A botanical garden that grew from 10,000 to 30,000 members in five years. A sculpture park rethinking what “membership” even means. A 526-acre park in Brooklyn where a neighborhood ball association raised six figures to fix a playing field. We recently sat down with the fundraising leaders behind all three, and the full conversation is worth your time. The complete recording is embedded at the bottom of this post. Here’s what stood out.
When success creates its own fundraising problems
Most fundraising advice assumes you’re trying to get bigger. But what happens after you succeed? That was the thread running through our recent panel conversation with three fundraisers whose organizations sit at very different points on the growth curve, and it turned out to be one of the most useful framings we’ve heard in a while.
We brought together three people who know green-space fundraising from the inside:
- Sam Perry, Annual Giving Manager at Filoli, the historic house and garden in the San Francisco Bay Area, has seen membership grow to more than 30,000 members and annual visitors reach 750,000 during a remarkable expansion.
- Aaron Turner, VP of Philanthropy at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, is one of the country’s largest sculpture parks and botanical destinations, with roughly 900,000 guests a year.
- Jaime-Faye Bean, Chief Advancement Officer at the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit partner stewarding Brooklyn’s 526-acre Prospect Park, which sees nearly 10 million visits annually.
CBA’s VP of Client Partnerships, Christina McPhillips, moderated.
Three organizations, three stages of growth
Before the panel got going, we asked attendees a simple question: Which best describes your organization today? The answers spread almost evenly across “building a fundraising program,” “mature program,” and “reinventing or restructuring.” In other words, the room looked a lot like the panel: everyone growing, but from different starting lines.
We also asked where people saw their biggest fundraising opportunity. The clear front-runner was building a major donor pipeline, followed closely by upgrading donors to higher levels and growing monthly/sustainer giving. If that sounds like your list too, you’re in good company, and the panelists spent much of the hour discussing this topic.
The Takeaway
Acquisition wasn’t the top concern for this audience. It was the harder, more valuable work of deepening relationships with people who already know you. That’s a meaningful shift, and it’s consistent with what the sector is seeing: repeat donors now account for more than 60% of total fundraising dollars, even as overall donor numbers contract. (NonProfit PRO on the Fundraising Effectiveness Project data)
“I already bought a membership — why should I give more?”
This is the question that haunts every membership-based organization, and each panelist had a different, useful answer.
Aaron Turner (Meijer Gardens) made the case for tearing down the wall between “member” and “donor” entirely. His framing — that support for an organization has “many different tributaries” that all feed the same river — reframes membership, planned gifts, sponsorships, and annual fund donations as different doorways into the same relationship. As he put it, your accounting shouldn’t determine how a donor engages with you. The goal is to honor the donor’s journey “from the moment they enter our space until the time they decide to leave us in their estate.”
Jaime-Faye Bean (Prospect Park Alliance) described the opposite-but-complementary move: leaning into the word “membership” because it signals community and belonging — then deliberately shifting to the language of investment and donation when the conversation turns to upgrades and second gifts.
Sam Perry (Filoli) shared how Filoli distinguishes between “lowercase-s support” (membership, which covers day-to-day upkeep) and “capital-S Support” (donations, which are forward-looking and let the organization “dream bigger”).
The Takeaway
There’s no single right answer on membership-vs-philanthropy language. What unites all three approaches is intentionality — every one of them has a deliberate, tested vocabulary for moving someone from a transactional relationship to a mission-driven one.
The retention mistakes they’ll admit to
We asked each panelist for a retention mistake they’d made. The honesty was refreshing.
Sam Perry described how Filoli’s active donor count had quietly eroded over several years before the team turned it around dramatically, and how the fix started with something unglamorous: getting timely, personalized thank-you receipts out the door and balancing speed against personalization.
Jaime-Faye Bean told the best cautionary tale of the session. Wanting to be environmentally responsible, “we’re a park, what are we doing killing all these trees?” — her team moved an annual renewal appeal from paper to digital. The response was dismal. The lesson: their donors love paper. They went right back to the mailbox. Meeting donors where they actually are beat doing what seemed obviously right.
Aaron Turner’s answer was the shortest and maybe the truest: there’s no one-size-fits-all model.
The Takeaway
Retention is where the economics of fundraising are won or lost — the donor you keep is far cheaper than the one you have to go find. Yet sector-wide retention still hovers around the low-to-mid 40% range, which means most organizations lose more than half their donors year to year. (Bloomerang’s summary of FEP retention data) Small, consistent stewardship habits move that number more than any single big campaign.
The data that actually changes decisions
When Christina asked what single piece of donor data has become most important, the answers clustered tightly: wealth screening, age overlays, and tenure.
