On lean teams, everyone wears multiple hats, but that doesn’t mean you’re actually working together. More often, you’re working in parallel, heads-down on your own urgent tasks and disconnected from what everyone else is doing. The result is that volunteers who could be donors never get asked, marketing campaigns that don’t drive revenue, and events that gather people but don’t raise money.
The problem isn’t your team size. It’s the silos.
Here’s what changes when you break them down: your volunteer base becomes your warmest fundraising prospects, your marketing content does double-duty as fundraising tools, and your event partnerships multiply your reach without adding work. Inspired by Colleen Stepanek and the team at Habitat for Humanity San Luis Obispo shared at Habitat NEXT, in this article, we’ll cover how you can do exactly that.
Read the success story: How Habitat for Humanity San Luis Obispo Broke Silos to Exceed Goals by 221%
Volunteers: Leverage as Your Warmest Leads and Best Connectors
Stop Thinking Labor, Start Thinking Relationships
When you think “volunteer,” what comes to mind? Probably someone helping at an event or swinging a hammer on a build site. But here’s what you’re missing: these people are already giving you their time, which makes them your warmest fundraising prospects. As Colleen Stefanek, Programs Manager at Habitat for Humanity San Luis Obispo, puts it: “These folks are already part of your mission.” [16:17]
However, most affiliates keep volunteers and donors in completely separate mental categories—and separate database segments. Your volunteer coordinator recruits people to show up while your development team cultivates a different list of donors, and the two rarely overlap, even though they should.
To combat this, start by tagging every volunteer in your CRM with meaningful context beyond just “volunteer”:
- Build volunteers
- Event helpers
- Corporate group participants
- Board committee members
- One-time vs. recurring volunteers.
Then assign someone to review that volunteer list quarterly and identify who should get a fundraising ask.
Depend on Volunteer Connections
Your volunteers have relationships you don’t. They know business owners, they’re connected to other community members who care about housing, and they have LinkedIn networks full of people who might sponsor your event or donate auction items. But if you’re only asking volunteers to show up and work, you’re leaving that relational capital completely untapped.
“We have a giant Google Doc of pretty much every business in [our] county,” says Colleen. “We send that out to our staff, to volunteers, and say, ‘Do you know anyone that’s part of these companies? Can you introduce us?” [39:33]
Using Colleen’s strategy, create one shared Google Doc listing every business and potential corporate partner in your area, including the aspirational ones and not just your current connections. Make it accessible to your entire team (staff and key volunteers alike), then send it out with a simple ask: “Do you know anyone at these companies? Could you connect us?”
Build Strategic Guest Lists Together
When you’re planning an event, who decides the guest list? If the answer is “whoever’s in charge of ticket sales,” you’re leaving money on the table.
Each part of your team knows different things about your community. Volunteers know who shows up repeatedly and who’s genuinely passionate, marketing knows who engages with your content and opens emails, and fundraising knows who has giving history and capacity. When you bring those three perspectives together, you stop guessing and start being strategic about who should be in the room.
To be more strategic about guest lists, be sure to:
- Host a meeting: Run a 30-minute “who do we know” session where volunteers, marketing, and fundraising each bring their top 20 prospects and compare notes—you’ll find overlap you didn’t expect and gaps you need to fill
- Create guest list tiers together: Tier 1 gets personal phone calls from volunteers who know them, Tier 2 gets personalized emails from staff, Tier 3 gets general invitations.
- Schedule a midpoint check-in two weeks before the event: This will help you identify who hasn’t responded and reassign outreach—volunteers can follow up with their personal invites, marketing can retarget engaged followers, fundraising can make last-minute personal asks to high-capacity prospects
Marketing: Create Once, Use Everywhere
Build Cross-Promotion Into Every Partnership
Most affiliates treat marketing like a solo act—your communications person creates posts, sends emails, and hopes people pay attention. But when you’re planning an event or campaign, you’re already building relationships with vendors, sponsors, auctioneers, and MCs who have their own audiences. If you’re not leveraging those networks, you’re doing twice the work for half the reach.
