Fundraising and donor care with Salesforce – Part 3 of 3
This is the third part of our ideas on using Salesforce CRM for fundraising and donor management. Here’s a few tips on making fundraising easier for everyone.
Smart Options To Fundraise Well
There are many options available for fundraising within salesforce or using many of the AppExchange offerings that are available. Some options include:
- Online and Recurring donations
Providing a simple and secure online form to allow donors to make a donation or pledge is a good starting point.An option where a donor can select to contribute on a regular basis and even select the day of the month that suits them based on other financial commitments is a sure way of obtaining predictable revenue. Use the social media, email communication and direct mail as a way of keeping these donors.
Provide a simple way to link your appeals to one or multiple donations forms on your website, or even provide a simple way for your donors to select where their donations go
Click on one of the Not-for-profit logos in the following link to see examples of donations forms: http://aakonsultpayments.com/features/
- Running of events or training courses
Events can range from corporate golf days, black tie balls, conferences or training sessions. To manage these events, you can publish a list of upcoming events or a monthly/yearly calendar or events.
Check out http://aakonsultpayments.com/event-management/ for some details of options available or see the AppExchange Event Management section for specialised offerings: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/category/events
- Memberships and friends of groups
Many non-profit organisations are built on the foundation of their memberships. These groups provide a steady income as they need to renew each year. The key item to membership is to have a simple way of managing the renewals and to now spend too much on administration.
Often, a benefit of being a member is having vote and a say in who and how an organisation is run at the AGM. A key requirement there for is not just who is a paid up member, but managing and tracking those with voting rights or being the primary contact for communications.
You can see more information on memberships at: http://aakonsultpayments.com/subscriptions/
- Applying for and managing Grants
The standard Salesforce CRM Object is a great place to track and manage grants. When you think about it, applying for a grant has a lot in common with the typical sales cycle from prospecting for new grant leads, submitting proposals and eventually wining/not getting the grant. The opportunity can be enhanced by adding custom fields for key dates and acquittal dates/requirements.
A great video on using opportunities with another custom object can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYx-56D5Fn8
- Bequests
Bequests are a very important contribution of funds for Not-for-profits. You can use salesforce marketing features to attract potential bequest donors, use the web-to-lead forms as a way someone can make an enquiry about bequesting and contact and opportunity management to track the bequestor and the bequested amount.
- Shopping Carts
Often organisations will use a shopping cart type feature as a way to attract donations on a website. For example, School for Life (http://shop.schoolforlife.org.au/) allow donors to purchase pens and pencils, chickens, teachers as a gift amount.
Others use it as a way of selling supporting merchandise to promote their cause and raise funds.
The key item for consideration here is having full visibility about what your donors have supported in the one centralised database. To see how this can be done, please a 3 minute video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMMQegv9Xqk
- Peer-to-peer fundraising
Peer to peer is a great way of getting your supporters to use their network of friends and colleagues to raise funds on your behalf. There are a number of different organisations that offer this online service now. In Australia, these include Everyday Hero and Go Fundraise. There are a number of options available on the AppExchange that can be found doing a search of “Peer to Peer”
AAkonsult Payments has made using Peer-to-peer fundraising more useful by providing and import routine to import these details. It also keeps track of the “fundraising” and soft credits them for their influence and at the same time tracks each of the individual donors.
- Phone
Organisations that cold call for donors over the phone often use outsourced call centers. Salesforce provides a great way of managing these using the Service Cloud and the Service Console to manage list of donors/potential donors to call and to follow up. It also has telephony integration making it easier for the operators to dial.
- Face to Face
You can use salesforce in a number of ways for face to face fundraising.
If you have a stand at a shopping center or the friendly persons on the street corner, then you could have a mobile device, such as an ipad running Salesforce1 where you could capture new supporter details, sign petitions or sign persons up to online donations/regular giving.
