The most useful form of investment that a charity can make in upgrading the service experience that its donors receive is a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Yet very few charities actually use the capabilities of a CRM to enhance the service they provide.
Most of the smaller charities I’ve worked with have shied away from CRM altogether because of the common misunderstanding that it is a tool designed primarily for large corporations.
If anything, the opposite is true here: a customer relationship management system really can be used to good effect in a charity with just two staff.
Give each customer your undivided attention.
Charities have a great opportunity to harness this innate openness by giving donors specific requests that pluck at their interests, and also keeping them informed. If you want to increase the chances of your fundraising campaign being successful – and of keeping donors’ attention – you need to make your organisation a place where donors feel valued.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a great investment to enhance your donor communication, since it can automate much of the process. You maintain a database of donor information, allowing you to create personalised communications for each donor (as well as for each corporation that gives) quickly and easily. You can use prior donations, interactions with your organisation and sponsored events to create a personalised donor retention communication plan.
Most of these – from simple acknowledgement to donor to communication about upcoming events – can be automated using a donor management system for NGOs.
One advantage is improved judgement.
A customer relationship management system (CRM) is, in essence, a database that manages and makes accessible information about a company’s individual customers. A database for all the financial records of a nonprofit organisation – its donors, its events and fundraising efforts – is an invaluable asset.
In the context of the modern information era where we can have access to almost any kind of data, it’s not uncommon for a charitable organisation to become unruly and difficult to manage. One of the classic rookie mistakes among nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) is that they’ll often end up with far too many online spaces, each with its own set of spreadsheets and databases, making everything a giant mess.
Your contacts will be tracked in a customer relationship management system, and the need to save their contact information in multiple places has been eliminated, so everyone in the group will have access to all of the relevant details to make marketing, communications, events and fundraising decisions.
Reporting You Can Count On
Without figures to base the decisions on, an organisation will not have a clear picture of its present condition and future direction. The CRM system’s massive reporting capabilities are good for charities.
Examples include donations, supporters, number attending an event, hours of volunteer time given, etc. All of these are evidence that can be quantified. Such data is important to trustees and other stakeholders, and that a customer relationship management system can on-demand generate.
Time is not squandered
The most striking divergence between a commercial business and a charity is that the latter depends on volunteers and part-time staff. Unfortunately, we have a limited time to accomplish our mission.
Many employees at charitable organisations spend a disproportionate amount of time on manual data-entry and data-retrieval tasks. These include filing reports, sending out mailings, and entering data. A customer relationship management system takes over all these low-level activities, automating them. This frees employees to work on higher-level activities that are directly relevant to achieving the organisation’s goals – for example, by spending time with new or prospective clients to consolidate relationships or seeking new prospects. Your employees couldn’t do these errands without the system.
Donation Administration
A charity faces several ways of making income for itself, including one-off and recurring donations, online and physical sales, fundraising events and grants. There are many ways that a charitable organisation earns money.The bigger the organisation grows, the harder it is to follow up all the way the charity makes income for itself.
The process of doing this is a little easier with a nonprofit CRM solution such as m-NFP hance’s 365, which stores data relevant to your organisation. You will have control over the funds from the moment they’re separated, and it will be easy to know which methods of fundraising are working most successfully – and which need refining.
Maintain open lines of communication between departments
It is a buzzword in nonprofit organisations, although helping between departments can atrophy if there aren’t solid procedures in place, and people don’t know who to ask for what, so they must fend for themselves.
A customer relationship management system is the surest way for a charitable organisation to ensure inter-departmental communication and some sense of organisation. It’s easier to work as a team when the communications are centralised, because fewer emails are circulating and all team members are working with the latest information.
As more people join a non profit organisation and work for it on a voluntary basis, it becomes difficult to keep the day-to-day operations of an organisation well organised, especially as the number of people working for a non-profit increases. From research and development to accountancy to community service, all departments should be able to connect with one another.
Security as well as standardisation.
No nonprofit, of course, should be complacent about data privacy. But a local spreadsheet of donor records is a poor data safe.
So not only does a customer relationship management system look after your legal position, it also looks after your customers – giving them confidence that they can see, organise and destroy the data you hold about them as required by GDPR.
Selecting the right customer relationship management system for a charity is more art than science. Because NGOs have such diverse missions, it’s vital to invest in the right strategy for your organisation.
