Top-Funnel Strategies for Long-Term Growth: Powerful Branding, Relevant Reach, and Relentless Optimization

A strong and healthy nonprofit fundraising program never stops introducing themselves to new audiences and perpetually drives awareness of their mission and the impact of their work. Top-funnel donor acquisition strategies are a powerful tool for these efforts. Brand awareness and lead generation campaigns across digital channels are a chance to make sure new supporters understand what your mission is, what the impact of your work has been, and what specifically they will be supporting when they make their first donation.

It’s also absolutely critical in ensuring that you’re continuously fueling your donor pipeline so that your program can continue to grow for years to come.

In a challenging fundraising landscape, continuing to expand your donor base is essential to ensuring long-term stability. If you’re just focused on direct-to-donate advertising and metrics like immediate revenue and ROAS, this can put your file at risk of attrition. Not all donors will stay forever, and at a certain point donors will drop off, meaning sustainability is limited when you focus only on your mid-funnel audiences. With this in mind, top-of-funnel investment is an essential investment in your program for the long run, and that benefit will span across the full donor funnel.

In recent years, as nonprofit advertising presence is growing and organizations are taking an interest in channels like CTV and streaming audio, we are actively sharing these opportunities with our partners based on meaningful expected impact – and our partners are also coming to us eager to grow and expand into these spaces and elevate top-of-funnel advertising as part of a full-funnel program. Whether you’re new to top-funnel approaches or are looking to expand your existing top-funnel outreach into new digital channels, I’m excited to share some of our most effective strategies for sustainable top-funnel acquisition:

The insights below are one feature in a comprehensive resource, our “2026 Acquisition Guidebook: Your Framework For A Year Of Growth.” Share your information below to access the complete Guide!

Brand Development and Long-Term Donor Retention

While many donors give at key tentpole moments like Giving Tuesday or in times of crisis, keeping your brand top of mind for your audiences throughout the year is a powerful way to support those major efforts and maintain fundraising momentum outside of peak moments. (We cover more about strategies for getting in front of potential donors in those key moments in our full 2026 Acquisition Guidebook!) Audiences who encounter your brand awareness ads as they naturally consume digital content are primed and warmed with your organization’s mission and goals. Our CMO likes to say, “Reputation goes through the doorway ahead of you.” When a fundraising opportunity arises later and an audience that knows you and has thought about you receives your appeal, they’re far more likely to consider donating if they remember that powerful Meta or display ad that reminded them about your organization’s mission and impact.

Brand recall is a powerful tool for driving this kind of awareness. Once you’ve seen Susan G. Komen’s pink ribbon logo, for instance, you don’t need to consume an entire ad to know that the message is about fighting breast cancer. What are the consistent visual cues and messaging you’ve tied to your organization’s brand to ensure that your audiences remember you when they encounter your content across channels?

Your top-of-funnel brand work through lead generation and brand awareness digital ads powers an incredible engine for your fundraising program. That’s why it’s important to consider the content and engagement strategies you’re using to introduce your brand to new supporters. If you’re able to drive awareness and education about your mission, you can bring on new supporters who are already bought into your work from the start.

One of the most powerful ways we help our partners introduce a mission at the point of acquisition is through engagement-first experiences using our own journey-building tool, Sign For Good, that allows organizations to spin up quizzes, surveys, photo albums, and other informative user flows that build affinity and awareness. (See Sign For Good in action as a powerful storytelling tool in this engagement campaign for our partners at Project HOPE!) Recent testing of acquisition-style ads with Sign For Good experiences delivered 105% more revenue and 52% more gifts than standard action-to-donation-page flows. This approach accomplishes two major goals at once: maximizing immediate ROAS and building affinity to improve lifetime value.

Leveraging AI in Digital Advertising

In a digital ads space increasingly dominated by AI presence, AI is no longer a bright-and-shiny thing nor an intimidating unknown. Now that we’ve had the time to see what works, weigh the pros and cons of certain capabilities, and identify what benefits they might hold for specific nonprofit programs, we have the opportunity to lean in.

For digital ads, AI has been in use for quite some time to power targeting when it comes to how ads are served. If you’ve been running paid digital ads, you’ve likely already strengthened your campaigns with predictive modeling, lookalike audiences, bidding strategies, and audience targeting.

As platforms incorporate more AI modeling in their algorithms, we are seeing certain strategies shift to create campaigns that are optimized to work with the AI. Just like the SEO strategies that drive Search results, optimizing your website for language learning models to crawl is now an important strategy to drive traffic through Search. It’s also important to keep in mind that AI-powered ads take time to generate learnings that will drive the strongest targeting and optimization. Rather than rely only on a platform’s AI tools, your program should also be sure to run campaigns manually – especially at first – to give the system (and your own team!) some time to get to know how your ads program works.

A note about AI and ethical use: With AI adoption, as with all our technology and data practices and partnerships, we prioritize working with tools that align with our mission and ethics. We recognize that not all platforms share our values, and we factor that into the tools we engage with. Whether leveraging LLMs as a discovery and research tool, opting into AI tools within buying platforms, or optimizing your brand for AEO/GEO: we recommend prioritizing transparency, accuracy, training, and ethical use first and foremost to ensure that your practices remain aligned with your mission.

Honing Your Targeting and Placements

Depending on your unique audience demographics and opportunities, the right partner can guide you to the channels that hold the best potential for growth. Especially at the top of the funnel, it’s important to prioritize relevant reach: rather than casting your message out to everyone, layering various targeting approaches onto digital advertising efforts is crucial to achieving quality reach. Consider targeting audiences in new age groups, geographic regions, and interests outside your particular vertical. And consider layering your targeting approaches to try both specific targeting with defined audiences and broader targeting. The latter approach will give the advertising platform the space to model its own ideal audience for your mission, which might identify prospects your targeting could have missed.

Digital advertising is most successful when it reaches the right audience where they already are and engages them with the right messaging. Younger users, for example, consume content naturally over a variety of platforms, which is why a cross-channel and multitouch approach is key for engaging this audience. By leveraging the data we have about donation history and what causes an audience supports, we can tailor ads to their priorities and ensure that your reels show up on their Instagram scrolls, or they encounter your display ads on their parenting blogs.

One Last Note

Taking risks and testing new approaches like these offers nonprofits the opportunity to innovate and find pockets of opportunity, and it’s a powerful way to ensure your content never gets stale. We’re reminding our partners as we dive into 2026 fundraising campaigns that when it comes to top-funnel acquisition: Don’t take your foot off the gas, and don’t be afraid to try something new this year. Challenging giving environments are a powerful time to discover innovative ways to drive meaningful and lasting connections with your audiences.