For many not-for-profit organisations and charities, donors are vital in helping you to work towards your overall mission and without them, it could be much harder to meet your overall objectives. This is why, it makes perfect sense for your organisation to invest in helping to provide exceptional donor experiences that can help to develop this into long-term support for your cause/mission.
You will find that donor management is a great way for your organisation to meet a goal as it involves being able to track and organise information gathered from your supporters. By taking this approach, you will be able to build up these relationships with your donors over time, improve engagement and extract the best possible value from that relationship.
In our latest blog article, we will take you through 5 of the best ways to be able to successfully manage donors for not-for-profit organisations.
1 – Select the right Donor Management System
In order to be able to effectively manage donors, you need to have access to organised & up-to-date information as this is vital in being able to formulate strong relationships with your donors. This is why, you may wish to consider investing in a top of the range Donor Management System to empower your organisation to follow all donor-related information. From this, you will be able to gain a real-time view of your donor activities, engagement and much, much more which will enable you to not only engage better but also to retain them too.
You need to find a donor management system that delivers a whole range of features that will be able to meet the requirements of your charity/not-for-profit. At Advantage, we are experts in being able to build bespoke systems that are able to meet your specific requirements and are fully scalable as your organisation grows, equipping you with the tools that you require to be able to develop and maintain relationships with your donors.
2 – Categorise your donors in order to build donor personas
It goes without saying but donor initiatives often start by defining your supporters based on specific criteria such as age, interests, location. As well as this, by having the right software in place, it might provide you with the opportunity to combine donors into groups based on their donation history, levels of engagement as well as how they prefer to be communicated to.
By taking advantage of this information, not-for-profits/charities are then able to create donor personas which will be able to provide a fair reflection of their current set of donors. Taking this one step further, these groups will be able to help you to better understand your contributors, thus making it much simpler to tailor your marketing efforts based on specific interests or preferences.
3 – Tailor the way you engage with your supporters to improve the figures
It can be said that choosing a single approach to talk to your supporters is the fastest way to reach out to them. However, the only problem is that many want to feel valued and engaged with the cause that they are supporting. This is where using personalisation for your communications can help to match up with your contributors interests and motivations. From this, your donors will be more likely to sign up for your initiatives and support your mission.
4 – Convert single donation donors into long term supporters
Being in touch regularly with your supporters before, during and after they have donated is vital in enabling you to build more long-term connections and ultimately trying to encourage them to become regular supporters. This can help to build out the future of your charity/not-for-profit as regular donors are more beneficial than single ones.
One of the approaches that can be taken to help encourage reoccurring donations be delivering regular and honest updates about your latest initiatives, impact as well as success stories. Moreover, it goes without saying but many donors want to know about how their donations are making an impact, so keeping them up to date with the progress on this and how its working towards their overall mission is vital in being able to builder stronger connections with them.
5 – Regularly review donor data to identify new opportunities
Finding out exactly where new opportunities are within your current set of supporters is vital in being able to initiate new outreach programmes. The only problem with this is the fact that gathering and analysing donor data can become a time-consuming process with a lack of resources often being the key problem in being able to do this.
You will find that solutions such as Microsoft Power BI can allow you to streamline these tasks, enabling users to easily find critical metrics and produce reports showcasing graphs and charts. From this, your not-for-profit/charity is able to follow specific donor metrics such as contributions, history, engagement in addition to donation frequency, making it much more straightforward to be able to identify new opportunities.
Next Steps?
There are no doubts that building long term relationships with donors doesn’t happen overnight and can take time to formulate, however if achieved in the right way, it can help to drive huge benefits for your not-for-profit organisation. If you are looking to transform the way you work through a bespoke CRM system from Advantage then give our team of CRM experts a call today to learn more.
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