Donor Tools Nonprofit Software

Using Donation Videos To Fuel Your Online Fundraising Pages

Neil — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:00:04 +0000

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to spruce up your online fundraising pages and add that little extra to connect with donors at the most critical stage of the donation process then these videos are perhaps what you’re looking for.

Youtube recently crossed the 1 billion videos watched per day mark according to a Mashable post. Now that alone is one very good reason to consider using video to connect with donors. But it’s not the only reason why video can help push the performance of a fundraising page on a nonprofits website. Video can offer the kind of personal connection to web visitors that words and text simply can’t convey. The good news is creating and distributing a donation video with a message isn’t exclusively a fundraising tool for the wealthy nonprofits any more. There are tones of excellent videos that convey a strong and crisp message which can be done on a shoestring budget with nothing more than someone who is passionate about the cause and a web cam.

If you’re looking to connect with those who land on your donation or fundraising page there are virtually no limitations to how creative you can be with making that final connection through an online video and that can make a world of a difference. Here are some ideas we liked amongst simple videos that could do the job and not cost a fortune to produce:

• Make a personal appeal: A simple video with a straightforward personal appeal for a donation where donors can see the passion and connect with the cause can be all you need to strike that chord. This appeal for donations to the Haiti earthquake victims is a great example.

• Use images and video clips to create a vision of awareness towards what the donors contribution would help bring relief to or contribute towards. This video that pieces together images provides a picture of the plight of those devastated by the war in Bosnia and makes an appeal for contributions that could help bring them relief and rebuild their lives.

• Get a perspective from those who can benefit from a donation whether in cash or kind. There is nothing quite like being able to get firsthand feedback from those in need of the help. This clip with an appeal for organ donation does just that and helps donors get an insight into the life of an average person who is in need of an organ which in this case is a kidney.

• Create a demonstrative or educational piece which illustrates the difference a donation can make. This one which is perhaps more professionally produced is great inspiration for how much can be packed into a single minute of video which need not take up much of a donors’ time. At the same time it not only conveys a clear message but also demonstrates how easy it is to contribute through the website which is a great idea.

The bottom line is you need not have a large budget and a film crew to create a compelling video which will help your fundraising efforts. You just need to have a video which can help you connect with donors in a straightforward honest way and make an appeal. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words….then how much is a video worth for your fundraising?

Strengthening The Donor Nonprofit Social Connection With The Social Web

Neil — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:03:46 +0000

A lot has changed since the social web has become mainstream in personal and professional interaction and like any change, it goes through varying stages of acceptance among users. I have a friend or two who have accounts on Facebook and Twitter but wish them using social networking instead of picking up the phone and personally calling them and they will loathe you for such an impersonal gesture. The only chance of redemption from this “impersonal” communication would be getting it right and wishing them over the phone one year later. Luckily, for most of us, social sites and the communications we make and receive through them are as real and personal as anything else. The connections and relationships that are built on the social web are as strong and real as many offline ones and this is evident to anyone who has been for a tweet-up or met up with those they are acquainted with through social sites.

I was just going through some interesting 2008 statistics from a study of 3000 donors across 23 major nonprofits by the Christian Foundation Grants. Although more recent figures should have changed, the research showed:

80 percent of those surveyed made donations both online and offline.

51 percent of those surveyed said they prefer giving online.

Only 40 percent of those surveyed said that most charity websites made them feel personally connected to their cause or mission.

74 percent of those surveyed said it was appropriate for the charity to send an email reminding them to renew an annual gift.

Like most other areas, nonprofits are also experiencing a rapid change in the way fundraising and donor management is being done as a result of social web trends. Are we running the risk of losing the personal connection between donors and nonprofits as online donations increase and donors prefer giving online? Are nonprofits losing the personal touch that was the foundation of the relationships with donors?
Not necessarily. What is required is to adapt those social donor management skills to the social web , build and strengthen bonds with donors online just as one would offline. A recent Mashable post on Twitter Fundraising highlighted the importance of

-recognizing volunteers and donors
-keeping contributors in the loop with updates
-keeping track of developing relationships.

