FundRaiser Blog

The FundRaiser Software Blog is an excellent resource for nonprofit organizations looking to learn more about fundraising, donor management, membership management, and much more.

Short Take: Reusing Last Year's Tax Summary Letter

Short Take: Reusing Last Year's Tax Summary Letter

If you are going to use last year's letter, it is good to review the letter in FundRaiser’s Word Processor, if the letter was used in FundRaiser previously. One of the common problems we see in Tech Support regarding Tax Summary letters is when people would like to use the letter from last year, and it isn't showing the right gift amounts. That’s easily solved. 

With the letter open in FundRaiser, click on the Gift List or Gift Total Function code and make sure that the date range is in the right year. You can also remove the merge function for the total giving or gift list and reenter it, and that will allow you the opportunity to reenter the date range. 

Continue reading
4504 Hits

Reach More Donors with NCOA Processing

Reach More Donors with NCOA Processing
b2ap3_thumbnail_NCOAProcessing-ScreenShot.jpg

One of the most frustrating experiences as a nonprofit is to send out a carefully crafted appeal letter only to have several envelopes be returned as unable to be delivered by the post office. Not only have you spent postage and used paper and time to send the letters, but your message won’t reach your donors. How do you prevent this from happening?

NCOA, or National Change of Address, is a United States Post Office program designed to prevent non-deliverable mail. The USPS maintains a database of all permanent address changes within the past three years by people who have completed change of address cards. When you export your database and use a USPS licensed processor, they will run your donors’ addresses through this program and provide you with information such as a changed address, the complete ZIP+4 zip code, which helps with mail processing, and which addresses are not valid without any further information. When you merge the received data back into your database, it will be updated and your donors coded appropriately to help you better manage your mailings.

Continue reading
4971 Hits

Producing End of Year Tax Summary Letters in FundRaiser

Producing End of Year Tax Summary Letters in FundRaiser

It's time to produce Tax Summary letters (also called End of Year letters) again. They are usually sent in January after the last donation for the year is in. To help you breeze through this process, here's a coherent plan of attack for FundRaiser users.

Step One

First, start by deciding how you want to list the donations in your letter. Two merge functions found in the FundRaiser word processor are used specifically for this type of letter.

Continue reading
5740 Hits

Short Take: Advanced Tab

Short Take: Advanced Tab
b2ap3_thumbnail_AdvancedTab.jpg

Groupings are a useful way to work with a large number of donor records, such as printing a report or sending correspondence. However, depending on your criteria, you may not need to create a grouping. When you click Customize on the report preview screen, you are brought to a new window with four tabs, and one of these says “Advanced”. On both reports and correspondence, you can use the Advanced tab to set the criteria you wish to use in running the report. (For example, people who gave in the last twelve months or gave over a certain dollar amount.)

For correspondence, using the Advanced tab is helpful for year-end letters. Instead of creating a grouping, you can use the Advanced tab to limit your letters to individuals who gave during the calendar year.

Continue reading
4586 Hits

Short take: Event Managment

Short take: Event Managment

FundRaiser Software provides many tools for managing event participation and donation. Users of FundRaiser Pro have access to the Campaigns and Events Module, which will track participation, donations, sponsorships, and provides detailed reporting. If you’re interested in the Campaigns and Events Module, you’re encouraged to sign up for the next training class.

However, even without the Campaigns and Events Module, you can keep track of campaign participation several ways. The Motivation Code records what motivated someone to give, and that’s usually because they attended an event or received a mailer. Using a unique motivation code will allow you to run reports as well as create groupings based off of event donations.

Continue reading
5026 Hits

How Often Should You Back Up Your Data?

How Often Should You Back Up Your Data?

Different people and organizations will have different backup needs. To set up a schedule that works for you, consider the following questions

How much data loss would you consider 'allowable loss"- fairly simple to recreateHow often do you enter data?How much of your data would be difficult or impossible to recreate?

