FundRaiser Blog

When entering a gift in FundRaiser, the Mode Code is used to differentiate not only between methods of payment (cash, check, charge, etc.) but also between monetary or in-kind donations.  When you create a Mode Code you must specify whether that code will be monetary or in-kind.  A Mode Code is always one or the other, and each gift requires a Mode Code.  You may have multiple codes, as is usual in FundRaiser, which allows for specific types of in-kind donations.  For instance, one of our users is a diaper bank, and, while they accept many infant-related types of in-kind donations, they need to keep diaper donations separated from others.  The easiest way was to have, simply, a "diaper" Mode Code.  When running various reports, you can specify to include monetary, or in-kind, or both types of donations.  Use these codes to your advantage.  And check out the Coding & Spare Fields training video in the Customer Portal section of our website.

On each gift record is a "Letter Notes for Merging" section.  It is primarily used for notes that will then be merged into thank you letter templates.  And for monetary gifts, these are usually personal greetings, of sorts, like "Gee, it was great to see you", or "Glad to see you've recovered from surgery", or something else to more personalize the thank you letter.  For In-Kind donations, this is a great place to put a description of the items (or services) that were donated.  It makes a permanent record as well as an easy way to pull that description in to a thank you letter.  More information on entering gifts is available in both the FundRaiser Overview and Recurring Gifts training videos available in the Customer Portal section of our website.

With the start of the new school season, my mind is on donor management for schools. One of the things I've learned most clearly from talking to school organizations about their successful donor management strategies is the key importance of knowing by constituent group who your most generous donors are. FundRaiser Software is created to help you do this as one of its core tasks. Organizations thrive who do it well, whether they are schools or another type of organization.

The three steps that make it easy to see your donations by constituent group start with the most basic donor management task.

In honor of   Happiness Happens Month  in August, I asked FundRaiser staff a few questions about how they make happiness happen. My questions were:

Below are our street-tested copings for creating happiness daily. It's not software tech support, but some of the suggestions have carried us, and our customers, through some sticky technical situations. If you are a FundRaiser customer, you know what a strong emphasis we put on offering the best technical support available at any donor database company, and this is one of the key ways we accomplish that. 

At the beginning of August, FundRaiser Software celebrates Happiness Happens Day. What's more,  the whole month of August has been declared Happiness Happens Month, a good reminder to tune in to happiness, and spread it around.

Here are a few nice tidbits that I've collected so far:  the Gulf of Mexico is recovering really, really well from the horrific Deepwater Spill (read the article), crime rates have fallen significantly in much of the Western World (read the article), and finally, it  appears that we get happier as we get older - great news! (read the article).

As the need for emergency services throughout the USA continues to rise, overall donations to emergency management organizations have fallen. The local United Way of Moscow/Latah County is succeeding at holding its own because of two important factors. The first is their own skill and understanding of their community and its evolving needs, and the second is thanks to their donor management database, FundRaiser Select.

The features Cretia Bunney, executive director at United Way of Moscow/Latah County, uses in FundRaiser are all core features. They are easy to learn. Even with very limited time, any organization can maintain the necessary records. Cretia works at United Way of Moscow/Latah only one day a week, and in that time is able to do this tracking in FundRaiser as well as her other office work.

Sacred Heart Radio is fortunate in their problem—they need to process lots of online donations. For this reason, Beverly Hill, office and database manager for Sacred Heart Radio, was eager to implement the automatic entry of online donations that is offered through the FundRaiser Donor Portal. Sacred Heart Radio is a national Catholic radio station. They are users of FundRaiser Professional with the Donor Portal for online donations.

“We promote online donations strongly and it is working for us. As a radio station, we have access to the airwaves. We use public service announcements that say ‘visit us online and click donate’,” explains Beverly.

Most nonprofits dream of the simplest form of fundraising-- an angel who walks in the door and freely offers money. For a few organizations this dream comes true... at a cost. Those organizations are very dependent on one or a few donors. What's more, staff fundraising skills languish.