For example, your auctioneer might have a following of people who attend fundraising events regularly, and your MC might be very connected to the local community. As Colleen puts it: “Anytime you can collaborate with someone, do it, even if it’s like ‘check out this person we got!’ We did a lot of that for our campaign around our MC.” [18:16]
To make cross-promotion the default, be sure to:
- Write it into partnership agreements from the beginning: Include social media promotion and email mentions as part of the deal when you’re booking your auctioneer or securing your venue.
- Create shareable assets for every partner: Give them graphics, suggested copy, and tagged posts they can share with one click.
- Feature partners in your content calendar: Spotlight your MC one week, your food vendor the next, giving them reasons to reshare and their audiences reasons to pay attention.
- Tag strategically and genuinely: Post about what partners bring to the event and why you’re excited to work with them, not just transactional “thank you to our sponsor” content.
Document Now, Use Later
Most nonprofits wait until their event or build is finished to think about capturing the story, which means they miss the most powerful moments and scramble to cobble together photos that don’t tell the narrative they need.
The video of your homeowner’s family on build day, photos of volunteers working together, the moment when keys get handed over—these become your appeal videos, presentation materials at sponsor meetings, email campaign visuals, and your most compelling case for support.
To turn documentation into a multi-year asset, be sure to:
- Plan your story arc before you start shooting: What moments show transformation? Opening day, challenges overcome, volunteers connecting, family reactions, completion, etc.
- Shoot with multiple uses in mind: Wide shots for presentations, close-ups for social media, interview footage for appeals, b-roll for email headers.
- Create a shared drive folder organized by campaign: Make it accessible to everyone so your volunteer coordinator can pull photos for recruitment and your development director can grab video clips for donor meetings.
- Repurpose relentlessly: That volunteer day video becomes a recruitment tool, donor thank-you, sponsor report, and next year’s event promotion
Mine Your Warm Leads
Your warmest prospects aren’t strangers—they’re people already paying attention to you on social media and via email. “Who’s following your LinkedIn? That’s a hot, hot lead. Someone’s already looking at you,” says Colleen. [39:13]
To turn engagement data into a development pipeline, be sure to:
- Run quarterly social media audits: Export your LinkedIn connections and Instagram followers, then cross-reference against your donor database to identify people who follow you but haven’t given.
- Share engagement reports across teams: When marketing sees that a local CEO has opened every email for three months, that’s intelligence fundraising needs.
- Create “warm lead” tags in your CRM: Mark people who engage digitally so you know who’s already paying attention when building prospect lists.
- Assign follow-up strategically: If someone from your volunteer coordinator’s network is engaging with content, have them make the personal ask
Fundraising: Make it Everyone’s Job, Not Just One Person’s
Make the Ask Central to Everything
As Colleen puts it bluntly: “In the past, there had been just some hesitation of the ask. And if you don’t ask, you’re not going to get anything because people don’t know that you need it.” [9:40]
The shift from “we hope people donate” to “we’re explicitly asking for money” is what turns gatherings into fundraisers. That means live auctions, silent auctions, direct appeals, and clear donation opportunities built into every touchpoint—not afterthoughts or optional add-ons.
To integrate fundraising from the start, be sure to:
- Set a revenue goal before you plan anything else and share it with everyone on the team
- Build the ask into your timeline—when does the appeal happen, who delivers it, what’s the specific call to action
- Ensure every team member knows this is a fundraising event, not just a community celebration
- Brief volunteers, vendors, and partners so they understand and can reinforce the message
Adopt the Role of Salespeople
“It is all about relationships. We are salespeople for Habitat. That’s really what it comes down to. And sales are about relationships and trust,” says Colleen. [58:50]
Volunteers sell the mission through their passion, marketing sells the story through compelling content, and fundraising sells the opportunity to make impact.
