Author: admin

With your modern Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system in place, you’re likely tracking donors and prospects, issuing tax receipts, logging calls, and setting tasks. But what’s next?

With a little imagination you can find that every area of your organization can benefit. Here are a few simple examples.

Fundraising

Automated moves suggestions. Put automation in place that automatically alert you when donors reach significant milestones and there’s an opportunity to increase their engagement.

Marketing and Communications

Integrate your digital marketing platforms so you can use data from the database to trigger a constituents involvement in a campaign. Think new donors on-boarding series or automate updates to program supporters.

Human Resources

You’re CRM is housing information about your constituents. It can do just as well with your staff. The system your team uses everyday to do their jobs can also do things like automate timesheets, track annual leave and host engagement surveys.

Board

Providing your board with portal access to the system that help your organization succeed can increase transparency and trust let alone the time savings of having to collect and publish reports from across the organization.

Programs

Every engagement with your clients is vital to your organization. Being able to track, report and even predict those engagements can make the difference for a successful organization.

The possibilities are endless.

How many databases, platforms, solutions, and systems does your organization have in place?

How many mission critical processes are restricted to a single area of the operation?

When was the last time each of those systems received any significant attention?

Nonprofit organizations can often find themselves in the situation where they rely on a number of independent and outdated systems for many of the areas of their operation. Leaders then have to make decisions with incomplete or inaccurate information but a modern Constituent Relationship Manager (CRM) can bring your organization together and give you a complete view.

Imagine the possibilities when you know how many of your members are also donors and at what level. Or understanding how often a potential client checks out your website before contacting you. Or having a direct line of sight on each engagement your front line staff has with your clients.

Organizations become more efficient as staff are freed up from chasing spreadsheets around and spend more time on the important relationships that are vital to the organization.

Take the next step and consider consolidating your organizations data with a modern platform.

You may already know that there can be some serious benefits to integrating technology into the processes at your nonprofit, but where do you start?

With literally thousands of options to help with everything from donor management, to volunteer management, to bookkeeping. Some of these solutions are free, and some have a reduced price for nonprofits. Some have a subscription based software as a service (SAAS) model, and some are purchased for a one time fee. How can you choose? How do you know what you need first? How can you know which one will provide the most bang for your buck?

Then there’s the hidden costs related to implementation and technological debt. Even though a piece of software may be available at a discount or even free that doesn’t mean that there isn’t associated costs to integrating it into your processes, training staff and changing the way you do business.

It is important to have a very clear understanding of your desired outcome. This becomes your guiding light as you weigh your options. From there, make an analysis of the current business processes that may be affected or integrated into the new technology. Then comes market research. Each solution should be investigated and the implications of its adoption mapped out. Once a possible solution is chosen, trial processes need to be created and the solution tested. Finally by analyzing the result and iterating on the processes a finalized solution can be decided on.

All of this can sound complicated and even onerous but the results can be more than worth the effort. To paraphrase Seth Godin; it will take a lot of work but you’ll get more than you put in.