GUEST POST // Choosing the Right Technology to Support Your Development Team
By Carl Diesing of DNL OmniMedia
Your nonprofit’s development team acquires funding to keep your organization going. Unfortunately, each individual fundraiser on your team is only able to speak with a certain number of donors, manage a certain number of grant applications, and plan a certain number of events. There are only so many hours in a day, and the last thing you want is for your nonprofit’s staffers to feel overstretched and underappreciated.
This team brings in much-needed donations from a variety of sources. While it may seem counterintuitive, assessing your technology and making an initial investment may be the key to this team’s success.
The nonprofit sector has a pervasive fear of spending money— a fear that leads organizations to be irrationally frugal. If an organization wants to continue growing its fundraising capabilities— and with that, its impact in the community— it’ll need to spend money on increasing the capacity of its development team.
There are a few ways to invest in and grow the capacity of your development team. You can hire new staff members or you can equip your current team with technology that empowers them to get more done in the hours they have available.
This guide will focus on the second strategy— how you can use technology to support and grow your development team. Let’s dive in.
Understanding the Intersection of Technology and Nonprofit Development
From the outside, fundraising may seem like a straightforward task: ask for a donation, receive the funds, make an impact.
However, as a nonprofit development professional, you know that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Your development staff conducts fundraising efforts that require a significant amount of organization— from the due dates and deliverables for various grant funders to the many meetings and conversations with prospective major donors. Each step your fundraisers take needs to be carefully tracked and analyzed along the way, to ensure that you’re either:
Meeting the fundraising goals needed to keep the lights on at your organization and have a significant impact on your mission.
Not meeting your goals, but discovering the challenge early on to brainstorm a solution and save the day.
Even if your organization is technically able to manually track and report on the progress of your various fundraising initiatives, that would be a time-consuming task that leaves much room for human error.
That’s where nonprofit technology comes into play. Tech can increase both the capacity and efficacy of your development team, saving them time and increasing their success rates while doing so. For example, automated reporting allows you to monitor your various fundraising efforts without dedicating hours toward compiling data. And, task reminders can help your development staff stay abreast of their various fundraising commitments, such as submitting a grant deliverable.
For some organizations— specifically, those with more straightforward fundraising efforts— their constituent relationship management (CRM) system is enough to track fundraising efforts. However, as your fundraising grows in both scope and complexity, this tool can be less intuitive for the in-depth efforts you’re conducting and cause valuable information to fall through the cracks. In that case, you’ll want to consider equipping your development team with additional tech tools created for the specific fundraising efforts they’re completing.
Choosing the Right Tech to Support Your Team
As a baseline standard, your organization uses a CRM to serve as the home for all of your nonprofit’s fundraising, stewardship, and programmatic efforts. So, let’s focus on the supplementary tools that you can use alongside your nonprofit’s CRM to improve your development team’s data management abilities and more.
Major Gifts Software
DNL OmniMedia’s guide to Blackbaud Fundraiser Performance Management (FPM) outlines a few glaring statistics about major gift fundraising:
Only 37% of major gift officers use their CRM for prospect cultivation.
79% of major gift data is never entered into the CRM.
71% of major gift officers say too much time is spent on data entry.
65% of major gift officers want an easy-to-use, role-specific CRM.
Closely monitoring data about each individual major gift prospect is the key to more effective prospecting, cultivation, and stewardship over time, allowing officers to raise more unrestricted funds from individual donors. However, this monitoring is nearly impossible when major gift officers don’t enter data into your systems to be tracked.
A major gift-specific software solution (for example, the aforementioned Blackbaud FPM) provides additional value to officers, making the choice to enter data into the system an easy one. With built-in focused prospecting, moves management, and peer benchmarking tools, officers will want to log their major gift efforts and use the rich insights in your system to improve those efforts.
Grant Management Software
When a grantmaker awards funds to your organization, they do so with strings attached. To be awarded that grant, your organization needs to manage detail-intensive applications. However, the tracking doesn’t end there— once the grant is awarded, you also need to track how the funding is used, the reporting schedule, and upcoming deadlines.
Without grant-specific features, it’s easy for crucial deadlines and benchmarks to fall to the wayside. On the other hand, grant management software empowers your team with:
Advanced reporting automation and customization capabilities, empowering you to create the exact reports needed for your various grantmakers with ease.
A grant tracking calendar with progress and deadline tracking abilities to have a full picture of all in-progress funding.
A document library to store grant-specific and frequently used documents, including past applications and proposals.
Built-in or integrations with accounting tools for full financial transparency.
As you research, you’ll find grant management software can vary in functionality, so you’ll want to choose the tool that best aligns with your grant programming. Some popular solutions include Salesforce’s foundationConnect, Blackbaud’s Financial Edge NXT, EveryAction, and SalsaEngage.
Matching Gift Software
According to Double the Donation’s guide to matching gift software vendors, anywhere from $4 - $7 billion in matching gift funds goes unclaimed each year.
For a refresh, matching gift programs are those in which an employer pledges to make a matched donation to a nonprofit after their employee has made a gift. For your development team, this could mean two gifts for the price of soliciting only one from the employee.
However, the challenge with matching gift revenue is that to secure it, the donor needs to contact their employer and begin the matching process. For your development team, researching whether each of your organization’s donations is match eligible and reaching out to those individuals who have donated can be a time-consuming process.
With matching gift software, you can access a comprehensive database of employers that match donations to nonprofits like yours and embed that database directly into your online giving page. That way, donors can learn about matching gifts and search the database to discover whether their gift is match eligible right as they make their contribution.
You can take this a step further by investing in an automated matching gift software, such as 360MatchPro. This type of solution will automatically search for a donor’s match-eligibility once they’ve made a donation and send out information about matching gifts to those who are eligible.
Wrapping Up: Tips for Incorporating Tech into Your Development Strategy
Equipping your development team with software corresponding to the specific fundraising efforts they’re carrying out can make your team more effective and efficient in their day-to-day efforts. This increases your team’s capacity, growing what they’re able to accomplish over time.
If you choose to invest in development-specific software solutions, keep the following tips in mind:
Integrate your solutions with your main CRM. Whether major gifts software, grant management software, matching gift software, or even general fundraising tools, you’ll want to ensure the data from those solutions flows directly into your CRM. So, even if your development officers prefer interacting with the fundraising-specific solutions, you’ll have a comprehensive overview of all activities in your CRM.
Outline stringent data management practices. All it takes is one missed keystroke for a donor record to be unusable. Outline procedures for how your development officers should handle data to prevent such errors, including standardization of terms, numerals, acronyms, and titles and a process for handling errors upon discovering them.
Don’t be afraid to invest in the right technology. For organizations that find their fundraising plateauing, they may simply not be spending enough on overhead to allow their efforts to grow. Investing in technology can help your team overcome that challenge, but you’ll need to overcome your fear of overhead costs first.
With the right software, your development team will be able to scale up their efforts successfully. If you’re unsure of which solutions would best serve your team or how to implement those tools, you can always work with a nonprofit technology consultant. This partner will assess your tech stack, discover the best solutions to elevate your development team, and handle the implementation and training needed to get your team up and running with the tech.
This guest post was written by Carl Diesing.
Carl Diesing, Managing Director – Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with on-going web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.
