FundRaiser Blog

It is with sadness we report the death on January 13, 2016 of Larry Weaver, long-time employee and friend at Fundraiser.

Many of you have have “known” Larry for years, as he helped all of our FundRaiser users in his roles as Technical Support expert, and in later years, the “star” of our Training videos and live classes. Larry was the first employee hired by founder Gene Weinbeck, and remained, through the ups and downs of the company and his own move from Missouri to Arizona, a staunch friend and supporter of FundRaiser’s mission.

Dear Kim,

I am about to take the plunge. For years I’ve listened to many fundraisers stress the importance of segmenting your donor lists. For a variety of reasons including laziness, being too busy, and poor software, I have not yet done this.

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.)

Now is the time to start thinking about what information you need for your End of Year letters for tax season.  Start with a few simple decisions and complete your data entry for 2015 in order for the process to go smoothly. Questions to answer are

• Will you send out letters to all donors, just to donors who will be required by the IRS to have written proof of their donations, or skip sending them altogether?
• Do you want to include a fundraising appeal with the tax summary letter? 

What is a tax summary letter?

Tax Summary letters, often called End of Year letters, give donors information on what they have donated to your organization that year. These statements differ from the holiday appeal, in that they are sent after the holidays. Their primary intention is to give information to the donor for taxes; however it is not uncommon to combine them with another appeal.

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.

About 15 years ago, key members of CrossTalk ministry took a step back from their work, and realized they weren’t getting where they wanted to go. “We had a lag of four to six weeks in responding to people who contacted us. When we got around to contacting them they were irritated and didn’t care anymore. We were failing,” says Caleb Weiss, Development Director.

Caleb knew that donor management software could help, but theirs was more of a liability. “We had some kind of membership tracking software at that time. It took more work to use than it saved. We were also using several Excel spreadsheets. We needed a software product that would help us do our job without having to put so much into it.”

Dear Kim,

I am the director of a very small nonprofit organization that provides programs and services to adoptive families. We are considering starting a membership program. I really don’t know where to start. Levels? Benefits? Any suggestions?

BRING Recycling is adding #WorkUpstream – an online campaign starting on #GivingTuesday , December 1st – to their traditional end-of-year fundraising strategy. The social media portion of the campaign targets new donors from their Facebook and Twitter followers, says Ephraim Payne, Development and Communications Director at BRING.

New donors attracted through social media outreach will be added to the FundRaiser database as contacts, allowing for regular follow-up. “It allows us to reach them in a more focused way than we can through Facebook or Twitter,” says Ephraim. “We’ll be able to include them in our donor appreciation and cultivation communications.”

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.” 

Dear Kim,

I am the director of a membership nonprofit and our board is thinking about changing us to a non-member organization to help us refocus our efforts to serve our clientele, clean up organizationally and become more streamlined and efficient. Would this be a mistake and how tough is it to do this? What is the real question we should be asking ourselves to help determine whether we should be a non-member or member nonprofit?
—Members Only

Like many development directors, Raelene Pullen of Figge Art Museum has a small staff and limited budget, so she needs to use resources wisely. On first arriving at her new job, she turned to the donor database in place at the Figge for information on how to do that … and found that the data she needed wasn’t there. “The previous development team didn’t use the software in a very dynamic way. I’d have a question and refer to the software. The answers weren’t there. So I had to ask myself why that was. Is this software not good? The software can only return information based on what was input,” says Raelene about her first experiences with the donor database.

Instead of giving up on FundRaiser, she sat down to figure out what information she needed and if FundRaiser could do the job. She went through each of the technical trainings offered by FundRaiser Training and spoke to FundRaiser Technical Support.  When properly implemented, FundRaiser was able to provide almost all she needed. “Since then, we’ve revitalized and revamped the coding and campaign management processes. Now we are able to benchmark and track the differences in response for appeals, museum events, gifts, and engagement and have data over a number of years.”

