CRM and Donor Management — The Single View

CRM has become a vital tool for many nonprofit organizations. It is the tool used to capture the totality of the constituent relationship, and the means to communicate the importance of the relationship back to the constituent.

However, not all CRM solutions include donor management. In today’s competitive fundraising environment, having a platform that supports both CRM and donor management is practically essential. Today, systems need to be able to track and manage various types of constituents including donors, prospects, volunteers, advocates, members and event participants.

Traditional CRM applications provide basic constituent data. They allow organizations to learn the “who, what, when and how much” about constituents. Donor management takes this basic information and expands it to enable organizations to send more targeted messaging, do long-term campaign planning, automate processes, and have more access to more data. Organizations with CRM and donor management on a single platform are able to get a real-time view of each supporter.

Add a marketing solution that includes events onto the platform and organizations will have access to more data. The more data organizations can gather, interpret and use, the more they will be able to create customized fundraising campaigns that will yield greater results and enable organizations to better meet their missions. Data helps organizations know their donors better. And the better they know their donors, the greater donor affinity — and the greater donor retention.

Rebecca Motschall is senior project manager at Kintera.