In an effort to avoid this very situation, the Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home began to take proactive steps to move from endowment-only funding to individual donor support. Support from a broad base of individual donors creates a solid base  for organizations. Donor management software helps keep details organized for development aimed at individual donors.“I want to make sure that the Home is here in the future,” says Ward Orem, CEO of LLDL Home. “Up until 5 years ago, we didn’t have an aggressive development program. Our work was supported by an endowment but not a huge one. Whatever modest development efforts we made were scribbled on notes and kept in a binder.”“However, we could see that at the rate at which we were dipping into the endowment, we would eventually spend ourselves out of business. It was sort of a draconian doomsday projection but it was crystal clear we couldn’t keep withdrawing money from the endowment if we were going to sustain ourselves into perpetuity. The economic downturn drove the point home, but we already knew we needed to do things differently.”“As development folk, we recognized that the bulk of support comes from individuals,” says Ward. He knew he needed a solid infrastructure for donor gifts.

Nearly every citizen of the U.S., I believe, would agree that national independence from foreign powers is a good thing, and we celebrate our country's independence from Great Britain every year on July 4th.  But not all forms of independence are necessarily good, I think.  Let me elaborate.  When I was young, I was instilled with the idea that self-independence is a good thing, so far as providing for one's own needs, food, shelter, clothing, etc.  Hard work, I was told, was the key for obtaining that independence.  Looking back, I think that was a bit naive on my parents' part, but it certainly got me out of the house earlier than I might otherwise have left.  Few of us truly want to be independent in all respects, and most of us need some forms of interdependence to thrive and live full lives.  Successful marriage, rearing children, meaningful employment, team sports, all require interdependence to one degree or another.  And learning how to use donor management software as powerful and versatile as FundRaiser products requires a bit of interdependence as well.  So consider that trying to be too independent when learning the ins and outs of FundRaiser is not a good thing, and is probably a bit self-defeating, in that you will take longer to perform the tasks that you need to perform without a proper grounding in the use of the software.  Allow yourself the luxury of interdependence with our staff and other users in order to more quickly and efficiently reach your fundraising goals.  You'll see that, while not a bad thing in itself, striving for independence in all things may be a bit misguided.

It's not really an oxymoron.  There are several avenues for learning FUndRaiser software that allow you to be independent to a great degree:  training videos online; online FAQ's (Frequrently Asked Questions); the Help Contents HOW-TO section; FundClass Archives on our website for learning about fundraising itself.  These avenues of learning allow you to view the information at your leisure, on your timetable, without being dependent on someone elses's scheduling or priorities.  Someone else, of course, expended the effort to create or make available the information on the website, so there is a level of dependence on those folks (mostly our staff here at FundRaiser), but it's kept at arm's length, so to speak, through the media in which it's presented.

Membership initiatives can be a powerful way for your organization to increase donor loyalty and the size of gifts... but what do you actually mean when you say 'membership'? In fact, two very different types of outreach efforts are both called 'memberships' and they are managed in very different ways. Different staff skills are needed for each, as well as different donor database features. Understanding the differences between the two main types of membership will help you create a thriving outreach effort.

In a nutshell, donor management of benefit-driven memberships depends on keeping track of lots of different pieces of data, and following up in a timely manner on those bits of data. It is in fact, very much like accounting. Donor management of recognition-driven memberships relies on the tools that help you build relationships. It relies more on the people-side of development work.

Key to a thriving membership organization, is giving each member the sense that they are your most important. How can you do that, when members have different reasons for joining and different preferences for how you communicate with them? Your donor database can be your closest ally. With it, you can tune in to what it is that motivates a person to be a member, and record special preferences. That will help you to give each member the sense that you have them specifically in mind when you communicate with them, even as your membership continues to grow.

In a donor database, each donor/member has a record where you can enter information that is specific to that member. These specifics can be as basic as name and contact information, however to truly personalize your communications you need to go well beyond that. By recording information on what is important to a particular member about your organization, you can tailor your messages to speak to those interests. If you know what brought a member to your organization to begin with, what events each person participates in, and what friends, business associates or relatives of a particular member also belong to your organization, you are well on your way to understanding how to best connect with a particular member. 

Memorial giving feels good. A donor is able to give to an organization they or a loved one values, and at the same time express a positive connection to someone important to them. Because of the all-around 'feel good' of memorial giving, organizations who successfully promote this kind of donation reap the benefits not only of the gifts, but also the extra good feelings associated with the gifts.

Letting your donors know that they can give to your organization in honor of someone can be very simple and straightforward. Becky Lindberg of First Witness Child Abuse Resource Center and a FundRaiser Select user says, "it is such an easy painless way to keep people connected to your program."