Dear Kim,

I am the board chair of a small organization in a very rural (1,000 pop) town. We are not on the tourist track and, if we were to face the truth, we would admit that in 20 years our town probably won’t exist. Our organization helps seniors stay in their homes, which in our case are sometimes quite scattered over a large area. We have some government funding and a couple of events plus about 50 regular donors and two dozen really wonderful volunteers. I say all this because I have read your stuff and really find it useful, except for the advice to move people off the board who don’t help with fundraising. We have several board members who won’t help with fundraising but are active volunteers and actually good board members otherwise. They are very firm in this conviction. (They all make their own gifts.) We just don’t have the population that would allow us to find other board members but I don’t like the feeling we have now which is that some people help with fundraising and others don’t. I want everyone to feel they are part of fundraising. Any suggestions? 

Nonprofits who make it easy for donors to give gifts in memory or honor of someone, increase both donations and positive feelings towards their organization... especially when the follow-up on your part is handled well. Joan Young, a volunteer at Kairos Dwelling, who are FundSelect users, says that the key to managing tributes is understanding that two different letters are usually sent: the normal acknowledgment letter to the donor, and then an additional letter, called the notification letter, that goes to the family member of the memorialized person. Tracking both of these letters requires some attention.

The American Animal Hospital Association Foundation receives 800 or more memorial gifts a month."Veterinary practices will have a client who has a pet that passes away. The vet then makes a memorial donation to the program in memory of the animal," explains Tamara Fox. She says to deal with this volume of tributes, "being organized helps."

Dear Kim,

Does your nonprofit make it easy for donors to give donations as a special gift? Not only are these kinds of donations good fundraising, they also create positive feelings towards your organization. "More and more people are catching on– giving gifts in honor of holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries," says Becky Lindberg of First Witness Child Abuse Resource Center. For the non profit organization, "it is such an easy painless way to keep people connected to your program," adds Lindberg.

With very simple techniques to get people thinking about making a memorial donation, you can simultaneously

Dear Kim,

I sit on the advisory committee of a regional program whose mission is to fight racism and educate the public about celebrating diversity. They are hoping to increase their coffers by starting a membership program. I agreed to do some research into:

In part 1 - Raelene Pullen, Development Director at the Figge Art Museum, shares how she is successfully uses FundRaiser Professional to engaged more donors and increasing donations.

FundRaiser Professional is important in evaluating ROI (Return On Investment) of the events organized by Raelene Pullen. “After an event, we are interested to see the relationship between donations received by the Museum and the donor’s attendance at recent events. How do the donations that come in from those prospects compare to the ones that come from people who haven’t attended? This makes visible the impact of the event and that way of cultivating these relationships,"says Raelene.

Figge Art Museum is on the move, and so are their donors-- moving up the giving ladder! Raelene Pullen, Development Director at Figge Art Museum, is very deliberate about the steps she takes to communicate with donors and encourage them to become more involved in the museum. Her fundraising software, FundRaiser Professional  is crucial to the process. 

“One of the most important things I’ve learned through this work and using FundRaiser is the need for data organization and entry. We use the coding in FundRaiser in a way that allows us to communicate with donors in a dynamic way. We have clarified what kind of information we need to record and maintain so when we need it, we have the information we need.  Our intention has been to use highly specific information to target and move donors up the giving ladder,” says Raelene.

Membership programs may have many practical benefits, but the biggest benefit to an organization is their potential to increase donor loyalty. Someone who sees herself as a member of an organization will generally feel more ownership and involvement in an organization than someone who sees herself just as a donor, even if the member never has any more concrete involvement than simply giving money.

In addition, enrolling a donor as a member gives a concrete reason for sporadic donors to become regular donors, at least once a year when their membership renewal comes due.

A lucky thing about a job that feels valuable is knowing that going to work means more than just getting a paycheck. That feeling gives a sense of deep satisfaction, of real happiness. The downside is that sometimes work may start to feel not just valuable but also a little serious.

The founders of FundRaiser, Gene and Marcy Weinbeck, were aware of that and came up with a company tradition to help. At least once a month, the company has a three-day holiday weekend. In August, when the US has no official holiday, we picked our own-- Happiness Happens Day.