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Fundraising

Three Roadblocks Keeping Your Organization from Reaching Its Fundraising Goals—and How to Overcome Them

By | Fundraising, Fundraising Software, Nonprofit | No Comments
Three Roadblocks Keeping Your Organization from Reaching Its Fundraising Goals—and How to Overcome Them

What’s keeping your organization from achieving its fundraising goals? Even though inflation is high, people still give generously to good causes. If your organization isn’t achieving its fundraising goals, here are three possible roadblocks along with ways to overcome them.

Donor Expectations Are Changing

Donor expectations have changed with the times. Some call this the “Amazon effect.” We are all so used to the great customer experience created on Amazon, with spot-on product suggestions, easily accessible wish lists, fast shipping for Prime members, and a seemingly endless array of products that it is hard to remember that a smaller business may not be able to offer similar service. But people interacting with your organization also interact with Amazon, and like it or not, the Amazons (and other big companies) of this world have taught customers to expect extremely high levels of personalization and detail in their communications.

Additionally, donors have varying communication preferences. One donor may be addicted to her phone and never misses a text while someone else eschews cellphones and prefers email or snail mail. Still others may simply drop your organization a note through their favorite social media platform, expecting an immediate response. Organizations that can adjust their approach to donor preferences and provide an omnichannel experience are more likely to maintain good relationships with donors and achieve their fundraising goals.

Roadblock One: Impersonal Donor Outreach or Marketing

If your donation correspondence begins with dear sir or madame, we need to talk. This kind of impersonal marketing is outdated. Worse, it’s ineffective. Correspondence gets sent immediately to the virtual or actual trash bin, and you’ve wasted precious opportunities to make a connection with potential donors.

Gone are the days when nonprofits segregated their communications into personal outreach and mass outreach. In ye olden days, nonprofits often saved personal outreach efforts for large donors while smaller donations received mass, generalized emails

New software and technology make it easy to personalize everything from emails to postcards. We’re not just talking about personalizing the salutation, either. Even messages can be personalized to help you reach out to donors in just the way that they prefer.

Roadblock Two: Manual Processes

Manual processes, however, often make it impossible to achieve this level of personalization. Capturing details on spreadsheets and trying to do mass mail merges into documents can be a nightmare if you have even a single field incorrect in your documents. Tracking donation responses, updating each letter personally, and sending personal notes may be fine when you’re a startup, but if you’re growing, the need for improved and personalized communication far outstrips your ability to produce it manually.

Roadblock Three: Siloed Data

Both lack of personalization and manual processes interact with this roadblock to create a situation in which organizations often fail to achieve fundraising goals. Siloed data means that data exists in separate places. It does not communicate or synchronize with other data sources, so no one data source has the big picture. One program may maintain a spreadsheet of donors while down the hall, a second group has yet another spreadsheet with donor names on it. The spreadsheets are little data siloes. It is next to impossible to use such data because often other departments don’t know it exists. And, if they do know, it’s cumbersome to use.

The Solution: Software Solutions for Nonprofits

Grant and fundraising software offer a great solution that overcomes all three roadblocks in one. Welter Consulting can help you choose the right software as well as “clean” your siloed data to ensure it is accurate and ready to import into your new software. You can move away from manual to automated processes, ensure personalization, and share data with one system. We can show you how.

Donors expect more from us today. Communications and data management have changed. But the reason your nonprofit exists—its mission—and the generosity of your donors and benefactors hasn’t changed. By using the latest technology, and embracing personalization, automation, and centralization, you can move away from processes holding you back from achieving your fundraising goals.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact us for more information.

Best Practices for Integrating Finance and Fund Development

By | Accounting, Fundraising, Nonprofit | No Comments
group of office workers at table with open laptop showing graphics. Welter logo

Finance and fundraising work towards the same shared goal—maximizing margin in support of an organization’s mission. However, finance is often a separate department, with fundraising housed in grant management, marketing, or donor relations.

Although both can work effectively as separate entities within the same organization, when the teams are aligned, great things can happen. Aligning around shared data resources is a natural way to bring both teams together. Here are several best practices you can implement in your organization to help finance and fundraising improve collaboration around data and information resources.

Best Practice 1: Evaluate Current Fund Development Policies

Finance often acts as the guardian of an organization’s policies, but this can conflict with fundraising when donors wish to give support that is outside the current guidelines. A good example is a fundraising effort that connects a donor who wishes to give a substantial gift to the organization, but the gift is outside the organization’s normal policies. If this happens repeatedly, it may be time for finance and fundraising to collaborate on a policy review.

