Your Fundraising Is Only as Strong as Your Relationships

6 benefits of using a CRM to strengthen ties with donors

As fundraisers, you’re always looking for ways to build trust and strengthen relationships with donors; it’s how you not only spread the good word about your organization but how you keep it viable for the long-haul.

If you haven’t ventured into using a CRM (constituent relationship management) system to track your donors and donor interactions, consider how doing so may help you build a stronger fundraising program.

Using a CRM can help you strengthen donor relationships as it provides:

1. Customized donor communication

By using special or custom fields within a CRM, you can customize communication methods to a donor’s preference. Some may prefer email while others would like you to call them. Hand-written letters or personalized videos can be created based off data you collect from your donors, too.

2. Donor insight

Donor management. Tracking key information about your donors in a CRM provides you with a snapshot of your core giving demographics. From there, you can create targeted fundraising campaigns or reach out to prospects who fit certain criteria during various giving seasons or times of year.

3. Cost efficiency

A CRM can provide small teams with the support they need to run automated reports and track information that would otherwise take multiple team members to get done.

4. Easy data management and reporting

Whether you need to update the board or provide your leadership team with solid information about the progress of money being raised throughout the year, Customer Relationship Management makes it easy for you to generate, manipulate and customize reports and data. What might take team members hours (or days) to compile can typically be done with a few clicks of a button in a CRM that is regularly updated.

5. Automation in communication

A CRM that syncs with your online donation system can auto-generate thank-you emails or drip communications based on specific actions of your donors. You can also set up key communication around special holidays, anniversaries or birthdays of your donors.

6. Time savings

Embrace CRM technology as a way to save you time. Digging through spreadsheets or trying to merge data from online forms, donation landing pages and various email platforms can be tedious. With a CRM you can have all of that information synced at your fingertips for one-stop communicating.

Think about the areas of your donor relationships that you’d like to improve this year. If you struggle with keeping it all together and are looking for ways to improve your processes, think about implementing a Donor Relationship Management as a tool to boost your initiatives. There are some great tools out there designed to help you strengthen your donor relationships; it’s never too late to plan for those.

We hope this week’s issue of NL News was helpful in providing new ideas for strengthening those donor relationships. Spring is a great time to re-invigorate your strategies!

Wishing you the best,

– Your friends at NonprofitLibrary

P.S. Save the date for our upcoming webinar with Ronald Pruitt from 4aGoodCause on February 3rd to learn more about how implementing a CRM can also ensure you keep more of what you raise!