FundRaiser Software customers are already used to our Donation, Deposit, and Donor Reports for tracking donations. But for those who also use our Donor Portal it’s important to see what donations came in strictly through online means. The Online Donation report provides the same functionality as these other reports; however, it defaults to showing only gifts that came directly through the Donor Portal.
Giving Tuesday is just 2 months away, on November 27 and it is not too soon to start preparing for it. This year, we want to give you some extra help by creating an online donations page that is integrated with FundRaiser. Our Donor Portal can play a key role in the success of your Giving Tuesday campaign.
Your custom Donor Portal page for online donations will• look & feel like your website• accept online donations using Authorize.net• seamlessly stream donor and donation records directly to FundRaiser
Complementing a traditional capital campaign, “Positive, Uplifting Word FM” is trying a new kind of fundraiser – inscribed bricks listeners personalize to include in a pathway the nonprofit plans to install at its new facility. This Christian radio station has been growing steadily by offering positive conversations and uplifting music and recently moved to a larger, more functional ministry building. Bricks that listeners reserve now will be used next spring to transform the new location’s nondescript, concrete sidewalk into something much more meaningful: a “Pathway to Hope.”
“We’re not selling bricks,” qualifies Jean Otto Ford, one of Word FM’s main FundRaiser users. “We’re asking listeners to support this ministry at specific giving levels (at minimum) that then offers them a unique opportunity to create a lasting expression of what Word FM means to them – or of hope, love, inspiration, tribute, etc. Listeners often tell us that our station plays a huge role in their day-to-day lives, and this campaign provides a way for all of us to celebrate that connection.”
If you are receiving gifts for #GivingTuesday (or any other occasion) in another system, you’ll most likely be entering them into FundRaiser. (If you haven’t inquired about our Donor Portal, which can put gifts directly into your FundRaiser database, now is a great time to do so.) Instead of entering your gifts one-by-one, you can import them.
To import your gifts, save your file of exported gifts into a CSV (comma separated values) format. Most programs export into CSV files automatically. Then, go to File > Import and follow the prompts to match up the fields and import the gifts.
Society of St. Andrew (SoSA) started their #GivingTuesday efforts 2 years ago, and those efforts have paid off big. The first year they brought in $65,000. Last year, their second year, they brought in $87,000. “This year we are hoping for $100,000,” says Steven Waldman, Executive Director of the Society of St. Andrew. Many of the donations they receive from #GivingTuesday come in from their website. The online giving will be handled by the FundRaiser Donor Portal this year.
Steven believes that SoSA’s success with their #GivingTuesday campaign is due primarily to “keeping things simple. We make a clear connection to the GivingTuesday message and we make it easy for donors to give to us.”
The Sacred Heart Radio case study includes a reference to a feature in FundRaiser, called Recurring Gifts, and I want to point out to everyone that you don't need the Donor Portal version of the program to take advantage of it. It is particularly helpful for those with Donor Portal, since it not only allows a donor to set up their own regularly-scheduled donations, including bringing them into FundRaiser, but also allows for special "thank you" letters dependent on whether a payment is accepted, rejected, a card is expired, or about to expire. But even if you don't have the Donor Portal, recurring gifts can save you a lot of time, if you have one of the following situations:
Donors on a payroll deductionDonors who supply credit card or bank info for regular withdrawalsIf, for instance, you have 50 people who give on a monthly basis, regular as clockwork, the same amount each time, you can save a lot of time by entering the donation only once per person (as a Recurring Gift setup) and then have FUndRaiser produce the actual gift entry each time it comes due. You can offer each of the donors a preference on what day of the month they'd like their gifts processed. Once a Recurring Gift is established, it's just a matter of running the utility to process Recurring Gifts to have FUndRaiser build the gift records.
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.
Successfully promoting 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.
