift and donor lists directly from each record, giving you the tools to make quicker, more informed decisions.
• Evaluate fundraising performance with insights like:
• Revenue trends over time
• Donor activity and engagement patterns
• Gift and donor lists tied to each record

Turn Insights into Action

The new Projected Revenue insight combines received gifts with committed revenue—like pledges—to give you a fuller picture of campaign progress and expected outcomes. Additionally, the enhanced Donor List lets you filter and segment supporters by giving habits and contribution levels without needing extra queries.

With these features, you can:

• Track if a campaign is on track to hit its goals
• Adjust strategies earlier based on projected outcomes
• Provide leadership and finance teams with more informed reports
• Identify key donors for a specific appeal
• Segment supporters by contribution levels
• Plan targeted outreach and stewardship efforts

Built-in Extensibility

We built the refreshed Campaign, Fund, and Appeal records for flexibility, so you can customize the experience with page actions, custom tiles, and additional tabs to fit your team’s needs.

These updates make navigating records faster and more intuitive, so you can spend less time clicking through screens. To learn more about SKY Add-ins, visit the SKY Developer documentation.

Stronger Fundraising and Finance Alignment

Stronger alignment between your fundraising and finance teams is now simpler, thanks to several updates designed to connect workflows and reduce manual tasks.

Fund records now feature:

• Fund ID visibility directly within the Gift list
• Dedicated General Ledger (GL) Distributions tabs
• Improved cross-referencing between fundraising and financial records

You can easily manage Fund relationships by linking Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Events directly in Raiser’s Edge NXT. These connections help:

• Simplify gift entry
• Improve reporting accuracy
• Minimize duplicate work
• Provide a clearer view of fundraising activity across initiatives

Tracking Campaign expenses and linking Events also gives you better insight into fundraising performance and return on investment.

Detailed Appeal and Package Analysis

Appeals and Packages make it easier to understand which outreach efforts resonate and drive results. Appeal records now include Package lists, helping you quickly spot the type of outreach that contributes to your appeal’s success. You can uncover:

• Which audiences were reached
• Which appeal generated the best response
• How much revenue each appeal generated

Packages can be used across multiple appeals, creating a consistent approach to fundraising efforts. New visual tools for analyzing and comparing Packages are on the way, offering insights that are easy to understand and act on. We’ll share more about Package updates in an upcoming Community blog post.

Looking Ahead: Align Fundraising Strategies with Your Organizational Goals

Coming soon, the new Goals experience will help you tie fundraising efforts to clear, measurable results. Rather than replacing existing goals on Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals, Goals offer a centralized way to track the metrics that matter most to you. With flexible goal tracking and dashboards, your team can stay on top of progress, evaluate performance, and focus on the outcomes that drive your success.

Goals will center on four key areas of fundraising:

• Raising money
• Recruiting donors
• Advancing opportunities
• Completing actions

You’ll be able to define what counts toward progress using rules or queries, ensuring tracking stays accurate and dependable. Goals can be applied organization-wide or customized for individual fundraisers, keeping teams focused, accountable, and on the same page.

This tool will make it easier to measure your success and reach your goals.

A More Complete Fundraising Experience

Together, these capabilities create a cohesive fundraising metrics framework within Raiser’s Edge NXT. By connecting planning, outreach, donor engagement, analytics, and performance insights, you will spend less time on managing tools and more time advancing your mission.

Learn more about Modernized Campaigns, Funds, and Appeals Records in this micro-learning from Blackbaud University.