Lead with Success: How Blood Cancer United Digitally Transformed Their Fundraising
“Digital transformation” gets tossed around easily these days—but for mission-driven organizations, it’s more than jargon. At nonprofits navigating ambitious goals with finite resources, technology can be the difference between business-as-usual and breakthrough impact.
As the largest global nonprofit focused on blood cancer patient support, research, and advocacy, Blood Cancer United (formerly The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society) has long been known for driving scientific innovation. But the organization is equally committed to innovating how it engages supporters. For Blood Cancer United, reimagining fundraising isn’t just about efficiency. It's about giving donors, volunteers, and staff the best possible experience.
Few understand this better than Carrie Crabb, Vice President, Campaign Development Digital Transformation, who brings both frontline fundraising insight and deep systems expertise to her role at Blood Cancer United.
"It’s not just our organization’s name that has changed. We're experiencing a major digital transformation," Carrie explains. "My role is key in ensuring that we're building tools and systems in service of the people who will be using them, including patients, donors, volunteers, and employees, especially fundraising staff."
When Carrie joined Blood Cancer United, she brought prior experience scaling online fundraising and came in with a clear purpose: strengthen staff adoption of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and build a smarter, more connected approach to donor engagement.
A few years later, adoption has skyrocketed—so much so that demand for licenses now outpaces supply.
Designing breakthrough capabilities for fundraisers
Tech alone doesn’t transform an organization. Designing systems around people does. For Carrie, the goal is always the same: make it easier for fundraisers to build meaningful, personalized relationships at scale.
Blood Cancer United started with targeted use cases across three teams—each with distinct goals, but all sharing a need for insights that deepen connection.
Corporate Partnerships: Opening the Right Doors
Blood Cancer United’s corporate partnerships teams pursue major sponsorships and six-figure gifts from foundations and companies across the country.
“In order to do that,” Carrie says, “they’ve got to establish key relationships with people within the companies so that they can then get a foot in the door.”
Sales Navigator makes this possible by surfacing leads, tracking job changes, and mapping internal networks that helps turn cold outreach into strategic relationship-building.
Advancement: Elevating Major Donor Cultivation
For major gift officers, Sales Navigator has become a high-powered donor prospecting and cultivation tool.
“Our major gift officers are examining our current participants lists and mining data within LinkedIn Sales Navigator and having those kinds of relationships and leads bubble up,” Carrie says.
Instead of starting from scratch, fundraisers can quickly identify individuals with shared connections, philanthropic history, or corporate affiliations—creating more informed, more meaningful conversations.
Campaign Teams: Identifying High-Capacity Prospects
For peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns like Light The Night and Visionaries of the Year, the teams rely on LinkedIn to find high-capacity fundraisers and top donor prospects.
“We are looking for CEOs and COOs, people who can make decisions that could result in a sponsorship or a top donor or participant,” Carrie shares.
“LinkedIn is one of the major tools we have to see a person’s propensity to partner, their capacity to give.”
This intelligence fuels stronger recruitment, more effective teams, and ultimately, more successful campaigns.
Driving team adoption to turn curiosity into daily practice
Having a powerful tool is one thing. Getting people to use it is another. That’s where Carrie’s ability to build buy-in has made the difference.
“I think if you can get that adoption and people using it, the proof will be in the pudding,” she says. Her approach: celebrate wins, share best practices, and make the tool's value undeniably clear.
Showcasing success
“We are collecting success stories through a Teams channel, and we are celebrating the wins,” Carrie explains. She adds that when one person shares a success, it often inspires others to do the same, which creates a ripple effect of energy and momentum.
Carrie and her team also lean on incentives and gamification to drive adoption. “We often do contests like, ‘Whoever can provide the next five wins will get some kind of LinkedIn swag!’”
Active and ongoing training
Beyond motivation, Carrie has worked to ensure fundraisers understand how the tool connects to their day-to-day responsibilities.
“It’s critical that all staff understand the tool and the features and functions that they can actually do,” she says. “We help them make the connection between how it works and how they should be using it in their role.”
That clarity, she believes, is what turns curiosity into habit, and habit into impact.
A blueprint for donor-centered fundraising
Carrie’s work shows what happens when digital innovation aligns with human connection.
Blood Cancer United hasn’t simply implemented a new tool. They built breakthrough fundraising capabilities rooted in smarter insights, stronger relationships, and a commitment to innovation across every inch of the organization.
The result? A fundraising engine where technology amplifies the heart of the mission: connecting people who want to make a difference with the causes they care about.
For nonprofits balancing lean budgets with big expectations, Carrie offers a clear blueprint:
start small, prove value, empower your teams, and design solutions around the people who drive your mission forward.
If you’d like to see how LinkedIn Sales Solutions can help your fundraising team, get in touch with our team today.