By building a process of listening to what donors are saying (on social sites) and keeping conversations going with them in the form of replies, re-tweets, direct messages, emails and more, that personal connection can be forged back into fundraising and strengthened like never before. For example, how many donors can one personally meet and converse with offline in a single day? Few….if you compare it to how many you can connect with through the social sites enabled donor database that the Donor Tools software now sports. With the ability to pull up social accounts information on a donor such as their Twitter accounts and Linkedin profiles it’s possible to quickly know your donor and engage in conversation making them feel connected to the nonprofit and it’s work.

With the right tools and the right approach, the changes we are going through with social technologies is not likely to diminish the connections and relationships between donors and nonprofits. If anything….it can strengthen them.

How to Integrate Social Media in Donor Prospect Research

Chris Dumas — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:25:58 +0000

Did you know that you can use social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social web platforms to conduct research about donor prospects, cultivate major gifts and build stronger and long term relationships with constituents?

Historically donor management software has told you about things about your donors that have already happened. While your donors’ history is important, it’s also important to know what’s going on in your donors’ lives right now. Social media can help you learn this and many other pieces of information. Social media is here to stay and there are many experts in the field that can help you learn how to best use tools to connect and have meaningful connections to your donors. Some of the highlights of what you can accomplish are:

Be a psychic – know what’s happening now

Ever want to know if your prospect is in a good mood before you call? Maybe they are in a bad mood? With a little bit of knowledge and insight (and a few keystrokes) you can be better prepared when you do communicate with them.

Images and Videos

Want to put a face to the name? Doing some research on the web lets you do this in minutes. Photos from profiles on these social media sites, using image search are paired well with youtube videos to help you get the look and feel of your donors.

Listen

Lots of social media gurus say the first step in doing anything with social media is to listen. There is a ton of content and information available on the web. It takes some time to go through the process of finding these people and seeing what they are saying and what they are doing.

Relationships Matter

Understanding motivations and connecting with people on a personal level can help create stronger relationships with your contacts.

How do you do this?

We recently launched our first step into integrating your donor database with social media with our nonprofit fundraising software. It can help you incorporate all of these fundraising and social media best practices with less work. Here is how we help solve the problem with our first step into social media integration:

Import Twitter streams for donors
Search and connect with contacts on the social web
Import Twitter photos for contacts

We want to know what you think

If you have some ideas about how social media should be used with you donor database let us know in the comments or if you want to suggest a feature we should include in the next version let us know.

Technorati is a Beautiful Thing

Ryan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:00:10 +0000

sunkist_012, originally uploaded by shutupyourface.

Technorati has asked us to put the following verification code: 684NCA49GYXJ inside a blog post to verify the ownership of the Donor Tools blog. Rather than simply post this lonesome code, we thought it might be nice to show you a picture of this cute, vulnerable kitten to brighten your day.

Twitter – Where Nonprofits And Donors Connect

Neil — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:59:10 +0000

Twitter has emerged as a social media channel for people to connect that simply can’t be ignored. As a recent Socitm report put it while doing a study on the use of social media for local government services “Failure to engage with the [social media] trend is tantamount to ignoring the telephone at the end of the 19th Century.” The same applies to nonprofits and whether or not one likes the micro blogging format of communication, it’s hard to ignore the growing importance of Twitter in the nonprofits space.
The nonprofits community on Twitter is an extremely active one buzzing with activity and constantly updating people on what they are doing to engage them and get them more involved. It’s quickly growing as one of the more important platforms for nonprofits to connect with others and gather support for their work. As emails, letters and other longer message forms are losing attention as a result of issues like spam and overflow of unsolicited messages, Twitter is quickly becoming a communication tool of choice for many who prefer replying to direct messages and receiving updates through this format which is mobile and currently popular. In fact most find people more approachable on Twitter. People who otherwise would prefer not to entertain other phone calls and emails are more likely to respond to a tweet than reply to an email and that is something we can’t afford to ignore.
For the smaller nonprofit organizations Twitter can be access to the big time. A level playing field where they can engage and build a community that supports their cause on the same level as some of the global nonprofits. Just one look at the front runners for the nonprofit Shorty Awards that we covered in a previous post and you’ll see that smaller lesser known nonprofits have bigger fan followings and more votes than giants like Red Cross, Livestrong Foundation, Unicef and others. A tweet may be a handful of characters and words but it can create a lot of awareness.

