How Fundraisers and Accountants can Better Communicate
Bridging this communication gap can help your organization ensure every dollar raised is used effectively.
Tag Archive for: #communication
The most effective ways to expand visibility and maintain funding in your business.
On this week’s episode of A Modern Nonprofit Podcast, CEO Tosha Anderson invites Eric Ressler as her guest. Eric Ressler is the Founder and Creative Director at Cosmic, A Social Impact Creative Agency. Eric Ressler expresses his opinions and expertise about, “The most effective ways to expand visibility and maintain funding in your business.” Why do so many social impact organizations struggle to find, grow, and maintain funding? Eric breaks this question down and gives listeners tips to implement in your own processes. What does the future of social impact fundraising look like? Eric goes into the importance of your digital footprint and doing it in an authentic way. We cover why does social impact organizations invest in their digital strategy and platforms? We also hit on why should social impact organizations concern themselves with their brand when it seems like there are more important things to focus on? Finally why is the overhead percentage the wrong metric for assessing a social impact organization’s effectiveness? This episode is a wonderful conversation and a must listen.
Reach out to Eric Ressler @ [email protected]
Website: designbycosmic.com
How Nonprofit Technology Can Further Your Cause
Are you the proud owner of a nonprofit that’s looking to take your organization to the next level? Are you curious to learn about different things you can integrate to give yourself an edge? If so, then you need to learn more about how nonprofit technology can streamline your organization.
Doing so can help turn your nonprofit’s greatest weakness into a strength. For example, with the right accounting services, you’ll be more in-tune with the donations that you receive.
See below for an in-depth guide highlighting the benefits of nonprofit technology and how it can help your organization thrive moving forward.
1. Well-Oiled Machine
Nonprofits are like fish, they can only grow to the size of the pond they live in. If you don’t take the time to organize your business model, it will stunt the growth of your organization moving forward.
Not to mention the fact that if you make a mistake such as losing funds that were donated to you, you could be charged with the misappropriation of funds.
Despite your best effort, you might find it difficult to balance your organization’s need for things like event planning, bookkeeping, production, communications, marketing, and so on.
This is where nonprofit technology can be of tremendous help. For example, you could use event planning software to organize every event or gathering you have from this day forward.
It can help you get a proper headcount, see who is bringing what (EX: tents, food platters, etc.), and where your volunteers will be assigned that day.
This software can also help you control your budget. If you know the exact number of people attending, then things like calculating food serving sizes become that much easier. Stick with the one-pound rule: cater one pound of food for every adult in attendance, as well as 1/2 pound for every child.
2. Optimize Communication With Your Donors
Every successful nonprofit has a group of advocates. These are what’s known in the industry as “supporters”. However, a constructive nonprofit doesn’t wait for the supporters to take action, they’re proactive in keeping their supporters engaged.
Nonprofit technology has made it easier for organizations to keep their most active followers engaged. You can streamline communications with them and maximize each supporter that you have.
For example, you can use your best judgment to invite the right supporters to events they’ll be interested in. This defeats the traditional “email blast” method, which can quickly cause them to lose interest.
It can also help you keep in constant communication with them. You can use technology such as Slack, Zoom, etc. to discuss your nonprofit initiatives with them in their preferred method of communication.
Nonprofit technology can also make it just as easy to talk to your entire support network as it is to talk to one individual.
Let’s say you want to alert everyone to an upcoming event, but wanted to provide more insight to certain individuals. If so, you could use Slack to send a message to the entire group, then direct message those that you had extra insight for.
3. Better Understanding of Your Donors
First and foremost, if you’re struggling with balancing your organization’s finances, don’t leave that to chance. Hire a nonprofit accounting service to get everything back on track.
To ensure financial security for your nonprofit in the future, you have to gain a better understanding of your donor base. The more you know about them, the more engaged they will become.
There is nonprofit-focused CRM (customer relationship management) software that can help you:
- Track all donations on an account by account basis.
- Connect your donors/supporters with other like-minded supporters in your database (to form a community).
- Track the events that each donor attends on an account by account basis.
- Understand the best forms of communication with each donor.
- Organize all of the contact information for each donor in their accounts.
Without a CRM system, a person might attend one event, donate $25, then slip through the cracks of your nonprofit’s outreach capabilities. Make sure that no donor is ever left out. It’s how you grow the community surrounding your organization.
4. Increases Your Revenue
Say no more, right? If there’s a way to increase your organization’s revenue, you’re in! Nonprofit technology has proven to do just that for those that take advantage of it.
By integrating nonprofit technology, you can offer ways for your donors to donate online. They simply enter in their card information as they would when they online shop.
This makes it incredibly easy for you and your donors. You can also offer them a way to set up monthly or bi-weekly withdrawals from their account, so they don’t even have to think about it anymore.
