Introducing Donor Experience

Every donor gets a major gift experience. Here is what we built, and why the rest of the donor pyramid deserved it.

By Kevin Martin, President, AwardSpring

Roughly 80% of first-time donors never make a second gift, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Widely cited fundraising benchmarks put the cost of acquiring a new donor at about five times the cost of renewing one. And donor counts across higher education have been falling for years. Those three facts add up to an uncomfortable arithmetic: no amount of new-donor recruiting closes a leak that big.

The leak has a location. It sits in the gap between a donor’s first gift and the first time anyone shows them what that gift did.

The pyramid problem

Most stewardship effort goes to the top of the donor pyramid, because that is all the hours allow. The donor who gave $25,000 gets a visit, a custom report, and a relationship. The donor who gave $100 gets a receipt. It was never a question of caring less. In the 2026 Donor Stewardship Benchmark, our study of 125 scholarship foundations, 53% named staff time as their single biggest barrier to better stewardship, ahead of budget and technology.

And the stewardship that does happen mostly disappears. Among the foundations we surveyed, 79% mail printed impact reports, 45% can’t tell whether a donor ever opened one, and just 8% track donor engagement in any systematic way. The work gets done, then vanishes into the mail.

What we built

Donor Experience gives every donor the experience only major donors usually receive, without adding headcount. It comes down to three pieces:

• Impact artifacts. Impact reports and thank-you letters assembled from the real award and outcome data already in your system, including video thank-yous from the students themselves. A named student, the fund that reached them, and the outcome, assembled the day a donor asks.
• Approval workflows. Nothing reaches a donor without your team’s sign-off, and student content clears consent gates before a donor ever sees it. Your team signs every piece the system assembles.
• A donor portal. A branded space where each donor sees their funds, their gifts, and the students their generosity reached, any day of the year.

And because delivery is digital, stewardship finally becomes measurable. You know whether the report was opened, and the engagement history stays with your gift officers.

One record underneath

Donor Experience is the newest product on the AwardSpring Fund Platform, alongside Scholarship Management, Donor Management, and Fund Management. It runs on the same record as your awarding, which is why the impact story can assemble itself: the awards, the students, and the funds are already there. Advancement gets the impact story without adding a single request to financial aid’s queue.

See it first

Donor Experience is available September 2026. Alex Stepien and Brandon Weisenberger are hosting a first look on Tuesday, September 1 at 2:00 PM ET: the artifacts, the workflows, and the portal, live, with your questions answered as we go. Watch the replay.

If you’re one of the 600+ organizations already on AwardSpring, the award and student records Donor Experience draws from are already in your account. And if you’d rather see it one on one, see a demo and we’ll tailor the walkthrough to your funds.