FundRaiser Blog

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.

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.

The two main types of memberships are...

• Benefit-driven memberships where donors give more money to receive greater benefits. Often these are used during membership drives. Often, there are several membership 'levels', with higher donations amounts bringing more valuable benefits/premiums/privileges.
• Recognition-driven memberships where donors give money and receive recognition, such as a wall plaque, engraved brick, or even a named building. These are also called 'philanthropic memberships'. They are a development tool, used to convert  prospects into donors and to increase the size of gifts.These also often are offered in levels, with greater donation amounts offering greater recognition.

How donor management differs between the two types of memberships

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.

1. Make each member feel like they are your most important member

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:

Part 1  Why move data?

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. 

Looking for new donors is vital to any organization that depends on donations. Could you be overlooking some of your best potential donors? If your aren't asking the people who have benefited from the paid services that your organization offers, then you are missing a great source of donations. For instance:

• animal shelters can ask people who had adopted animals
• places that have an admission charge like museums, nature centers can ask visitors
• organizations that put on conferences or festivals can ask attendees
• health care organizations can ask people who have received health services
• schools can ask alumni
• theater groups can ask box office visitors
• and so forth

Low Hanging Fruit

These people who have already shown that they value your organization offer fundraisers the equivalent of low-hanging fruit, says Laurie Anderson Mann, of DramaBiz.

Did you start a capital campaign and have to allow it to lapse before it finished? You are not the only one. Many nonprofits have had this happen-- maybe because of the economy, or unexpected changes within an organization.

Just because you let a campaign lapse, doesn't mean you have to abandon it forever. You can revive a lapsed capital campaign, and your donor database can help. By keeping your contacts current, you will have the records there to start up again when you are able.

When you think about the things that you are proud of achieving in your organization last year, what do they include? Take a moment to ponder before you read on.

After the start of the New Year, one of the things I enjoyed most was hearing from some of our customers about the things they were proud of having achieved in 2012. That got me thinking how good it feels to achieve something and to hear how people you care about have done so, too. Then I started wondering what staff members here at FundRaiser are proud of achieving.

The answers cover a lot of territory. Two things they have in common though; every achievement required learning new things; and people felt good about whatever they had done.  Feeling good ('subjective well-being') has been substantially linked to better health, so it stands to reason that when you learn something new, or want to generally strengthen the health and morale at your organization, a powerful way to achieve that is to give yourself and staff the opportunity to stretch and learn.

In order to create a strong membership program, there are  four basic questions you need to be think through in order for things to run smoothly. Knowing the answers will get a new membership program off to a strong start; or help clear up problems in one that is already established. Either way-- whether you are new to membership management or needing to strengthen one you already have, knowing the answers to these questions creates a solid foundation:

• What role do you want people to play in your organization who are not board or staff?

• What should be the base membership fee?

• What benefits should you offer to members?

• How can you best manage joining and expiration of membership?

1.  What role do you want people to play in your organization who are not board or staff?

The answer to this question helps you decide whether you actually need or want a membership program at all! There are many benefits to a membership program but it will also be additional work to keep it running smoothly. Will this extra work be worth it to you?

The crunch was on at Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home. They had to find a replacement for their Development Coordinator, and get her up to speed on their FundRaiser program fast. Ward Orem, CEO for LLDL Home, was pulling his hair out. “We had a huge mailing coming up, and then a spring campaign, and immediately after that a large fundraising event.” The Lisner-Louis-Dickson-Hurt Home is the only long term care facility in Washington, DC exclusively serving disadvantaged senior citizens of the city. They are FundRaiser Professional users.

Virtually at the last minute, they found a new Development Coordinator, Debbie Lyle. “Debbie is new in the position and was literally being dumped into boiling hot water,” says Ward. He decided to invest in onsite training for her. “Debbie had to get her feet on the ground and start running immediately. Individualization was critical. Although we have benefited in the past from FundRaiser training webinars, we felt that it would be so much more beneficial to have a FundRaiser trainer sitting right next to us. It was well worth the investment,” says Ward.

As the last week before the holidays wind down, things here at FundRaiser Software have been, well, INSANE! We’ve needed all hands on deck to manage tech support, sales, and fulfillment.  While it always feels great to be this busy (and the only thing we like better than being this busy is being this busy all the time!), it has been hard to find a moment to catch my breath and write this message. I would like to take a moment to thank you. You are the reason that we do this.

We truly are so fortunate. We all come to work every day and get to work with YOU - the absolute best customers on the planet! Even during the holiday rush, when everyone is trying desperately to get their last-minute appeal letters, thank-you letters, and tax letters out the door, so many of you take the time to thank us and wish us Happy Holidays. That means a lot to us! We know that the software isn’t perfect and sometimes you probably want to just throw the computer out the window, but you still manage to find the grace to be polite (if a bit panicky) and wish us well. That is enough. Truly.

Nick Haring is the new fellow at the end of the FundRaiser Tech Support line. In addition to Jonathan Smith, Nick is here to answer your questions about using the FundRaiser programs. Nick is replacing Sherry Willis whose own home business, Half-Pint Homesteads, has taken off and needs her full time. We are sorry to see her go, and happy to have someone like Nick join the FundRaiser staff. Right now, he's responding mostly to emails involving simple queries. "I’ll be on the phones soon!" he says.

Nick studied Computer Science and Mass Communications at Missouri Southern State in Joplin, Missouri. After losing his home in the Joplin tornado in 2011, he moved back to West Plains, Missouri, to be closer to family.

After his move, he was happy to discover that FundRaiser Software was looking for someone like him as a support technician. Because of his ability with computers he is at home with technical questions; and with his interest in communications, he has an easy and pleasant way of sharing information. Look for his blog posts coming up as he settles in at FundRaiser.