Assigning work to volunteers, pulling up donors’ contact details, analyzing fundraising campaigns — these are necessary tasks nonprofits and charities carry out so they can achieve their philanthropic mission.
But as essential as these tasks are, they can also be time-consuming and tough to manage. That’s where a customer relationship management (CRM) system can help. By centralizing constituent data, streamlining communication, and automating busywork, a CRM empowers your organization to raise more funds in less time.
Below we’ll cover five key ways a CRM can help your nonprofit or charity thrive so your clients can as well.
Key CRM for Nonprofit Takeaways
- A customer relationship management system (CRM) is a software solution that helps you manage and grow relationships with your constituents.
- CRMs help nonprofits manage donor relationships, engage volunteers, run fundraising campaigns, automate time-consuming tasks, and securely store and analyze data.
- CRMs for nonprofit organizations also offer features to engage volunteers and boost donor retention and acquisition.
What is a not for profit CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management system) is a software system that securely organizes customer data and uses it in time-saving automations such as recurring emails, real-time notifications, or automatic reporting.
In the nonprofit world, CRMs are often referred to as constituent relationship management systems since they track data about donors, volunteers, clients, and other constituents.
In addition to common CRM features for effective contact management and communication, a nonprofit CRM should also offer functionality for:
- Volunteer management: Keep your volunteers engaged and on task with tools like task assignment, automated communications, and performance tracking.
- Donor relations: Track key donor information, monitor donor behaviors, and drill into donation data to figure out what practices arouse the spirit of giving.
- Fundraising campaigns: Run segmented email campaigns, manage marketing tasks, and analyze donor engagement and campaign data to optimize your campaign performance and increase event attendance and donations.
5 Benefits of Using a CRM for Nonprofits in 2024
The positive effects of investing in a CRM range from more organized volunteer management to more targeted fundraising efforts.
Read on to learn the five biggest ways your nonprofit or charity can benefit from these systems.
Strengthen Donor Relations
A CRM can help your nonprofit or charity improve donor retention, acquire new donors, and grow current relationships in three main ways:
- Centralized donor information: When you can easily pull up your donors’ interests, donation history, location, behavior, and other useful intel, it’s easier to create personalized and relevant emails, updates, newsletters, and fundraising campaigns.
- Automated communications: To keep communication flowing, you can send automated follow-up or thank-you emails through your CRM. You can also create automated emails to send out on special occasions, such as a donor’s birthday.
- Donor data analysis: A CRM lets you analyze donor behavior to identify the key actions and campaign elements that regularly cause donations, so you can double down on them.
By showing donors you know them, communicating regularly, and using the data from donor interactions to improve your correspondence, you’ll keep donors interested in your cause and money flowing into your organization.
Improve Volunteer Management
Managing your volunteers is tough. There are often many different people involved, each with unique abilities, experience, and needs. CRMs help you track this information in a centralized location so you can manage your volunteers more effectively.
CRMs can also help managers motivate volunteers to participate enthusiastically, take initiative, and go the extra mile.
For instance, Fireberry CRM enables you to:
- Assign and track tasks and responsibilities from a central online platform.
- Store your volunteer’s key information (name, age, skill sets, project, etc.,)
- Track how much time each volunteer has devoted to your projects.
- Communicate with volunteers from the CRM.
Combined, these features make it easier to find that ideal intersection of task, skill, and interests. You’ll be able to assign them to work they enjoy and do well.
Plus, the valuable insights into volunteers’ activity also empowers you to give them more accurate feedback and praise, which inevitably improves their performance and morale.
Run More Lucrative Fundraising Campaigns
To run successful fundraising campaigns, you need to understand your audience. What messaging and content makes them want to contribute to your campaign? How do their age, location, and past behavior influence their decisions?
The power of your CRM here is audience segmentation. With demographic and behavioral data, you can easily divide your audience by various factors, and then tailor your campaign promotions to the desires and interests of each group.
