We’re glad to welcome Marcy Fritter, Account Manager at Cathexis Partners, to the Virtuous blog. Marcy has served as a front-line fundraiser, creating campaigns and managing events including walks, galas, and golf tournaments. She has supported Cathexis Partners clients for more than 11 years, assisting nonprofit fundraising organizations with online platform implementation, customization, and CRM migration. She enjoys serving as a translator between the client and the developer, leveraging platform knowledge and personal user experience to transform clients’ visions into effective solutions.
What nonprofit doesn’t want to improve fundraising results? But as a nonprofit professional, you don’t always have the resources to simply add another fundraising campaign or event to the calendar. So, how can you raise more without adding a bunch of work to your schedule?
Here are three ways to improve your nonprofit’s fundraising results.
Three ways to improve your nonprofit’s fundraising results
1. Prioritize clean data.
This might not be the first thing you think about when you’re aiming to boost your fundraising. But ensuring your data is accurate can make a big difference in your fundraising results.
Your donor data powers your fundraising campaigns, drives segmentation and personalization for donor communications, feeds your fundraising reports, and is critical to any of your marketing automation and artificial intelligence efforts. So, no matter how great your fundraising program might be, it won’t deliver optimal results if you have duplicate, outdated, and missing data in your CRM system.
To clean your donor data (and keep it clean):
- Merge or delete duplicate records – Deduplicate at least once per week. If you haven’t done this in a while, then you might need to dedupe daily until it’s completed, and then move to a more regular schedule for maintenance.
- Uncover records that need corrections or additions – Run data queries to look for any data points that need to be updated, and then add to or correct them. This might be anything from specific information about donors that you need for personalized communications or looking for email addresses with missing @ signs or ZIP codes in the incorrect format. If you have a lot of data that needs updating, then you might want to work with a nonprofit technology consultant for added help.
- Update your database policies and procedures – Be sure to have a database policies and procedures document in place and update it regularly to ensure data is entered and cleaned properly across your organization. Review the document with new staff members to make sure they understand the standards. Also, notify your entire organization when you make any updates to the document.
2. Personalize donor communications.
Put the data in your CRM system to work to send more personal and targeted communications. Segment your audiences and customize messages to them based on things like their donation history and other interactions with your organization. This could be as simple as looking up your previous campaign information and adding a personal note to your emails, such as:
- “Thank you for being one of our top donors/fundraisers last year.”
- “Thank you for donating/fundraising $X last year.”
- “Last year, you ran X:XX in our 5K and took X place. Are you ready to do it again?”
3. Optimize your donation page.
When potential donors make their way to your donation page, they’re probably interested in supporting your nonprofit. Optimizing your donation page helps to ensure you don’t lose donors at that critical moment, and it helps to make sure you get the most out of each donation.
Here are some helpful approaches:
- Use impactful imagery – Use images of people, animals, or places that your mission supports to help donors feel more connected with your mission and make them more likely to give.
- Associate giving levels with your mission – Tie donation levels to how the funds will help your organization. Letting supporters know that their donation can, for example, help send a child to school for a year, is more impactful than asking for a specific amount of money.
- Ask to make the gift recurring – Give donors the budget-friendly option to make their donation a recurring gift, with the convenience of monthly payments charged automatically to their credit card. This approach encourages donors to remain donors longer and to give more over time.
- Ask donors to cover the transaction fee – When someone donates through your online form, your payment processor typically charges your organization a transaction fee. This effectively reduces the funds your organization receives. Include an option for donors to cover the cost of transaction fees, and your nonprofit can recapture some of those lost funds.
- Use a matching gift tool – Add a matching gift tool to your donation form to make it easier to take advantage of corporate matching programs and boost your fundraising campaign results.
You already work hard on your fundraising activities, so make sure you get the most out of them. Put the tips in this article to work and get ready to boost your fundraising results!
