Over the last three and a half years, we’ve onboarded more than 250 NGOs onto our Glific platform, which comes out to hundreds of demos, thousands of emails, and countless follow-ups. But our biggest learning hasn’t been how to sell Glific. It’s that sales is only one part of growth.
Glific is a chatbot platform for nonprofits, and for years, our pipeline was built almost entirely on the personal network and the events we attended. That worked until a point when it stopped being enough, and we went back to the drawing board. We realized our funnel looked like a typical sales funnel, moving from awareness to interest to demo or desire and eventually action. But when we actually looked at where the pipeline ended, we had to ask ourselves: does it end where the customer makes the purchase? From that realization, we started mapping our customer journey for real, breaking it into a growth flywheel that maps out every stage a customer goes through once they get onto Glific.
As our understanding of growth evolved, we realized every stage has a different bottleneck. Solving one simply revealed the next one. We started treating it as a system: find whatever isn’t working right now, fix that piece, and expect the next one to surface somewhere else (some can be fixed early; some can take a long time).
1. Creating Consistent Demand
The first bottleneck, and the one we’re still working on, was demand. We were leaning too heavily on networks and creating awareness through webinars, so we moved to more deliberate ways of generating qualified leads:
- Webinars (sourced from people on what they want to learn)
- LinkedIn ads
- SEO
- partnerships
- our recently launched trial accounts
We also invested in case studies and live demos. Where we are today is that partnerships and referrals are consistently generating leads, and we’re still refining a scalable, repeatable inbound engine.
We’re also still experimenting with different marketing initiatives we can build. One thing we’ve learned along the way is that social sector context matters as much as marketing capability itself. Without that context, corporate marketers often bring standard playbooks that don’t translate well in our case. Funder and NGO dynamics work differently from typical B2B buyers, so sector understanding is key to demand generation.
2. Prioritizing the Right Opportunity
The second growth challenge was prioritizing the right opportunity. We realized not every interested organization was equally ready to adopt Glific. For a while, we spoke to every interested organization the same way, with the same follow-up and the same assumption that interest would eventually turn into adoption. We built a detailed scoring model first. What actually changed things was coming up with our ICP, our NGO persona, and introducing a qualification criteria to prioritize organizations based on their need, readiness, and fit.
Instead of fitting all the organisations into our criteria, we also changed our approach to what NGO’s need and how we fit in their journey. We landed on a lightweight qualification criteria: three simple checks to figure out if this is the right NGO for us to focus on. This significantly increased our sales. Because we focused on NGOs that matched our MQL criteria, our Accelerator got 60% more conversions than we’d initially planned.
3. Enabling Organizational Buy-In
One of the key things I’ve learned, especially in nonprofit sales, is that the job isn’t done once you’ve given the demo. A good, strong demo doesn’t lead to a decision on its own. Our primary contact often wasn’t even the final decision-maker, and the organization needed internal alignment before moving forward. What changed in our approach is that we started caring deeply about the organization we’re speaking to, and looking at how we can support them through their decision-making process. Sometimes that means:
- creating proof of concepts for them with them
- sending case studies relevant to them
- writing leadership notes for their leadership
- engaging their key decision-makers directly
When we’ve cared deeply, organizations have responded the same way. Our philosophy is to work with non-profits as partners vs customers. The demo doesn’t really end until the organization is ready to make a confident decision.
4. Onboarding to Activation
A big growth challenge for us has been onboarding to activation journey. Completing onboarding never guaranteed adoption.
I like to put it this way: “Are you counting it as watching a movie once you’ve bought the ticket, or only once you’ve actually sat through it?”
That’s the gap between signing up and getting real value, what I now call Time-to-Value, and organizations, especially in the nonprofit space, need to close that gap early. Every organization goes through the exact same onboarding process, yet adoption still varies widely. One of the biggest reasons organizations churn is that they never realized the value, because they never either launched a real use case or worked deeply on seeing the chatbot beyond one program.
Some of the common roadblocks we’ve seen organisations encounter while getting a pilot off the ground are:
- Finding the right person to own the project internally.
- Competing priorities and limited implementation capacity.
- Uncertainty about where to begin or which use case to pilot first.
- Delays in decision-making and approvals.
So we are shifting our focus from just completing onboarding to actually driving activation, which we now define through proactive check-ins to understand product usage blockers and the customer’s experience. NGOs have really appreciated that we’re equally invested in the problem they’re trying to solve.
5. Keeping Customers Happy
Last but not least, our happiest customers are core to growing our platform. Even while we focus heavily on acquiring new organizations, we need to care just as much about keeping our existing customers happy and supported. That takes real, ongoing work, staying engaged with them through the platform, which in turn unlocks expansion and referral opportunities. And in our experience, NGOs trust other NGOs much more than any advertisement.
Top Takeaways & Outside World
- Not every interested lead is a fit. A lightweight, three-question qualification filter outperformed our own more detailed scoring model, because it left room for a sector where few organizations check every box.
- Onboarding and activation are different milestones. An organization can finish onboarding and still never use the product for anything real, so track the gap between “signed” and “got value” on its own.
- Fixing a bottleneck rarely ends the work, it usually just moves the constraint further down the funnel. Treating growth as a system to keep tuning, rather than a problem to solve once, is what made progress compound.
Outside research backs up a couple of these instincts. Amplitude’s 2025 benchmark across more than 2,600 companies found that over 98 percent of new users churn within two weeks if they never hit a value milestone, which lines up with what we’ve seen in NGOs that never launched a real use case early on. On the retention and referral side, B2B SaaS companies typically attribute 20 to 40 percent of new customers to referrals and word of mouth, and referred customers carry 16 to 25 percent higher lifetime value, a reminder that the work we put into keeping customers happy is also a growth channel, not just a retention one.
We’re still learning. Some parts of our customer lifecycle are working well, others are still active experiments:
- building a predictable top-of-funnel
- improving activation
- scaling customer success
- turning referrals and customer advocacy into a real growth channel
If you’re working through similar growth questions in the nonprofit or social sector, I’d love to connect.
