Nonprofit revenue operations strategy starts with helping fundraisers succeed.  Your operations team clears the report queue. Your fundraisers get their spreadsheets. Everybody’s busy . . . .but is the work helping fundraising move forward?

Thomas Turner of charity: water reveals how a customer success approach can sharpen priorities, simplify data access, and strengthen donor relationships.

Thomas, Vice President of Revenue Operations at charity: water, joins us to explore a different approach: make fundraising success the mandate for the team supporting it.

That means agreeing with development leaders on the two or three priorities that deserve focused attention. A routine report might take longer because operations is building something that will save time or improve decisions across the team. The trick is making that tradeoff clear, and making it together!

Discover how self-service analytics can give fundraisers useful dashboards and filters without requiring them to become CRM report writers. Thomas shares a geographic filtering example that replaces repeated requests with a few selections and an export.

CRM adoption gets a refresh, too. Instead of selling staff on “more data,” connect documentation to a situation they recognize: inheriting donors with three years of missing relationship history. As Thomas puts it, “And so we do these things in service of the future.”

The conversation also connects donor portfolio management with giving capacity, project sponsorship, and longer-term partnerships. Thomas describes a target of around 150 major donors per portfolio and recommends measuring internal service before a culture shift, then repeating the survey after three or six months.

For context, Thomas reports that charity: water has served 22.1 million people with clean water, with roughly 700 million still without it. He also explains its 100% model: public donations fund water projects, while separate supporters fund operations.

 

Key Takeaways:

– Set two or three shared operational priorities with fundraising leaders.

– Replace repeat report requests with usable dashboards and filters.

– Explain CRM documentation through donor continuity and portfolio transitions.

– Treat fundraisers’ relationship insights as inputs to engagement analytics.

– Establish a service baseline and reassess after three or six months.