Guest Essay

To successfully raise major gifts, first consider your community engagement efforts

By Amberlie Phillips

March 23, 2026

This post is part of “Building a Thriving News Ecosystem,” a series from Knight Communities Network, a Lenfest Institute community of practice for local funders creating thriving news ecosystems.

As a nonprofit fundraising strategist, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about major gifts — how to qualify and cultivate prospects, when to make the ask, how to thank and engage current donors. The giving cycle never ends! 

However, while fostering and sustaining relationships with our largest donors and prospects remains vital to fundraising success, I’ve come to believe that spending time on broad-based community engagement is just as important to a successful major gifts effort – and in fact, it is almost impossible to grow a major gifts program without robust, ongoing efforts to engage the larger community. So, if your news organization wants to raise major gifts, first ask yourself a simple question: how good are we at building community?

Securing major gifts is all about building relationships, and a true relationship typically doesn’t start with an ask for a lot of money – rather, a connection is built through a shared affinity for the organization, mutual curiosity and discovery about opportunities for further connection, and trust. This foundation is built over time through consistent interactions with the organization, and the best way for a nonprofit to ensure that this foundation is built with its major gifts prospects is to excel at offering engagement opportunities for stakeholders at all levels in its work and mission.  

Think about organizations that are very publicly raising major gifts for large projects on a regular basis: universities, hospitals, and arts organizations. A key advantage they have in donor engagement is that they are built to engage their community by offering a service or product — education, healthcare, performances, etc. — that is directly related to their philanthropic case for support. 

Engagement opportunities like these are an incredible strategic opportunity for these organizations for two reasons: 

• It essentially ensures that a prospect pipeline is always being cultivated through programmatic offerings
• There are opportunities to engage built into ongoing mission-based programming, rather than being limited to an annual fundraising gala or other one-time events.

For news organizations, this presents an interesting question, as publishers’ services and products have a built-in baseline of engagement: subscribers and readers are part of the community you’re serving. However, because this service (and the way folks are engaging with a publication) is inherently a solitary activity that takes place in front of a computer screen or on a phone, news organizations must go beyond producing content for online consumption and build community that is not limited to a screen.

A few examples I’ve come across in my work with news organizations:

• Hosting conversation-with-a-reporter-type events at local coffee shops or community centers for reporters who cover a specific neighborhood or geographic regions – these were free, open-to-the-public events, with RSVPs and contact information requests.
• Being present at large local community events, such as festivals or street fairs, for casual opportunities to connect. This is a great opportunity for news organizations to form a volunteer corps of citizens committed to independent local news.
• Securing an issue-specific matching gift and finding the community member who is passionate about the issue and asking for their help in meeting the match. Specifically, this could be for news coverage of a rural area, a local issue, or a specific population, and true engagement would mean asking for all types of help — not just money.   

There are myriad ways to engage community, and often, organizations must explore different ways and offerings to determine the right formula for their specific audiences.

 In my experience, news organizations that excel at doing community engagement work with a fundraising lens do the following:

• They have a clear understanding of who their community is, and are committed to engaging ALL stakeholders, not just those with the deepest pockets.
• They believe engagement activities are mission fulfillment and critical to their work and are committed to sustaining it over time.
• They invest staff time in community engagement work – this is often found in the development department, but could also live in marketing or programming.
• They have systems in place to convert those who engage into donors.

Investing staff time and having systems in place to convert community members into donors are the key to unlocking major gifts success through community engagement, as well as demonstrating the ultimate return on investment for the efforts. 

When considering staffing fundraising efforts, determining where community engagement ultimately lives can have a significant impact on roles and responsibilities. For example, if an outlet views community outreach as a primary lead generator for annual fundraising efforts, making this work part of the development team’s portfolio is a smart move. Conversely, if the newsroom are looking to raise general awareness about their work to increase audience engagement or readership, the work may more appropriately live in the newsroom or marketing.

Like staffing, establishing and sustaining systems that feed those who are most engaged into a fundraising pipeline will have tremendous impact. The fundamental idea behind leveraging community engagement for fundraising efforts is that publishers find their most dedicated, passionate supporters first, and then qualify and cultivate them into major gifts donors. Building a system that enables this identification and prioritization is fundamental to this process.  

It is most likely true that many (or even most!) of a publication’s current major donors will not lean into community engagement efforts – this means the team may host events that are designed to engage community (and ideally major donors) but when all is said and done, they fail to attract those folks. Don’t despair, for two reasons:

First, the engagement events themselves offer you valuable opportunities to reach out, connect, and share results with any supporter, even if they don’t attend. I once had a major donor call me after I invited them to an upcoming event that was focused on advocacy and policy work for an upcoming legislative session. She declined, saying that she would never attend such an event. However, in the very next breath, she complimented me (and the organization) by saying she was glad to know we were doing this type of work and that we were inviting our community members to join us in our efforts. She also assured me that she read every single piece of communication we sent her. This conversation opened the door to additional tailored outreach (that did not include invitations to events!) and ultimately resulted in a foundational gift for a new policy position at the organization.   

Second, a robust community engagement effort is a pipeline to future major donors. Doing this work not only builds credibility and trust with current donors, but also affords an opportunity for this who are interested to raise their hand and get more involved – and while not all these will be major gifts prospects, it is relatively simple to create opportunities for engaged prospects to make the transition to committed donors — think regular asks, giving clubs and special projects.

As fundraisers, there are many demands on our time and resources, but ensuring that community building is an organizational and fundraising priority is an investment in the sustainability of your mission, your organizational credibility, as well as current and future major gifts.