Awareness leads to building communities around your organization. Building communities can translate to building support. Building support translates to more donors. Twitter among other social networks and social media sites will be a key destination for fundraising. The site which hosts thousands of nonprofits among other organizations and people has been instrumental in collecting aid for Haiti and other relief for other global disasters. It’s been central to spreading awareness on so many causes and been a platform for so much work to happen that it’s a channel that can’t be left out. We’ve been busy here at Donor Tools working towards Twitter integration which will be core to the donor management process as we see it. With all the buzz and activity from nonprofits on Twitter in the last year or so it just goes to show less can be more and few words can make massive difference.

Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn Integration with your Donor Database

Chris Dumas — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:11:57 +0000

We’re very happy today to announce our first step into social media integration with your nonprofit donor database. Now you can start connecting with donors on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and have a quick way to find videos, photos, blogs and web sites about your contacts.

This is the first step for our nonprofit software into this space and we have opened it up for users to play around with and for us to start collecting feedback on what to do next.

For users that already have accounts the feature is live and if you want to try out the feature you need to sign up for a free account.

We think that this update is a great first step in making it easier to have stronger relationships with your constituents.

One of the big problems that we’re trying to solve is that your donors have information in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media services, and that this data is all isolated. We think that’s silly and Donor Tools fixes this by making it easy for you to go through your donors and be able to find them on the social web.

Here is what you can now do in Donor Tools:

Search for contacts on the web and connect with them
View an up-to-the-second Twitter feed for a contact, right inside Donor Tools
Grab their photo from Twitter.

This is a start – we want to know what you think and how you plan to use this. Let us know!

Take a look here:

Why CRM Is For Business And Donor Management Software Is For Nonprofits

Neil — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:14:09 +0000

Tired of managing your donors in excel sheets and thinking of trying out something a bit more sophisticated like CRM (Customer Relationship Software)? You may want to hold on to that thought for a while and consider a few things before taking the plunge. While the donor management process in a nonprofit can be considered the counterpart of the customer relationship management process in a business, when it comes down to the details of what kind of software could help manage these, they as different as Norah Jones and Rage Against The Machine. While there are nonprofits who use CRM tools to help track their donors, CRM software is built around a very different set of requirements and can’t provide the sort of insights and functionality as donor management software which is specifically purpose built for nonprofits. Here are a few reasons why CRM is for businesses and donor management software tools for nonprofits:

Analyze This

Analytics capabilities of CRMs are designed around information required by marketing and sales teams. They are designed to analyze sales targets, lead conversion, revenue pipelines and project profit margins. Now how useful is that to the average nonprofit? Analyzing donations, funds and donors is a world apart from analyzing marketing and sales figures to project future business and profitability. If CRMs are designed to track and analyze customers through the business process, donor management software tools are designed to track and analyze donors contributing to a nonprofit.

Pricing Factors

Most CRMs whether stand alone or Saas (software as a service) are built keeping in mind they will be used by the sales and marketing organization within a business. The users will be sales, marketing or customer service reps and they are priced on the premise that these tools are to help increase profit margins and sales so it’s justified to charge a premium for the usage of these tools. CRM are priced keeping in mind businesses and their budgets. Nonprofits have different needs and budgets when it comes down to this. Buying a 500 user license of a particular CRM may not make financial sense to most.

Complications

CRMs are often more complex and require a learning curve. They are implemented within businesses assuming there will be a CRM Manager of some sort to manage the system and there are technical training staff which can help get all the employees up to speed with it’s working. Donation management is comparatively a more straightforward process and keeping the confusion to a minimum makes sense.

Speaking a different language

Although most CRM’s are quite customizable, they are geared towards tracking customers through the pre-sales, sales and after sales cycles. Accordingly, they refer to entities such as a prospect, lead, warm lead, cold lead, decision maker, influencer, customer and so on. Funds are measured in terms of potential revenue, sales revenues, discounts, cost of sales, profits, profit ratios and similar terms, In reality, when it comes to non profits the entities are quite different. You have donors. Funds are collected in the form of donations (not against the sale of something) and donations can be in cash or in kind. A parishioner belonging to a church donates 4 pews or benches towards the renovation of the church, it needs to be recorded. In a CRM you are likely to be able to enter the value in a field which accepts only currency values in terms of “$”. Donor management software on the other hand understands that in the nonprofits world, not all donations are made in cash but need to be recorded nonetheless. It speaks the same language as the ones we nonprofits understand.
So while CRM software is well suited to customer management the people who are core to nonprofits (donors) are not customers per se. The CRM was a software solution designed around the customer. The donor management software tool was designed around the donor. Why are CRMs not suited to the nonprofits requirements? Quite simply “a square peg where a circle should be”.