These questions will give you the answer for how often you need to back up.  If your computer crashes and you lose all your data, how recent was your last back up? Does it cover the data which would be difficult or impossible to recreate? If you enter a lot of information regularly, you may want to back up weekly. 

Continue reading
4583 Hits

Cultivating Your Donor Database Gives You Opportunities to Reach Out

Cultivating Your Donor Database Gives You Opportunities to Reach Out

Going back and cultivating your database will give you additional opportunities to reach out. Run periodic reports to find your lapsed donors, for example people who haven’t donated in the last 6 months. Use those reports for additional donor outreach.

Both the Donor and the Donation Report are good to use. For instance, you might want to usee

Continue reading
4235 Hits

Gift Codes Help Record Details of Campaigns

Gift Codes Help Record Details of Campaigns

Campaigns are generally recorded in FundRaiser through the Motivation code, which is a gift code. The Motivation Code tells what motivated the donor to give to your organization. These codes usually correspond to the campaign that an organization is running when the donation is made.

In FundRaiser Professional there are some additional gift code options- Period and Miscellaneous. These are good ways to get more detail on a campaign. Period codes are usually used when you do multiple mailings are done on the same campaign. For instance, if you do 4 mailings on a campaign, the Period Code shows which season each of the mailings was sent it, and allows you to see the differences in response according to the time period.

Continue reading
4580 Hits

Use the FundRaiser Built-In Word Processor for the Smoothest Mail Merging

Use the FundRaiser Built-In Word Processor for the Smoothest Mail Merging

Don’t be afraid to compose your fundraising letters in the FundRaiser word processor. It has many of the same features, such as bold, italics, or bullet points, as other word processing programs like Microsoft Word.

Using it will make letter merging easier than if you write your letter in another program and paste it into the FundRaiser word processor. This is  because there is often hidden code in other word processors that will affect how your letter will look. This is especially true with bullet points and paragraph formatting. When you write letters directly in the FundRaiser word processor, they will appear true to the formatting that you apply.

Continue reading
4961 Hits

Organizing Your Letters

Organizing Your Letters

My family is big on writing letters, and I think there’s no more powerful form of written communication than a letter in the mail. It shows that someone took the time to write, print, sign, and mail a letter. The organization (or the individual) cared enough to use a stamp and make sure the letter got to the carrier or the post office. It’s a personal way to communicate.

FundRaiser has many features for helping you with this fine mode of communication. One feature that I'd like to highlight here is that of being able to mark letters active or inactive as necessary. This comes in very handy for events which occur on a regular basis. How does this work?

Continue reading
4460 Hits

3 Donor Management Tips to Improve Your FundRaising Campaign Reporting

3 Donor Management Tips to Improve Your FundRaising Campaign Reporting
Track Campaigns more easily 

All the FundRaiser programs can help you track your campaign activity.  FundRaiser Professional has a special "Campaign Management" component to help do it even more completely, but any version will allow you to do the following tips. Any of these tips will help you gather together donors and/or donations specific to any of your campaigns. 

1.  Code those gifts !!!

Most campaigns are made up of fundraising events.  Some are physical gatherings, like walkathons, parties, etc., to encourage immediate donations. Some are awareness events, such as mailings, advertising, and so forth, which will bring donations over a period of time.  In any of those cases, when gifts are received and recorded, it just makes sense to use the Motivation Code to indicate why that person gave at that event.  Normally it will be a code that reflects the event during which they were asked to give, whether a mailing or a gathering.  If you do this consistently, you'll be able to create Groupings, based on donations made to these codes during a particular period of time.  Groupings can be used with almost all reports, so you can focus on a particular event, or on all the events within a campaign.

Continue reading
6901 Hits

How to figure Retention and Attrition Rate in FundRaiser

How to figure Retention and Attrition Rate in FundRaiser

In Kim Klein's article on stopping a subtle decline in donations, she mentions the importance knowing your donor retention and attrition rates. You can figure donor retention (how many you have kept) and atttrition (how many you lost) easily using Fundraiser. 