For example, say you’re running a campaign for a project to buy books for underprivileged schools. You know your younger donors care a lot about social justice issues, while the older ones care more about access to quality education.
To boost donations, you could split your audience into two camps and create two email campaigns: one focused on social justice issues and the other using education-focused language.
Segmentation for mass email campaigns is just one way to put donor data to work in fundraising. On a smaller scale, you can use a specific donor’s personal information and donation history to write a one-off, highly targeted fundraising email that feels personal.
The money raised in both cases — mass email campaigns and individual outreach — will be higher than if you use the same email copy and campaign strategy for every donor.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
For nonprofit executives, the greatest tasks are creating a culture of fundraising and building a strong team, board, and donor network.
For fundraisers, their focus should be on doing work that directly raises funds.
Grant writers? Grant-related work like finding grants, writing, and researching. Volunteer managers? Creating the best possible experience for volunteers.
Often, to excel in these various core functions, team members need long gaps of undistracted time for focused, creative work — what productivity expert Cal Newport calls ”deep work.”
Unfortunately, small admin tasks (what Newport has dubbed “shallow work”) often impede these efforts. They encroach on those hours of solitary creative thinking where, for example, a fundraiser is dreaming up the next big fundraising event.
Perhaps this overload of small tasks is part of what’s causing 50.2% of nonprofits to cite stress and burnout as barriers to staff retention in the 2023 nonprofit workforce report.
Luckily, CRMs can automate a lot of these repetitive tasks that eat up your time:
- Sending thank you emails to donors (via automated emails).
- Reminding volunteers which tasks to focus on (via automated reminders).
- Transferring data (via digital donation forms and integrations with your tech stack).
- Scheduling meetings (via calendar sync technology).
- Creating reports (via automated reporting).
A not for profit CRM will empower you and your team to spend more time on critical functions that get you closer to your goals, and waste less time on administrative tasks.
Securely Store and Analyze Critical Data
With a CRM, you can track incoming donations, document donation forms, organize and filter your current and potential donors, and store critical information about your constituents in a secure, searchable database.
A key benefit of staying so organized? You and your team can easily access the information you need to do your jobs.
For example, instead of searching through a long chain of emails (or a file cabinet) for a donor’s address to send them a handwritten thank you note, you can pull that intel up on the nonprofit CRM in seconds by typing in the donor’s name.
Another valuable feature is the campaign dashboard, where you can track the progress of fundraising campaigns and gain valuable insight into their effectiveness.
To illustrate, here’s an example of a dashboard in the Fireberry CRM:
Credit: Fireberry CRM
Notice how this particular dashboard compares statistics, such as total donations, to data from the previous month? By setting up custom analytics in your CRM, you can easily monitor the metrics that matter most to you and help improve your team’s performance.
Benefits of Nonprofit CRM: Conclusion
There’s a lot of work involved in managing and developing relationships with your constituents.
A CRM lightens the load for nonprofits and charities by offering features like volunteer task management, automated follow-up emails, donor segmentation, fundraising campaign analytics, and data storage.
If this sounds helpful, explore Fireberry CRM and see how it can boost your organization’s operational efficiency and streamline constituent management.
FAQs
Why does a nonprofit need a CRM?
Not for profit CRM software effectively organizes constituent data and uses it to conduct personalized outreach and perform automations that save time and improve efficiency. Without a CRM, nonprofits risk drowning in administrative tasks and disorganized data storage.
What are the benefits of CRMs for charities?
Charities can use CRM software to make more data-driven decisions, personalize outreach and fundraising, track donations, streamline constituent communication, save time, maintain data security, and improve cross-departmental collaboration.
What is the major difference between a nonprofit CRM and a fundraising platform?
While a CRM can help you track donations, document donation forms, and manage donor information, the platform can’t directly accept donations; the tool is primarily for managing relationships with donors. Fundraising platforms, on the other hand, allow you to create and host digital donation forms and process donations securely online. Both tools work to improve fundraising outcomes.
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