How Can Software Help You with Campaigns and Special Events?
by Sasha Daucus
Campaign management is at the heart of any non-profit organization’s activity. A campaign may mean something as straightforward as sending out a letter to raise funds, or it may be as complex as holding a charity golf tournament to gain both donations and greater visibility in your community.
While a great deal of the success of a campaign depends on you, your staff, and your board, the right kind of fundraising software can help greatly.
Primarily, software is used to help organize the details of a campaign, help you target your messages to the right people, and then keep track of responses and evaluate the success of your campaign. In addition, many basics of non-profit campaigns repeat themselves each time: every campaign teaches you something new that you apply to the next one. Good campaign management software helps you focus on that learning and apply it more easily in the next round.
In the simplest terms here are the steps for any campaign, whether it be an appeal letter or a charity golf tournament.
- Decide on a campaign
- Plan out the steps
- Decide who is your target audience
- Inform those people about the event
- Track participation/responses as they happen
- Use reports to review the success
1. Decide on a campaign
This essential step is up to you and your organization. Software can help you by giving you information on the success of past campaigns, but deciding on exactly what to do will be closely tied to your mission, the stage your organization is in, and the resources you have available.
2. Plan out the steps
Once you have decided on the campaign, software begins to really help by giving you a place to keep the plan and details all in one place. In addition, good campaign software provides you and your staff a central location to share that information.
- In the case of a simple appeal letter, there may be only a few steps; while in the case of a golf tournament, you may have many steps and several related activities. The basic steps are the same, differing only in scope.
- In addition, when you use software that works for both simple and complex campaigns, it greatly cuts down on the ‘learning’ overhead. Every campaign that you execute can be used to increase your skills for accomplishing the next campaign. In this way, sending out an appeal letter can actually help you be more accomplished when it comes to coordinating a golf tournament.
3. Targeting your Event
“Targeting” means selecting the people who are most likely to be interested and then delivering a message that will speak to them. It is the single most important thing you can do with software to save money, increase donor loyalty, and raise funds. Integrating targeting into your campaign can greatly enhance your success.
- For an appeal letter, you would probably target those people who have donated in the past or have recently expressed interest in your organization. An easy way to then increase the response rate is to personalize the letters. One type of personalization that consistently increases donations is including the amount of the last donation and suggesting a slight increase.
- For an event like a golf tournament, you can contact past sponsors, donors, and volunteers each with a specific message that shows that you know how they have participated in the past, as well as explaining how they can continue that involvement for the present event.
4. Inform those people of the event
Once you have decided who you want to target your message to, software provides the solid and dependable tools to get that done. While crafting your message is up to you, having a single software program that allows you to write, merge-in personal messages, and then send out the completed letters, allows for great efficiency and excellent record keeping. In addition, having one program which accomplishes all related campaign management tasks significantly reduces time spent learning software or entering data in several places.
- For instance, you can automatically record donors’ participation in a particular campaign at the same time as you are printing letters, labels or sending out email messages related to that campaign. In the case of a golf tournament, you can record which of several messages a donor may have received- for instance a request to participate, to sponsor, or to volunteer.
- In addition, this kind of integration makes it simple to do testing of messages. You may send out one appeal letter to half of your donors and another variation to the other half, to see if one draws in more donations then another.
5. Track participation/responses
Software is at its best with tracking features - how many tickets have been sold, how many given away, who sponsored what or who, how many are coming to a banquet, etc. Once you reach a certain volume, these kinds of details will begin to slip between the cracks unless you have special tracking tools.
- Tracking opens the door to many important campaign management activities- some basic and some sophisticated. Keeping simple records of what was given, by whom, in response to what appeal and for what purpose is the basis for building donor loyalty and increasing the success of your outreach efforts.
- For appeal letters, these basic tracking items may be enough. The more you practice them, the more refined your targeting can become. For golf tournaments, or other events where there may be several kinds of participation, tracking can be more complex. Integrated campaign management tools enable you to track these different kinds of participation and response. For instance, you can record both RSVP’s and actual attendance; who sponsored different aspects of your event; what jobs volunteers did.
- Tracking allows you to evaluate your success while the campaign is in progress; and later to do a full evaluation, and compare the results with other events. It allows you to give credit where credit is due. It is also the basis on which targeting is built, so you can refine what you do for your next event.
6. Use reports to review success of campaign or event
Analytical tools and reports are crucial to campaign management. They nourish the success of every phase of your campaign.
At the beginning, they help determine which campaigns have been successful in the past. They allow you to compare and contrast different campaigns.
During a campaign itself, they allow you to view your success in progress, and allow for mid-course corrections if needed. Development directors who are able to make these kinds of corrections to a campaign-in-progress succeed over the long-run.
After a campaign is over, reports allow you to see hard data on what you accomplished, and report to your board and donors.
- For an appeal letter, reports can quickly show basic statistics like total raised, number of donors that contributed, and range of donations- the kind of facts that everyone wants to know. They allow you to compare the results from different appeal letters.
- For a golf tournament, in addition to these basic statistics, you can also evaluate ROI (return on investment) for the overall campaign and any side events. They allow you to rise above the excitement generated by any specific event itself and get hard data on whether it was worth the cost.
- When tracking tools are integrated with campaign management tools, there is no need for the entire development team to learn how to use three or four different programs to satisfy reporting needs.
Software cannot replace the passion you have for your mission, or your experience and creativity. It can, however, support those things and help you create more success so that you can continue doing what you want to do for many years to come.
Resources
Using the New Campaign Management features in FundRaiser Professional
Benefit Events Mean More Than Money
Sasha Daucus edits the FundRaiser Software newsletter, focusing on articles that help non-profit organizations feel more comfortable with their donor management software tools. In her free time she enjoys cooking and listening to world music from the Mediterranean region.
FundRaiser Software offers non-profit organizations intuitive donor management software that is easy to learn and easy to use. Three programs, ranging from simple to sophisticated, let you choose the features you need now, while guaranteeing a built-in growth path for the future. Software flexibilty, budget options, and superb technical support make FundRaiser Software uniquely adaptable to the needs of non-profit organizations whatever their mission.