Both are calculated by taking all the donors you had in the previous calendar year and comparing which of those donors gave in the most current complete calendar year. In other words, which of the people who gave in 2014 also gave in 2015? Expressing that number as a percentage of loss gives you your attrition rate; expressed as a percentage of renewal gives you your retention rate.

Continue reading
9578 Hits

Beyond End of Year Letters

Beyond End of Year Letters

Now that January is coming to a close and end of year letters have been printed and mailed, it’s time to think about other ways in which you can prepare for the upcoming year. Performing some general maintenance tasks will help keep your FundRaiser running smoothly and your donor management process easy.

First, think about the letters you send. With the change in the calendar, you can update the accomplishments or perhaps highlight special stories from the previous year that would resonate with your donors. Updating the letters with new codes will help staff and volunteers alike use the correct letter. And don’t forget to mark your old letters inactive to keep them from being repeated.

Continue reading
31947 Hits

New Year, New Codes

New Year, New Codes

For organizations with annual events or campaigns, there are many ways to track the donations that come in each year. From fund and motivation codes to more general category codes, there are a multitude of ways to make sure you know exactly how and why your donors gave to your organization.

Keeping your coding system understandable plays a big role in the effective use of your donor management software. Therefore, when it comes to your annual events, think about using one main code and append then year to it. For example, a gala would be GALA14, GALA15, and so on. This way you would know that all codes that start with “GALA” would be for your annual event. (Or whatever prefix you choose to use for your event.)

Continue reading
5258 Hits

Using Letters To Showcase Your Organization

Using Letters To Showcase Your Organization

To build on the blogs recently posted about greetings and letters, I wanted to share a bit about FundRaiser’s word processing capabilities. FundRaiser Software comes with several pre-loaded letter templates. These templates have places for you to list your organization’s accomplishments and goals. So, it’s always good to review the letter templates before sending your first mailing.

When you open FundRaiser Software, you’ll notice a menu item marked Communications. Here you’ll find everything you need to send letters as well as update them. The Letter Templates menu option allows you to see all your letter templates, review their content, and even determine if you want to make them active or not. (We’ll talk more about active/inactive letters next week.) If you see a letter you need to personalize, for example a “Thank you” letter that has a place marked to put in accomplishments for your organization, then click on Edit Letter to go straight to the built-in word processor.

Continue reading
4891 Hits

Managing Tribute Gifts with FundRaiser Software, part 2

Managing Tribute Gifts with FundRaiser Software, part 2

In last week's blog post, I discussed the general donor management issues for working with tribute donations. Here, I will go into more of the specifics of working with these gifts in FundRaiser.

The general flow of tribute gifts can be explained better, perhaps, with an example. Let’s say that a prominent citizen of the community has passed away, and that the family has requested that donations be directed to your organization. You might first enter that citizen’s name as an honoree in the Windows | Tributes section, along with the family member to whom notification should be sent. It is good to prepare this ahead, because you may receive many donations and you will want to respond promptly.

Continue reading
4692 Hits

Four Great Times To Call Support

Four Great Times To Call Support

Here at FundRaiser our technical support team is here to help you. Whether it’s a simple how-to question or a detailed technical issue, you can reach our support team by phone or email. In fact, unlimited support is included in your Annual Maintenance Plan.

However there are our times when calling support can save you time and remove the worry from complex tasks.

Continue reading
Tags:
4958 Hits

Frequent Givers? Or recent givers?

Frequent Givers? Or recent givers?

A common question that I receive in support is how to see a list of donors who gave in subsequent years. Along with the question, they also want to know who gave multiple times in a year, or even in multiple years. It’s easy to find out the answers to those questions, and more, when you begin with a grouping.

When creating a grouping, on the “common patterns” tab, there are multiple options for different types of donors. The LYBUNT or SYBUNT categories capture your donors who gave last year, but not this year, or some year, but not this year. However, how do you capture those donors who have given in multiple years?

