Many organisations are well and truly into their Christmas Appeal planning by October. Often all of the thoughts and planning are on design work, getting addresses into order, direct mailouts, targeted segmentation and email templates. There is a lot more to it than collecting money. Managing appeals can be done easily with the right tools.
Much less thought is given to the collection and management of donor information. For that side of things, many Not-for-profits will just utilise a 3rd party provider such as Give Now, Go Fundraise, Everyday Hero, PayPal etc. with little more thought than just collecting the money.
What You Should Think About
However, you really should be thinking about the following:
- How do we capture and store donor information so we can leverage that for the next campaign?
- How do we ensure the data coming back is valid? Are the addresses and contact details correct – will we need to clean the data yet again for years appeal or pay expensive 3rd parties to do that for us
- How do we provide a receipt that is personalised and with our branding/messaging
- How do we make sure most of the donation amounts are going to us and not paying large commissions to 3rd party websites?
- How do we do all of the above without having to employ an army of volunteers
There Is A Cost Effective Solution To Manage Your Appeal
I hear you saying to yourself, that to get a system in to do all of the above is going to be really expensive and we don’t have time. Well, I’ve got some good news for you on both of these.
One of the cheapest ways to get a Donor and Fundraising management solution is by using the Salesforce CRM with the Non-profit Starter Pack. Salesforce makes the first 10 licenses free of charge to genuine Not-for-profits.
As Salesforce is a Cloud based solution, it’s simply a case of signing up online and you’re off and going. To help you get up to speed, Salesforce provides many resources such as setup assistant, online help, online videos, community-hub for online networking with other NFP’s, usergroups and there are many organisations that provide professional consulting and training services.
Get A Fast Start And Top Performance
To complement the core donor and fundraising solution provided by Salesforce there are add-on applications from the AppExchange. The one we recommend is Payments2Us (formerly called AAkonsult Payments). This allows organisations to very quickly create an online donation page for single/regular givers, address validation/correction capabilities, generate receipts, de-duplicate contacts, imports from 3rd party donation websites and more. As Payments2Us has many built-in best practices, then at a high level, to get it up and going is simply a matter of installing, then generating sample data and picking the forms you wish to use and finally setting up receipt text.
To fully round off your cloud based donor and fundraising solution, you would also be looking at adding a professional email marketing tool. These too are available from the AppExchange and many don’t charge for the pre-built integration into Salesforce CRM. Some of the common ones we have seen being used are Vertical Response (especially with their first 10,000 emails a month being free for NFP’s), Campaign Monitor and MailChimp for Salesforce.
So, it’s not too late to get organised now and to do your Appeal properly this year.
Try Payments2Us now for free