Jaime-Faye is focused on age overlays right now, with an eye toward reviving planned giving — noting that in New York City, enormous wealth was created simply by people who bought homes decades ago. Sam pointed to wealth screening and a longer-term wish to capture donor motivation in the CRM so messaging can be segmented around why people give. Aaron highlighted tenure and tax-smart giving signals (QCDs, stock, DAFs), making the sharp observation that donors “give a lot more out of money that is not in their checking account.”
For the record, the panel’s CRM stack was as varied as everything else: Prospect Park Alliance on Raiser’s Edge, Filoli mid-migration from Altru to Raiser’s Edge, and Meijer Gardens on Salesforce. None of them had a large dedicated analytics function — a reminder that you don’t need a data team to be data-informed.
We also ran a quick poll on whether attendees even know their current retention rate. Half said yes, they track it regularly; the rest could find it but don’t watch it closely, or only know it approximately. If you’re in that second group, that’s the single most actionable thing you can change this quarter.
The Takeaway
You don’t need every overlay. Pick the one or two data points that will actually change a decision — for most green-space organizations, that’s wealth capacity and age — and build the muscle of looking at them regularly.
Why everyone’s suddenly talking about donor-advised funds
One audience question — is anyone doing DAF marketing? — opened up one of the most practical exchanges of the hour.
Jaime-Faye punctured a common myth: that DAF holders are all “sophisticated philanthropists” with everything planned out. In reality, plenty of people reach year-end having forgotten to direct their funds. Simply reminding them you accept DAF gifts — on your website, in appeals, as a P.S. — captures gifts that would otherwise sit idle. Sam echoed the “make it visible everywhere” approach. Aaron is going a step further, building relationships directly with community and family foundations so their advisors know his organization is a viable, ready recipient.
This tracks with what we’re seeing across our client base. DAFs are now the fastest-growing way to give, and the numbers behind that are striking: when a donor switches from a credit card to their DAF, the average increase in their giving is roughly 10x. There’s even a dedicated national DAF Day each October to rally awareness — a natural anchor for a campaign.
The Takeaway
DAF fundraising is one of the lowest-effort, highest-upside moves available to a green-space organization right now. The barrier isn’t sophistication, it’s visibility. Make it easy and ask.
The campaigns that surprised them
We love asking fundraisers what worked when they didn’t expect it to. Three very different answers:
- Prospect Park Alliance: A neighborhood ball association, frustrated by the state of a field’s clay, used GoFundMe Pro to raise over $100,000 to fully restore it — and helped fund full-time maintenance staff in the process. The lesson Jaime-Faye drew: people had stopped seeing the park as a service and started seeing it as theirs. That sense of ownership is the whole game.
- Filoli: A “low-lift” email campaign to standard members, simply inviting them to upgrade to the philanthropic Filoli Circle, produced a handful of upgrades into a high-retention, high-touch program. The insight is an old fundraising truth that bears repeating: some people have simply never been asked. Filoli is now making that a recurring, monthly habit.
- Meijer Gardens: Aaron is activating a 600-strong volunteer base — average age 69 — around the full “time, talent, and treasure” model, and is about to launch a crowdfunding campaign so the community can help keep a beloved Dale Chihuly sculpture. His operating philosophy: most ideas aren’t bad ideas. Test for feasibility, try it, and if it doesn’t work, move on.
The Takeaway
The highest-ROI campaigns in this session weren’t expensive or complicated. They were askable moments — a community that wanted to give, a member who’d never been invited to do more, a piece of art people loved. Your next surprising win is probably already sitting in your audience.
A few more gems from the Q&A
- On gala guests: Converting one-time gala attendees (especially a board member’s guests) into recurring donors is genuinely hard. Jaime-Faye’s idea: tie the gala’s pledge moment to one tangible program and invite those donors to see it in action — turning a transaction into an experience.
- On text messaging: Still emerging for this group. Filoli is exploring it for renewals and give-days; the others use it sparingly or not yet. A reminder that “new channel” doesn’t have to mean “all at once.”
What this means for your organization
If there’s a single thread connecting Filoli, Meijer Gardens, and Prospect Park Alliance, it’s this: growth doesn’t fix your fundraising — it changes the questions you have to answer. The organization building its first major-gift pipeline and the one navigating a generational wealth transfer are both, in their own way, learning to move supporters along a journey rather than process transactions.
That’s the work we do every day. For 50 years, Carl Bloom Associates has helped parks, gardens, and cultural organizations turn visitors into members and members into committed donors — through smart segmentation, tested messaging, and the kind of retention discipline that compounds over time.
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