Transform your newsroom’s fundraising capacity with a purpose-built CRM and Moves Management System designed specifically to cultivate, engage and grow mid-tier and major donors.
BlueLena CRM is the first and only fundraising platform purpose-built for independent news publishers — combining behavior-driven donor prospect scoring, automated moves management, and integrated email tools to accelerate mid-tier and major gift development. Designed for lean teams, it enables you to identify, cultivate, and steward high-potential donors with precision and scale — turning loyal readers into sustaining supporters of local journalism.
Core Capabilities for Fundraising Development
BlueDepth™ Donor Scoring
Our proprietary propensity model evaluates donor potential not just by wealth, but by real-time engagement: email opens, newsletter clicks, donation history, demographic signals — all starting with an email address. Scores update automatically and feed into fundraising workflows, enabling teams to quickly identify high-value prospects.
Structured Moves Management System
Once a contact’s score crosses a threshold, BlueLena automatically places them into a finely tuned fundraising journey — with prebuilt stages and tailored touch points for mid- and major-level gifts. This ensures every lead receives the strategic stewardship it deserves.
Task Automation and Messaging Personalization
Use pre-built automations — from email outreach sequences to task reminders — to deliver a personalized experience at scale. Lean development teams can focus on high-touch interactions while automation maintains momentum.
Native CMS and ESP Integration
Built on the industry-leading ActiveCampaign™ platform, BlueLena seamlessly combines CRM and email tools — so fundraising campaigns from welcome series to major donor outreach can be managed effectively and efficiently from a unified system.
Proven Fundraising Growth
Local publishers using BlueLena CRM are reporting breakthrough results:
- 30% increase in total individual giving, year-over-year
- 18-24% increase in average gift size thanks to stronger donor engagement
- 25% increase in midsized and major donor pipelines
These metrics underscore how targeted donor scoring and pipeline management unlock sustained revenue growth—exactly what local journalism needs.
Onboarding & Ongoing Support
- 12-week strategic onboarding, led by product experts including Megan Wofford (Director of Product), with a focus on fundraising
- A dedicated Publisher Success Manager and 40 hours of annual on-demand strategic support
- Enrollment in BlueLena Academy, a GNI-sponsored series of training and skills development workshops available for every member of your team
- Seamless data migration from Salesforce, Boomerang, Little Green Light or spreadsheets
- Integrations with Slack, analytics and our direct mail platform to align fundraising activity with operational workflows.
Trusted by Leading Independent Newsrooms
BlueLena’s growing network of publishers leveraging our CRM and Moves Management system represents a diverse mix of nonprofit and mission-driven for profit newsrooms, including:
These publishers are united by a shared goal: to strengthen their development capacity and secure the future of independent journalism.
System Description and Features
Using BlueLena’s built-in CRM, you can create accounts for each opportunity and connect an unlimited number of contacts to the organization while also designating the “primary point of contact” to associate with a “deal” that is created in the membership, sponsorship or fundraising revenue pipeline.
Use the Deals feature built into BlueLena to manage opportunities for your organization
By creating a “Deal” associated with a Contact and Account, you can assign tasks to individual membership or major gift development team members, either manually or within the BlueLena automation library. Take notes directly within each Deal and Contact record, so that your entire team is aligned. Attached proposals and contracts to the record. Connect with Calendly to track meetings and integrate with your work calendar. You can also automatically update Deal owners, Deal stages, Deals won or lost and Deal values – all within one elegant and simple user interface.
Create Contacts to manage your individual customer relationships
Each “Contact” created in the BlueLena platform is fully customizable with key contact information including email, phone, job title and other fields you may create without any limitations. Using field “Groupings” you can connect multiple sources of data to a single customer contact and build segments directly in the platform. The Contact record aggregates and organizations all the information you have collected about an individual. Unlike other CRM systems that have a limited number of fields, BlueLena’s platform may be customized as you see fit to support all of your individual contact data.
Build a complete view of supporters using BlueDepth™ propensity model, included with your services
BlueDepth™ evaluates giving potential through real‑time engagement signals — automatically updating and feeding into fundraising workflows. Unlike wealth scoring systems that identify donors of any type of organization, BlueDepth™ is trained on your own data and identifies deeply engaged readers who have a high probability of specifically supporting news organizations.
Deepening your understanding of audiences and individual customers unlocks opportunities to drive monetization.
- Find the individuals who are most engaged with your content.
- Add scores to overall deals and contacts, and automatically segment your leads based on characteristics or actions they take with your site.
- Build scored models to distinguish between small dollar donors and those who have the potential to contribute more to your organization.
All of this is available using our BlueDepth™ donor prospect modeling through machine learning built-into BlueLena CRM.
Get full visibility on your donor pipelines including on-demand donation and major gift forecasting reports
Which opportunities should your development team spend more time on? What does your organizations revenue look like in six months? Not every deal is going to close, so which opportunities should you prioritize? Using our Deal Reports you can stay up-to-date on open deals so nothing slips through the cracks. You can also use this to help forecasting revenue performance based on when you anticipate potential opportunities to convert to wins.
Optimize fundraising performance for the organization and individuals
Track the performance of individual members or your team and the overall donation and major gift funnels through our built-in revenue performance reporting. You can also see how likely team members are to close each deal through our predictive modeling, allowing you to drive peak performance and directing your team to focus where it makes the most difference.
Ready to Scale your Fundraising Development Program?
Schedule a walk through, and learn how BlueLena can:
- Identify your top-tier donors through behavior-based scoring
- Automate moves management with publisher-tailored pipelines
- Grow your mid-tier and major gift program sustainably
- Support every step—from onboarding strategy to ongoing optimization
About BlueLena
BlueLena is a strategy consulting and audience management platform founded in 2020 to support the sustainability of independent local media. By combining cutting-edge technology with expert-driven services, BlueLena helps over 250 news organizations across North America develop and manage subscription, membership, and donation models. Its unique shared-resource management approach provides publishers, regardless of size, with access to enterprise-level tools and personalized support, enabling them to focus on high-quality journalism while building loyal, revenue-generating audiences.
BlueLena is majority employee-owned, and backed by investors including Automattic (the parent company of WordPress), Local Media Association, and Old Town Media.