Often, policies have been in place for years. As the organization changes and grows, its mission changes along with the organization, but policies put in place many years ago haven’t changed. Gift policies, for example, may not encompass new technology that didn’t exist when the policies were written. Finance should provide guidance and collaborate with the fund-raising team to adjust gift and donation policies so they remain in alignment with best practices in nonprofit accounting and governance but still meet existing needs and opportunities.

Best Practice 2: Ensure Finance and Fundraising Understand Data Governance

Who in your organization “owns” the current fund accounting system and its resulting database? Probably finance, and that’s how it should be. But the fundraising team provides data that feeds into the fund accounting database—notably, fundraising campaign pledges, donor information, and gifts and donations that must be accounted for and tracked against funds and programs.

To ensure this tracking is accurate, fundraising and finance must determine who owns what in the data management system. Collaborating on a shared data dictionary, tagging each fund or donation appropriately, and tracking revenue and expenses to the correct fund are important parts of nonprofit accounting and financial management.

Without clean, clear data management, any upcoming audit will be a nightmare of tangled data and unclear information. This can lead to many challenges, the least of which is giving your auditors headaches—and showing discrepancies in your accounting. No one on the team wants this, so be sure to agree on who owns what in the database, how information should be managed, and, in the event of questions, which group has the final say.

Best Practice 3: Improve Communications

Depending on the size of your organization and its company culture, finance and fundraising may or may not interact frequently. What’s your take on this situation? Do the two departments find ways to connect and communicate, or are they frequently at loggerheads with one another?

If you find the two groups are bickering, it’s time for a sit-down. Ask each group to bring their questions, concerns, and challenges to the table. Perhaps employees from each group can shadow the other for a day—a member of finance works in fundraising, and vice versa. This helps each team gain a better understanding of the unique needs, challenges, and benefits the other brings to their work. Often, infighting and silos arise because of miscommunication. Eliminating these miscommunications and encouraging teams to share information freely is a great step

Everyone at the organization wants one thing: to support the mission. To do so, good communication, a shared understanding of job functions, and collaboration on policies and data is essential. With a few simple steps, you can accomplish this in your organization.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please call us at 206-605-3113 for more information.

Digital Storytelling Techniques Boost Fundraising Success

By | Fundraising, Nonprofit | No Comments

As the world continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, nonprofits feel the pinch. Many face record shortfalls. Some who relied upon in-person fundraising activities find it hard to adapt to the new digital world where business and personal events have shifted to the ubiquitous video conference.

Those nonprofits who have never conducted digital fundraising campaigns face a steep learning curve as they embrace the new normal (a phrase we’ve all heard since the pandemic started in March). As you begin your online fundraising efforts, you’re faced with a myriad of choices. What marketing tactic do you use, and when? How do you engage potential donors when so much vies for their attention online? How do you make your story stand out in their newsfeeds or emails?

The following guide to the best digital storytelling techniques can help your digital fundraising activities go from ho-hum to homerun. Ready? Let’s get started.

Establish a Successful Marketing Platform

  1. Review your current marketing plan. Has it been updated since the pandemic? If not, now is the time to update the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis section, competitive analysis, and target audience.
  2. Look at what your competitors are doing to raise funds or generate sales. Where are they running ads?
  3. Where are your donors congregating online? Do they like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube? Once you understand your target market, begin to assess various advertising platforms for your fundraising campaign, and start a list of possible platforms to place ads.
  4. Set up online payment portals or gateways to collect and record funds from the campaign.
  5. Gather the stories to share in your fundraising campaign from those who your nonprofit has helped. Ensure that if you use anyone’s name or likeness, you have a signed consent form on file.

Two Powerful Digital Storytelling Techniques for Nonprofit Fundraising

Take a cue from the for-profit world of advertising and use these proven techniques to elicit responses. Each of these powerful storytelling techniques can be adapted to nonprofit fundraising with just a few adjustments. These basic formulas have been used for decades to sell products. Why not use them to generate funds for a good cause?

The AIDA Formula

AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. It’s a way of writing material to grab attention and interest, spark the desire for action, and inspire the action. In nonprofit fundraising, a compelling headline grabs attention while success stories and pictures generate interest.

To spark the desire to help, you must tell the story in such a way that it appeals to the emotions. Then, ask for the desired action—in this case, a donation. Make it easy for people to donate by creating a direct landing page for the campaign with links to online donation forms or buttons to click to donate.

