8 Nonprofits and Their Successful Growth Strategies

Growth isn’t difficult to recognize. For example, you can easily compare your total online fundraising revenue from year to year and show your board that you grew by “X” percent.

What’s difficult about growth is quantifying how you got from point A to point B. If you want to recreate growth, or test new growth strategies, you have to know exactly what works and what doesn’t. One of the reasons we release the Classy 100, an annual list of the top 100 nonprofits that grew on Classy over the last year, is to help you answer questions like this.

We circled back with some of the nonprofits from the 2016 list to dig deeper into specific areas of their growth. Each organization details the strategies they used, like how:

• The Urban Ecology Center stewards their supporters
• Geauga Humane Society’s Rescue Village merges their offline and online revenue
• Tap Cancer Out structures their events to encourage early fundraising
• The Down Syndrome Research Foundation sustains a steadily growing recurring giving program

These examples, and the others listed in the guide, serve as guiding lights for how you might also grow your organization. Use them as points of reference throughout your journey.

While growth might be difficult to pin down, it isn’t out of your reach. To learn more about these organizations and how they grew, as well as identify new strategies for your own nonprofit, download the guide below.