3 Nonprofit Operations to Streamline With Your CRM

As a fundraising professional, you’re always looking for ways to level up giving. But to raise funds efficiently, your nonprofit’s operations must be streamlined to ensure a standardized process for garnering support and collecting donations.

The right constituent relationship management (CRM) solution can help your organization manage its donor data while also streamlining daily operations. By combining data collection with effective fundraising processes, you’ll maximize donations and retain support from more engaged supporters. 

When you choose a CRM that keeps all your data in one place rather than in multiple or siloed systems, you’re better able to focus on engaging your donors. Through personalized, multichannel outreach, you can turn occasional donors into monthly donors and keep those recurring givers excited about your mission.

Donation Processing

Your growing supporter base and diversified revenue streams are indicators of a healthy fundraising strategy! While this is a positive sign, it also means you’ll need to securely and efficiently process various types of donations across different platforms and giving frequencies. 

Your CRM can help manage these donations with secure payment processing, regardless of whether the gifts are online, in the mail, over the phone, in-kind, from a Donor Advised Fund, or matched by a company.

With an all-in-one CRM, your nonprofit can:

• Accept and record all types of gifts: Donors choose to support nonprofits in many ways. Ensure your CRM can handle major gifts, recurring donations, in-kind donations, Donor Advised Fund gifts, and donations received over the phone. It’s not all about a good online donation form, though that’s extremely important! You need a system where you can input all that data and make sure it syncs it all in real time.

• Lower costs: Multiple systems often mean multiple licenses and multiple bills. But when you have all the fundraising tools you need in one place, your CRM costs less than if you try to build a mismatched ecosystem of different platforms. 

• Aggregate and analyze donor data: When all your donor data is in one place, you can leverage analytics to discover donor insights and better plan your fundraising efforts. For example, if a donor by mail suddenly makes an online gift, you know that’s a new channel you can use for outreach. And research shows that donors who give in multiple channels tend to be more engaged donors. 

• Leverage useful fundraising tools: If your CRM offers multiple fundraising tools, you can dip your toe into new creative strategies to find new donors and reach out to your current donors to ask them consider another gift or upgrading them to higher levels

Plus, donors will be more likely to consider recurring gifts when they feel reassured that their payment information is safe. Your payment processor should be PCI compliant at a bare minimum. For the most secure payment processing, look for a PCI-certified vendor. This means they have gone through a rigorous certification process and that they’re constantly under a third-party microscope, ensuring their certification is valid.

Email Automation

According to CharityEngine’s guide to fundraising software, email marketing automation is a top CRM feature most likely to be utilized and most impactful for your fundraising efforts.

Your CRM will streamline email communications by:

• Personalizing messages: You have the data to populate email salutations with individual donors’ names, making them feel directly spoken to rather than just addressing them as ‘friend’ in an email blast list. 

• Incorporating your nonprofit’s branding: Customizable templates let your nonprofit’s brand shine through every email.

• Automating communications: Follow up with donors quickly and personally through automated messages. Automation workflows can help your nonprofit send personalized communications to large audiences, lessening the workload associated with your nonprofit’s outreach. These are great tools to thank donors for their recent gift, to ask them to take a survey to learn more about them or convert them to a recurring gift. 

A CRM with robust communication tools can help you leverage your database of donor data to reach out effectively and record donors’ engagement. This way, you’ll know exactly how donors respond to your outreach efforts so you can craft communications that are more likely to reach and engage them. 

Data Reporting

As you secure more gifts and expand your outreach, you’ll gather an increasing amount of data about your supporters and their donations. Your CRM’s data reporting features can help you track this data and draw insights to measure your impact, track your goals, and adjust your approach as necessary.

Use your CRM to keep your donor data organized and receive reports about your fundraising efforts. For example, you might use the solution to track:

• Email open and click through rates: Along with other metrics, you’ll be able to see if your emails are resonating with your audiences. If your open and click through rates are low, you know you need to switch up your subject lines to make your emails more appealing.

• Peak donation times: For example, did your nonprofit secure the highest number of recurring gifts on GivingTuesday or during its year-end giving campaign? Or was there an unexpected bump in recurring gifts after an email sequence?

• Donor demographics: When you dive into your donor demographics, you’ll see how easy it is to segment your donor base (age, location, frequency of gift, etc.) and create personalized communications for each group.

According to NPOInfo’s guide to donor data management, your CRM’s data tracking can help you keep your data in one place. This way, you can find information more easily and actually use your donor data to enhance your fundraising efforts.

Whether you’re searching for the best nonprofit CRM to use or realizing the full potential of your existing solution, understanding the ways your nonprofit can use your CRM  to its advantage can help you wisely allocate your resources to support your cause. 

Audit your nonprofit’s operations and identify processes that could be streamlined. This will help you find a CRM that will increase the productivity of your fundraising team and help you raise more money (and more recurring donors) for your mission. 

Provided by guest blogger, with additional edits by A Direct Solution.