Problem-Solution-Ask

The problem-solution-result-ask formula is often used in case studies to showcase how a company solved a problem, and, by extension, could solve the same problem for the potential customer reading the case study. Nonprofits can adapt this formula by thinking of it in terms of the problem brought to their attention, the solution they applied, the results achieved, and asking for donations to continue such work.

Perhaps you have seen advertisements from animal shelters on television or online. These are classic problem-solution-ask ads. These ads typically start by showing the problems—abandoned pets, sick dogs, injured cats. Next, the scene shifts to the solution—pets frolicking with new owners, shiny eyes and coats, injuries healed. The solution is the shelter’s activities and the dedicated people working there. Such commercials end with the ask and the offer. They ask for donations, offer something in return (the feeling of helping, a gift), and ask again, providing clear and easy methods for donating to the organization.

This formula has worked well for many nonprofit organizations and charities, including food banks, homeless shelters, drug and alcohol rehabilitation charities, educational organizations, and medical charities. It can work for many types of nonprofits, and it may work well for yours!

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information.

There’s Power in Numbers – Crowdsource Your Fundraising Efforts

By | Fundraising | No Comments

Have you heard the term “crowdsourcing”? It refers to using the power of groups or crowds for fundraising efforts.

People crowdsource a wide range of activities. Artists have engaged their fans to crowdsource funding to produce CDs and books. People crowdsource funds to help neighbors and friends rebuild after a disaster.

You, too, can use crowdsourcing to raise funds for your nonprofit. To get started, learn the basics of crowdsourcing, then work on your campaign using these tips.

There’s power in numbers … the ability to raise money for your nonprofit.

What is a Crowdsourced Fundraising Campaign and How Does It Work?

Crowdsourced fundraising campaigns engage your nonprofit’s supporters, so they become your fundraising team. Each person who participates in the crowdsourcing campaign works their contact list to raise funds. It’s like having a big crowd of volunteer fundraisers working on your behalf to raise money.

The organization running the crowdfunding campaign establishes channels for accepting donations, provides marketing support, and uses its communication channels to raise awareness.

3 Crowdsource Fundraising Tips for Nonprofits

  1. Establish clear, specific goals

Crowdsourcing is similar to many other fundraising activities. It starts with clear end-goals. Consider the following questions as you develop your fundraising goals.

  • What is the objective of this fundraising activity?
  • What is your financial goal?
  • What will the starting and end dates be of the campaign?
  • How will you measure the success of this activity?
  • How many supporters do you need to engage?
  1. Develop the story

Crowdsourcing campaigns revolve around a compelling story. The hero of the story isn’t you or your organization: it’s the fundraiser. Everyone who chooses to participate in the crowdfunding campaign should be treated as a hero in the story.

Build out the campaign story using classic storytelling elements. Every story has a hero, a villain, an obstacle to overcome, and champions or supporters. Think about a well-known story such as “Star Wars.” The hero is Luke Skywalker; the villain is Darth Vader. The champion is Obi-Wan Kenobi. The obstacle to overcome is for Luke to destroy the Death Star and cripple the Empire. It’s a classic tale with elements examined by mythologists such as Joseph Campbell for its compelling modern spin on time-honored storytelling elements.

The hero of your story is clear: the person participating in the crowdsourcing campaign. The villain? What does your organization combat or overcome: illness, animal cruelty, environmental destruction, illiteracy, homelessness? And the champion is the donor—the people who the crowdfunding person engages in the campaign and encourages to donate.

Weave a spellbinding tale in the marketing materials around these classic storytelling elements for powerful messages that resonate with the target audience.

  1. Build donor materials

Make it easy for people to respond and donate. Build a special landing page to track donations from the crowdsourcing campaign. Create and print paper-based donation forms the volunteers can distribute to their contact list and use a code on the form to track donations back to the campaign. Provide plenty of case studies, stories, and marketing materials to support the campaign. Be generous with your time answering questions, hosting online chats or videos, and using social media to support the campaign’s goals.

Successful Crowdsourcing Makes Participation Easy

The key to successful crowdsourcing your fundraising activities, is to make participation easy. By providing supporters with all the materials and information needed to share the campaign, you’ll encourage greater involvement and higher donations.

Welter Consulting

Welter Consulting bridges people and technology together for effective solutions for nonprofit organizations. We offer software and services that can help you with your accounting needs. Please contact Welter Consulting at 206-605-3113 for more information.