5. Optimize Your Website
Do you wonder why it seems as if your site visitors are landing on your site, then navigating away from it without clicking on any other page? This is what’s known as a bounce rate.
Nonprofit technology can help you assess what issues your site has that are harming the site user experience (in other words: what’s scaring them away). This can help you lower your bounce rate and capitalize on those that come across your site.
The more site visitors you capture, the more donors you have for your nonprofit organization. Then you can use your CRM software to build meaningful relationships with each of them!
Take Advantage of Nonprofit Technology Today
Now that you have seen several ways that you can take advantage of nonprofit technology for your organization, it’s time to take action!
Be sure to visit this page to listen to our podcast, the Modern Nonprofit Podcast, to learn more about streamlining your organization.
For more inquiries, please be sure to reach out via our contact us page and we will be happy to assist you further.
Automating Communication for Nonprofits – A Short Guide
From wildlife funds to children’s charities and the ASPCA to international NGOs, no matter what they support, most charitably oriented organizations have at least one thing in common: a resource deficit. There are only so many staff members nonprofits are able to hire; only so much space they can rent, and never enough time in any given day.
Well, never fear. Automation is here and it’s got all the timesaving, cost-cutting, tech you need to bulk up your nonprofit’s resources and boost productivity when you need it most – particularly when it comes to marketing and communications efforts. And in case you don’t quite know where to begin, here are a few thought starters from the Charity CFO’s research library.
A different approach to marketing
Marketing is an invaluable resource for nonprofits, whose sole mission is to reach out to likeminded people who are willing to lend support. And automation in the information age has made connecting with people at the touch of a button a real possibility.
The first question that may spring to mind is, “But how can a machine replace real human interaction?” The answer is, it doesn’t have to. All it does is make meaningful interaction more accessible.
For starters, marketing automation means that you can connect with your database in the following ways:
- Automatic email messages – Crafted by humans, managed and sent by machines, whenever you need them to be.
- Automatic responses to queries – Depending on the tech you choose, these can range from simple, “We’ve received your message and will get back to you” responses, or AI-driven responses that can answer more complex questions.
- Automated birthday messages – These are a great value-add for donors and other supporters; a personal touch that (ironically) can be done automatically.
- Targeted or Programmatic Advertising – These are tools that will effectively bring potential donors to you, based on their searching and browsing habits.
Tools to take a look at
The digital age is a Shangri-La for communicators. Anyone old enough to think back to the 80s or 90s will remember terms like “The check is in the mail” and “Just fax it through”. Nowadays, paper has disappeared for the most part. Letters are rarely sent through the mail anymore and checks have given way to electronic funds transfers, online credit card payments, and PayPal.
Mailchimp, Emma, and ActiveCampaign are just three examples of email marketing platforms that have taken the communications world by storm over the last few years. In 2019 alone, over 340 billion mails were sent from Mailchimp’s platform, making it the most popular contender on the list. But that’s not necessarily to say that it’s the best. Mailchimp does have great features and is quite user friendly, but it all comes down to personal preference.
The common denominator is that these platforms have made creating email templates and mail design something anyone can do. And you can schedule emails well in advance plus automate several communication processes.
Salesforce.org is a large CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that has designed automated tools specifically geared at NPOs. Their Power of Us Hub is a resource center that helps nonprofit organizations communicate – both internally and externally – and connect through training and employee engagement initiatives.
Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack provides subscriber access to operations systems, donor management programs, and cloud-based communication platforms like Marketing Cloud and Pardot.
Salesforce isn’t your only CRM automation option, though. Bitrix24 offers up to 12 users in your organization FREE access to email and telemarketing tools, reports, and quite a bit more. Neon CRM has combined CRM and fundraising platforms, and Salsa CRM offers their own branded CRM, fundraising, and relationship management tools.
Content is king
That’s just the beginning of the automated solutions that are available for nonprofits who want to ramp their communications efforts up to the next level. But one thing that’s always important to bear in mind is that, because all of these amazing tools are now available to communicators, it’s easier for messages to get lost in the clutter.
That’s where the human element comes in. Marketing tools in the right hands are like paintbrushes in the hands of a master. It needs to be said that automation is not actually robotic. Before anything can be automated, a communications framework must be laid so that everything your organization needs to say is driven home effectively.
So, before you go fully automatic, consider the importance of copywriting (not to be confused with copyrighting), to make sure that your messaging is on point; design and corporate identity, for an aesthetic that will appeal to all stakeholders and stay consistent; and marketing strategy, so that you have an ultimate goal in mind for what you’d like your communication to achieve. More detail on all of that in a future post!
Trust the experts
The Charity CFO is a leader in managing business and accounting processes for nonprofits. We’re consistently updating our knowledge of nonprofit industry trends so that we are able to provide nonprofit agencies with the resources they need, when they need them.
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