To ensure everyone on your team is a “salesperson” for your mission, be sure to:
- Train everyone to talk about impact in ways that naturally lead to giving opportunities
- Share donor conversations across teams so volunteers and marketing understand what messages resonate
- Let fundraising brief volunteers and marketing on upcoming campaigns so everyone’s aligned on the ask
- Celebrate wins together—when a volunteer’s connection becomes a major donor, everyone should know and feel ownership
Invest in What Multiplies Results
Not all expenses are equal. Some costs are overhead that just keep things running, but strategic investments in fundraising multiply your returns. Professional auctioneers are a perfect example—yes, they’re expensive, but they know how to read a room, maintain momentum, and psychologically prime people to spend more.
“Our auctioneer was worth every penny that we paid him, without a doubt. Our whole team at the end was like, ‘Oh, we’re bringing him back,'” says Colleen [28:40]. For her event, the auctioneer didn’t just facilitate the auction—he changed their timeline (moving appeals before dinner instead of after), used techniques they’d never considered (calling fake bid numbers to maintain energy), and ultimately helped them raise 221% of their goal.
The Systems and Processes That Bring Everything Together
One Shared Timeline for All Functions
The biggest operational mistake lean teams make is letting each function manage their own deadlines independently.
“Having a timeline and a checklist beforehand is just really, really helpful for everybody,” Colleen says. [26:45]
The keyword is one timeline—a single shared document where everyone can see what’s happening across all functions and how their work connects to everyone else’s.
Having one shared technology platform supports that same visibility. In Giveffect, for example, data updates automatically reflect across functions, so every team member sees the same information in real time.
No “My Job” Mentality
On paper, you have distinct roles with clear responsibilities. In reality, successful lean teams operate with a different philosophy: “This has to get done. How do we get it done? Don’t care if it’s not necessarily my job title,” says Colleen. [6:10]
This doesn’t mean chaos or people randomly picking up tasks—it means creating a shared task board where anyone can grab work based on their capacity and interest. Maybe your development director has 30 minutes between meetings and notices that auction item follow-ups haven’t been made. Maybe your volunteer coordinator is good at graphic design and offers to create sponsor recognition posts. Maybe your marketing person sees that thank-you calls to volunteers are piling up and makes an hour of calls.
Technology as a Tool to Connect, Not Separate
Technology should eliminate silos, not create new ones. Yet many affiliates use separate systems for volunteer management, donor databases, email marketing, and event ticketing—which means data lives in four places, nobody has a complete picture, and integration requires manual exports and imports that rarely happen.
That’s why more affiliates are adopting connected systems like Giveffect, where volunteers, donors, and events all live in one ecosystem. When data flows automatically between teams, collaboration becomes the default—not the exception.
Choose tools that integrate by design:
- Event management that handles ticketing, volunteer shifts, auction, and check-in in one place
- CRM tagging that works across functions (someone can be tagged as a volunteer, donor, and event attendee simultaneously)
- Shared document storage where marketing assets, volunteer schedules, and donor lists are accessible to everyone
- Marketing and communications platforms that let you segment by any data point (attended event, volunteered last quarter, gave last year) without exporting to spreadsheets
Start Breaking Down Silos Today—with Giveffect
Giveffect is built specifically for lean nonprofit teams that need volunteers, marketing, and fundraising to work from the same system. With Giveffect, you can manage volunteer shifts, event ticketing, auction items, donor data, and email campaigns in one place—so your volunteer coordinator can see donor history, your marketing person can segment by engagement, and your development team can identify warm prospects without juggling multiple platforms.
The best part? You can duplicate successful campaigns year over year and just update the details, which means you’re building a system instead of starting from scratch every time.
Ready to see how integrated tools support integrated teams? Book a strategy call today to learn more.
Habitat for Humanity is a registered service mark of Habitat for Humanity International. This resource is not affiliated with or endorsed by Habitat for Humanity International.