If it takes at least six outreach attempts to connect with a new discovery prospect, that’s manageable for a team of five. For a team of twenty, spread across major gifts, planned giving, and corporate relations, it’s the kind of standard that falls apart without something holding it together.
Who
The U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation (USNA AA&F) grew its development team from five frontline fundraisers to nearly twenty, across major gifts, leadership annual giving, planned giving, and corporate and foundation relations, while preparing for its most ambitious fundraising goals yet. More people meant more portfolios, more donor activity, and a lot more that could fall out of sync.
The Challenge
Growth created opportunity, but it also meant more portfolios to manage, more donor activity to coordinate, and a much greater need for shared alignment across a fast-expanding team. Leadership knew that sustained fundraising success couldn’t depend on individual effort alone, it needed a consistent, organization-wide way to manage portfolios, track engagement, and hold the team accountable. Fundraisers needed help focusing on the right relationships and preparing for donor conversations, all without losing the personal nature of the relationships themselves.
Why EverTrue
USNA AA&F brought Signal by EverTrue into its daily workflow to strengthen the human decisions behind portfolio management, not to digitize activity for its own sake. Signal gave fundraisers a shared view of engagement history, portfolio activity, and relationship signals: the same view their managers used to coach and their research partners used to sharpen prioritization. With that shared foundation in place, less time went to assembling context from multiple systems and more went to the conversations that actually move relationships forward.
The Results
Since implementing this more structured, relationship-driven approach, USNA AA&F has:
- Achieved its first-ever $100 million fundraising year
- Increased donor meetings by 50%
- Grown President’s Circle donors by 21%
- Secured two transformational eight-figure gifts
- Built a scalable fundraising framework to support continued growth
Those bigger numbers came from consistency compounding over years, not one big moment. USNA AA&F’s data shows it takes at least six outreach attempts to connect with a new discovery prospect, and the team uses that number in every portfolio review to push harder before writing anyone off. That same discipline is what turned a $2,500 President’s Circle donor into a $15 million commitment: years of sustained engagement, growing board involvement, and a relationship the team never let go cold.
“It took many years to get to that point, and it was the consistent communication, the consistent relationship building that got him there.” — AJ Bauer, Associate Vice President of Development, U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association and Foundation
That’s also why it’s repeatable. As AJ put it, no one person closes a gift that’s been stewarded over decades, it’s a full team effort, which is exactly what a shared operating model makes possible across a team of twenty instead of five.