Continue reading
4395 Hits

Connecting With Category Codes

Connecting With Category Codes

An important aspect of fundraising is making connections with your prospective donors on a deeper level. It is one thing to connect with someone over a shared concern over animal welfare, for example, but reaching them with a story about a rescued cat or one who needs funds for an expensive surgery creates an immediate connection, one that you can tailor to the person’s interests through category codes.

Within FundRaiser category codes are designed to document and segment the non-giving aspects of your donors’ lives. Using category codes can help you create a more meaningful relationship. Document what activities your donors like, for example, and you could entice them to an event that seems tailor made for them.

Continue reading
4700 Hits

Flexible Emails Within Fund Raiser

Flexible Emails Within Fund Raiser

One of the things I receive questions on as I’m hosting training classes is email through FundRaiser. How does the program know that someone can get emails? What can be sent via email? Is there a copy? The convenience of email, not to mention the cost savings, makes it appealing to use. So let’s talk about emailing within FundRaiser.

For each record within FundRaiser you have complete control over the communications preferences. If someone prefers email—and many people do these days—then the customer’s record can be set to email only. Additionally, with each correspondence that is sent, you can choose if it will be sent through the postal mail or via email where appropriate.

Continue reading
4616 Hits
Wait a minute, while we are rendering the calendar
donor retention rate lapsed donor GoFundMe project on site training transparency membersip benefits board members customer service thank you letters passwords donor repeat donors Reporting to IRS appeal mode code support tech tip Network for Good donor prospects features Reminders LYBUNTS #GivingTuesday budget Facebook major donors new nonprofit how to handle auction gifts grants banquet campaign in honor of donations community supported gardens direct mail membership programs donor relations community arts nonprofits major gift prospects solicitors accounting software reports anonymous donors donor targeting Cloud PayPal motivation social media word processor Groupings animal rescue arts change of address updating customer portal correspondance welcome packet mission driven vacation look and feel donation history how-to videos data analysis Alternative Addresses general new donors data entry email event management disaster relief holiday letters custom page spare fields Importing Data planning Constant Contact training tip letter FundRaiser Hosted tribute gifts Thanksgiving follow up large donations correspondence New Year monthly giving Task List FundRaiser Spark new leadership adding personal notes to letters donor engagement donor retention volunteers backing up data endowment campaign texting donors new version segmenting donors Snow Birds Tickles ticket sales brick campaign Personalizing data conversion pictures charity golf tournaments National Change of Address donor attrition development director SYBUNTS Thank You training donor source the Ask fundraising role of nonprofits donor profile announcements annual campaign In-Kind gifts donor slip alumni FundRaiser Basic overview security volunteering online donations user interface happiness donor attrition rate product news entering auction gifts legacy giving new features merge fields gift entry understanding giving trends community broadcasting memorial giving motivation code tax summary letters donor contact information government grants GivingTuesday case study giving levels gift acceptance policy ROI End of Year Letters salutation NCOA processing membership benefits foundations giving history pledges targeted mailings updates Codes holiday giving operating systems holiday password protection auction communications donor preferences building donor relationships appeal letters personalizing letters nonprofit fundraising donor recognition small donations capital campaign phoning donors upgrade moves management ticketsales annual maintenance plan grassroots campaign premiums donor advised funds Congratulations importing csv office spreadsheets Crowdfunding Campaign user spotlights publicity materials merge notes Excel technical support Facebook campaign prospects mailing corporate sponsors flash sales upgrading donors donor loyalty gift notes field online donations raffle operational costs add ons Volunteer module planned giving Resiliency letter templates relationship tracking advanced tab fundraising letters campaign management recurring gifts increasing giving amounts Donor Portal Company culture

Connect With Us

  800-880-3454 ext 3
  Email Us
  Request More Information
  Monday-Friday
      8:30AM-5:30PM CST

Customer Portal Login Form

User Name:
Password:

If you are not sure about your Customer User Name, please call 800-543-4131 and we will be able to help you.

Or you have lost your password, Request Password