A Minor Change to QuickBooks Export

Ryan — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:06:48 +0000

If you use Donor Tools’ Quickbooks Export feature, and you receive donations via PayPal, you’ll want to take note of this minor change.

We’ve changed the way that transaction fees are reflected in the IIF file generated by Donor Tools. PayPal transactions are still recorded into Undeposited Funds, just as before. Previously, PayPal fees were recorded into an account called “PayPal Fees” under Bank Service Charges. Now, the account will be named “Bank Service Charges:Transaction Fees”.

To prepare for this minor change, you can simply rename your existing account to “Transaction Fees”. If you do end up with two accounts, you can easily merge them together.

The Race For The Shorty Awards In The Nonprofits Category Is On

Neil — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:07:57 +0000

Attention spans getting shorter, shorter posts and content snippets in the form of micro blogging are getting more popular. If Twitter’s user base is anything to go by there is nothing short about the growth rate of this web phenomenon. To top it off everyone’s attention has now shifted to the Shorty Awards the web’s very own Oscar equivalent for ‘best producers of short realtime content’. With the awards to be announced barely a month away on March 3rd 2010, the heat is on to gather the most votes and emerge winner of the Shorties in a number of categories. At DonorTools, the race we are closely following is the one that’s just kicked off in the “nonprofits” category.
Perhaps one of the great things with web awards and popularity on social sites is that an otherwise fairly unknown individual can be up against a giant organization with large marketing budgets and still come out on top. This year’s leader-board so far is an interesting one with a blend of lesser known individuals and the likes of Peta, WWF and Rotary International. Although it’s still early in the race to see how this pans out over the next month, the current top five on the leader-board vying for the Shorty in the nonprofits category are:

• 1st To Write Love On Her Arms – TWLOHA is a non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for people struggling with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.

• 2nd Frugal Dougal – CDO of #pawpawty events, helping animal charities around the world, check out www.pawpawty.com

• 3rd Shaun King – 30 Year Old Husband, Father, Grad Student & Lead Pastor of The Courageous Church (www.Courageous.tv) in Downtown Atlanta

• 4th Alex’s Lemonade – Fighting Childhood Cancer, One Cup at a Time.Follow ALSF for news about childhood cancer and some stories about the over 100,000 people helping in the battle.

• 5th The Trevor Project – The Trevor Project is the leading national organization focused on crisis and suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth. The Trevor Helpline: 866.4.U.TREVOR

While these are the ones currently ahead of the pack, there are some great Tweeps to follow among the finalists in this category if you’re on Twitter and it’s just great to see so much good work happening. Regardless of who finally takes the Shorty home, kudos to all the finalists and the difference they make.

New: Import your Whole Donor Database

Ryan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:54:13 +0000

For a long time it’s been possible to import your donor list into Donor Tools. But up until now there hasn’t been an easy way to import donations as well. So many people have asked for this feature, and we’ve heard you! Introducing the new, improved Donor Tools data import feature. Now you can import your whole database – donors and donations included!

If you’re just getting started with Donor Tools, this is a fast and easy way to bring in data from your old database, so you can hit the ground running. And if you have historical data that you’d like to bring in, or if you receive donations from other sources, our import tool also handy because now you can simply import your donation spreadsheet right into your Donor Tools database.

We’ve tried to make this feature really intuitive and easy to use. You simply upload your spreadsheet (in CSV or Excel format), and then match the columns in your spreadsheet to fields in your Donor Tools database.

As much as we hope that our new data import feature will “just work”, there are a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your data import is successful and that you get the results you want. We’ve put together a pretty comprehensive Introduction to Importing Data on our User Guide.

And as always, if you have any questions or trouble, our wonderful support staff is ready to help.