Your donation form looks like it was built in 2012.
Your email campaigns are inconsistent, and new donors don’t hear from you after your first gift.
You know the donor experience is broken… but when you’re a small team, fixing one piece at a time feels like all you can manage.
St. Bonaventure Indian Mission & School went the other direction: they overhauled everything at once, and the increase in monthly gifts alone made the effort worth it.
At the 2026 Bridge Conference, St. Bonaventure’s Executive Director and their agency partners shared exactly how they did it.
The problem
St. Bonaventure is a small nonprofit serving the Eastern Navajo Nation from Thoreau, New Mexico.
Their digital program was disconnected: an outdated website, a donation form that barely worked on mobile, inconsistent messaging, and almost no recurring giving infrastructure.
They had siloed technology partners and no automated donor journeys.
Every piece of the digital experience was operating in silos.
The fix
St. Bonaventure brought in Faircom New York for digital strategy, Teal Media for website design, and GoFundMe Pro as their donation platform.
Rather than letting each partner work in isolation, they aligned all three around a single goal: a connected donor experience where brand, website, donation forms, and email all fed into the same system.
The most consequential decision was using GoFundMe Pro’s native Mailchimp integration so that every new donor automatically entered a segmented welcome journey.
That one integration meant the small team didn’t have to manually sort or tag anyone.
A first-time donor made a gift, landed in the right segment, and started receiving cultivation emails without a single staff member touching it.
The results
Over the full fiscal year (FY25 to FY26), online gifts grew by 115%, revenue increased by 59%, and conversion rates more than doubled.
Recurring giving tells the bigger story.
St. Bonaventure went from 9 monthly donors in July to 261 by June, growing steadily enough that by spring they were adding 25 to 30 new monthly donors per month.
These were primarily new and reactivated donors, not existing sustainers migrated from an old platform.
Email clearly became the program’s biggest revenue driver at roughly 56% of digital channel revenue.
How to apply this to your program
Connect your donation platform to your email CRM. If a new donor has to wait for a manual import before hearing from you again, you’re losing the window when their intent is highest.
Build one welcome journey before you build ten. St. Bonaventure didn’t launch with a complex automation map — they started with a single new-donor journey and expanded from there.
Treat your donation form like a fundraising tool, not a checkout page. Recurring gift prompts, a mobile-friendly design, and suggested gift amounts that match your audience all reduce friction when it matters most.
The bottom line
No single change drove the growth for St. Bonaventure — connecting every piece into one donor experience did.
A small team in rural New Mexico pulled this off, and if your systems aren’t talking to each other yet, that’s the place to start (especially before year-end).
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Quick hits
I’m obsessed with causedb — a free, searchable database of nonprofit emails and ads from more than 1,000 organizations.
Litmus breaks down what your email footer legally requires and what quietly hurts your sender reputation if you get it wrong.
CauseVox published a free donor welcome series template with email-by-email timing, cadence guidance, and segmentation for first-time and recurring donors.
Everytown for Gun Safety is hiring a Director of Email and SMS Campaigns to lead strategy and manage a team of digital campaigners across state and national advocacy efforts. NYC or DC, hybrid, $115-125K.
‘Til next time!
Sara