Thursday, December 5, 2013

Effective Donor Management Solutions for Non-Profit Fundraisers


Maintaining a sustainable donor base is essential towards making a fundraising event successful. For non-profits organizing regular fundraisers is even more important as their growth as an organization depends of the same; funds raised through these events are allocated towards working for social causes. Availing comprehensive online event management solutions that come embedded with fundraising tools provides exceptional donor management facilities that make nurturing customer relationships a rather easy task. Whether it is for maintaining year-round communications through emails and newsletters, or for making year-end appeals to new and existing donors, a donor management system can prove to be extremely helpful in streamlining backend operations thereby reducing overall cost for the non-profits.

Wading through endless numbers of spreadsheets, email programs, dated lists of campaigns, and unfriendly donor databases constitute a major chunk of back-office jobs of most non-profit organizations. The situation worsens as the year-end approaches or when there is a fundraiser in the offing. It is during these times when pulling together contacts and contribution related information to identify the right donor or a prospective sponsor to send an email appeal becomes imperative for a non-profit. By making logical use of the online fundraiser management system one can sail through the situation quite smoothly.

The right donor management system helps to create exactly those targeted lists which are required to ensure that each donor on the list gets an email message that will convincingly encourage their support towards the cause. A good SaaS solution can facilitate an organization in understanding individual donors, and accordingly analyze, categorize, and communicate to the target groups of potential donors.

For smaller organizations with tighter budgets

For cash-crunched non-profits with limited staff and resources, it is always better to opt for free fundraising event management tools that are hosted online. These solutions, which are available to the end users at a monthly fee over the internet, are designed to work differently without requiring substantial upfront investments, and are surprisingly easy to learn.

The biggest advantage of using such tools is that an organization does not need to worry about its timely upgrades, or other maintenance related functions as the actual software is hosted by the vendor. The organizational staff can easily access them from anywhere in the world provided they have internet access.

Less expensive installed fundraiser management systems

Instead of opting for a "rented" database hosted online, a small non-profit organization can also choose to go with a low-cost fundraising event management solution that can be installed by an individual having basic technical know-how. This often requires a bigger upfront investment, but reduces overall cost if the entire lifetime of the system is taken into consideration.

Advanced fundraiser donor management solutions

These fundraising event management solutions have more expansive reporting and donor profiling facilitates that assists bigger fundraising organizations to manage their donor base with convenience. No wonder, they require more implementation resources as well as time to learn and support, while providing greater depth and width of service capabilities that are essential for effective donor management.

Salesforce is one such hosted software solution that offers a broad framework for managing all kinds of data related to the donor base management. Non-profits can make use of the free "Nonprofit Template" to gain unprecedented support for converting potential business leads into donors.

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