In honor of Mother's day, we're running a case study , written in 2010 that shares how FundRaiser is used to create a personal feeling for appeal letters sent out from one central location on behalf of several Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) chapters in Florida.

Fundraising appeals for many MADD Florida chapters are produced and mailed from one central office, but donors won’t be able to tell. With personalization, these letters will look and sound local, addressing the local activities of the closest chapter.

Recently, the number of unwanted and abused animals Whatcom County Humane Society  (WHS) cares for has risen to over 3,000 a year. In addition,  WHS wants to providing more and better services for all their animals. This means ongoing improvements in fundraising techniques and effectiveness. Improved doesn’t mean complicated, though.

They use simple coding and reporting to track the progress of campaigns. “We are just about to do our Masquerade Gala which is our biggest fundraising event of the year,” says Amy Reidesel of WHS. “In the database, I mark incoming donations with motivation codes. I use a code for:

Menaul School has turned its fundraising downslide around. They've worked as a team to do it, combining in-person fundraising with strategic changes to what they record in their donor database and backed up by meticulous data entry. Each of these jobs is accomplished primarily by a different person, who excels at it. The data entry work is entrusted to a special volunteer.

Through steadfast attention to detail, volunteer Jim Hodges makes sure that correspondence goes out in a timely fashion and accurate data is in place when reports are needed for evaluation and planning.

This has been quite a week for disastrous and heartbreaking events in the news-- first the Boston Marathon bombing, then the explosion of the chemical plant in Waco, Texas. How does your nonprofit organization handle these kinds of events in your social media outreach?

You might have planned to make a post about some event or topic that seems out of step with the reactions that flood the newsfeeds when such well-publicized tragedies occur. Do you stay the course and make the post? Do you pause the post? Do you make a brief comment of condolence, or use the opportunity to offer some help if the crisis relates to your mission?Some FundRaiser users quickly went into action with posts related to their mission. Here's how a few of them handled it:

Part 3 How to move data In part 1, we talked about the reasons you might need to move your data.In part 2, we showed how you can evaluate how easily your data move will be.

Now, let's look at the nuts and bolts of actually moving data.

Part 2 How easy will moving my data be? In part 1 last week, we talked about the reasons you might need to move your data. Now, you probably want to know how easy that move might be. The answer may decide whether you do the work yourself, or decide to go with professional data conversion.

Moving data from one program to another may be amazingly simple or extremely complex. If you are considering such a move, the answers to the following 4 questions will reveal to you just what the case will be for your organization and data situation:

In a survey of FundRaiser users, 50 percent of respondents have moved data from one donor-management software program to another. Of that 50 percent, most have moved data more than once.

The most common reasons for moving data are:

The Ignatian Volunteer Corps was facing a donor data tragedy. Their data was in a custom program which was no longer updateable. “We couldn’t upgrade or get support, so we started looking for a new and improved system,” says Tamara Zavislan, Director of Development.New software meant that  she was going to have to move all her data out of the old program and into the new... often a painful and difficult process, like moving into a new house. For IVC, preserving all donor data was a high priority, and she knew that wasn’t going to be easy. “We had 4,000 records. With import tools, we couldn’t have saved the gift history. We would have had to enter it all by hand. In the past, we’d had experience with volunteers moving data by hand, and that hadn’t worked well,” says Tamara. “That’s why we decided to go with the professional data conversion.

Tamara had previous, unpleasant, experience with professional data conversion and this time around she was determined for it to go better. She succeeded, finding three things, in particular, that helped make the move go well.

Like many public radio stations, WBJC-FM uses premiums to encourage people to make donations. Also like many organizations, they are ambivalent about using premiums.Yvonne Allen, Membership Director for WBJC-FM,  states the dilemma clearly: "public radio stations are trying to get away from premiums because they cost money and stations need that money for operating costs," she says. "But we get a lot of contributions and without premiums, I think we wouldn’t get as many."

WBJC-FM has been running a success premiums program for years, and has just  finished another successful fund drive that used 'thank you gifts' to help boost response. They have found that there are 5 key factors to creating a good balance between the costs of the premiums and the incentive they provide to donors. Yvonne shares  those tips here. WBJC-FM is an all classical, user supported station. They use FundRaiser Professional to help manage many details related to their premiums program.