Why Fundraising CRM Software?

A lot of people, even some people within the non-profit industry itself, are rather surprised that most organizations do not use professional CRM Fundraising Software - I'd estimate it's at only 4% of all non-profits (about 50,000 of the approximately 1.6 million non profits registered in the United States) . These include all the clients from DonorPerfect, Blackbaud, Convio, Exceed, Sage, Donor2, etc. - combined.

Yes, the other 96% tend to use something, like Microsoft Excel or Access, but at the end of the day there's still very few who take the necessary next step to increase their fundraising performance through CRM fundraising software.

Many of the organizations in this group are typical of one I support- the Camp for All Kids Foundation.

Founded in 1995, the foundation has provided full scholar camperships to low-income middle-school children to private independent residential camps. What's unique is that the organization's recipients may continue to receive an annual campership- as long as they continue to meet their school’s academic and citizenship standards and are invited to return by their respective camps.

It's a fascinating program and as a former camp counselor and assistant camp director, I believe 100% in their mission.

When it comes to fundraising technology, however, they are admittedly a bit behind the times. About 2 months, I had a chat with one of the board members who had a simple question: "Why should anyone buy CRM Fundraising Software?" It seemed like a very reasonable question, and I couldn't believe that we had exactly ZERO web pages or marketing material that addressed it. In reality, for many years we've been operating under an assumption that everyone knows why they need to buy fundraising software, for the same reason as why everyone needs to buy food, shelter, transportation, etc. It was a flawed way of thinking and one we set out to correct. (Note: Apparently, we're not alone. I checked Intuit Software (makers of Quickbooks accounting software), and they didn't have anything either that answered the question why one would purchase accounting software in the first place- it was just a given)

As a result, we've developed some material, and by far our largest effort was to communicate it through a new marketing channel for us- a YouTube Video.

So here's the video link that we'll be using and perhaps we can get the other 96% to consider fundraising software after all. Feel free to pass it along.

Shorter is better...

Today I received an email from a non profit organization that read like a novel. I'm surprised Google accepted it instead of marking it as spam. It was so long I copied it to Word and counted the number of characters and words.

3108 words. 21,000 characters. And it wasn't a newsletter.

The call to action was buried on page 6. I didn't make it past page 8.

We know that with our clients, less is more- we get much better responses from shorter email marketing campaigns.

In your next campaign, try a short, text only message. Keep it simple and direct- i.e., we are x% short of our goal this year and need your help- click here to give.

Try it, and as always, test against your standard communication. I think you will be surprised by the results.

UK Fundraising....

It's been a while since my last post. Must. Post. More. Frequently.

One of the reasons is that I spent the last week in the United Kingdom helping our new UK distributor, CSDM (www.csdm.co.uk), get up and running to promote, sell and support our DonorPerfect customers in the UK.

Though we've never had a concentrated effort to build our business in the UK, we've always attracted non profits in the UK who bought our software. As you can imagine, supporting a client base with a 5 hour time difference is not an easy nor efficient task, so we realized that a local, established distributor was the way to go.

I visited CSDM in beautiful Ross-on-Wye and met with CSDM's founder, (ahem, Managing Director as that title is more recognized in the UK) for several days of intense training, understanding, and sharing of our similar yet distinct markets.

For example, one of the largest differences in UK fundraising is the absence of a US system of using individual tax deductions to encourage individual giving and a use of GiftAid instead. GiftAid is a program set-up by the UK government that allows individuals to declare their status as a UK taxpayer. Upon this declaration, any registered non-profit in the UK can submit a form of these declared donors' donations, and receive a rebate back from the GiftAid program.

Think of it as a government backed matching gift program that sends a check to the non-profit for approximately 28% of every pound pledged. For example, if a non-profit declares that 200 donors gave £10,000 in June 2008, then they are entitled to a GiftAid check of ~ £2,800.

Furthermore, if a donor declares GiftAid now and has given previously to the organization, the organization can declare those previous donations (to a maximum of 6 years) for GiftAid immediately. DonorPerfect easily identifies these previous donations, and automatically generates the correct report that matches the current GiftAid requirements- making it easy for our clients to generate 28% more in income.

In addition to supporting GiftAid, our UK version of DonorPerfect supports the European date format (DD/MM/YYYY) as well as the international currency (£) and addressing requirements (postal code) inherent to all UK non profit organizations.

We're excited to expand our presence in the UK and look forward to serving the market through our relationship with CSDM. It's fascinating to see the growth of DonorPerfect in markets outside the US, and perhaps sometime in the future I'll be able to say again, "Can you help me get back to the M-5???"