FundRaiser Online and/or Hosted
Online giving is fast becoming a popular way to raise money, and FundRaiser has options allowing for a couple of different ways to do that. Whether using the Hosted version or a locally installed version , FundRaiser’s Donor Portal option allows you to have real-time reporting on donor activity, while giving your donors the options you want them to have: freedom to donate, of course, either one-time or setting up a recurring gift; the ability to print out their own personal reports of their giving to your organization; channeling their giving to specific interests within your organization; updating their own contact information; even printing their own tax receipt letters. The Donor Portal option allows for all of this to come through from your website to your FundRaiser almost as it happens (within a minute or two, depending on the type of data entered).
Thinking through what you want when setting up online giving options
This can be so very convenient, both for your donors and for your staff, but it comes with a small price in labor to set it up properly. You’ll want to consider
- what, exactly, should your donors be able to do so far as updating contact information?
- will a single email acknowledgement suffice for an online gift, or should you follow up with a printed letter?
- what do you want to say in your automated email response to a donation?
- what codes do you want to use in conjunction with online gifts, especially if you allow donors to earmark monies for a particular part of your mission?
There are more considerations than these, of course, but you get the idea. Since people giving online will expect (and deserve) an immediate response, automated thank you email messages will need to be set up in advance. Coding on gifts will vary depending on the choices you offer donors (building fund, help the homeless, etc.) and these links also need to be established before going “live”.
You’ll need to know how to direct people to your donation page, or donor log-in page, using “links”, either on a website or in email or an e-newsletter, etc. You will certainly want to include those links in just about all electronic media you use to communicate your goals and ideas to the public. You may even want to explore how to make them a part of your social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for even more exposure to prospective donors.
If you study the basics of the program, as found in the many training videos available through the Customer Portal section of our website, and learn those well (coding, groupings, word processing/mail merge, email setup, reports), then everything else falls into place pretty easily. Codes for gifts are the same whether they are assigned by you on the Gift page of a donor’s record or by the donor when choosing from dropdowns you provide for them on your donor webpage. Mail-merging of information will be very similar between auto-generated thank you emails and letter templates you create within FundRaiser’s word processor (although the merge options will be fewer in number with the automated email).
Questions to ask yourself when choosing between Hosted or locally installed software
Now, when it comes to choosing whether a Hosted option is better for you than a “stand alone” installation on your own network, it really depends on your mobility factor.How mobile do you (or your staff) need to be? If you are visiting the office every day, then having FundRaiser installed on your local network computer system may be just fine. If, on the other hand, you are out of the office a lot, whether visiting prospects, lecturing, lobbying, or whatever, you may want the convenience of accessing your database through an internet connection. There are free Wi-Fi spots throughout the US and Canada that make it easy to access the internet. Many of you may already use a wireless connection for your laptop when on the road. No matter how you get to the internet, FundRaiser Hosted can be reached, and you can be accessing your data from virtually any location.
What about security? Well, your IT and Web Development people (if you have any) can tell you how secure your system is, of course, but you can count on the Hosted version being as secure as possible. Your copy of FundRaiser is stored on our secure servers, under stringent access limitations, to insure that only you can get to your data. Besides the secure servers, there are two possible layers of password protection: the first to access the location of the copy of FundRaiser on our servers, the second in the form of username/password control that all users of FundRaiser enjoy. And remember that you can not only prevent unauthorized people from getting into the data, but also control what your authorized staff members can see and what they can do once in the program.
So, it comes down to this: if you want greater control of online donations, while providing your donors freedom to handle some basic input on their own (saving your staff from updating records) while giving them a convenient way to donate, then the Donor Portal version is a good fit for you. If you also want to be free to access your FundRaiser data no matter where you are in your busy week, while not having to worry about security issues, then you’ll also want the Hosted version of FundRaiser.
The program itself pretty much stays the same, whether using Hosted or installed on your computers, but the “delivery system” changes somewhat to accommodate Donor input and/or your mobility needs. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call us. We’ll be happy to go over your unique situation to see which combination of features will be the best fit with your organization and management needs.
Resources
The Mariemont School Foundation
The Right Tool for the Job: training options for FundRaiser by Larry Weaver
