Donor Relationship Management

If you can keep up-to-date and make sure your records are clean and have good information, it will help you and your organization cultivate, steward and solicit your donors in the proper way.

Budget management and budget cuts are never easy, but becoming stagnant and not trying to change is not the answer.

The term "Big Data" gets tossed around an awful lot these days, no matter if you're talking the business sector or nonprofit fundraising sector. But "big data is really about the small data," said David Acup, managing director of interactive marketing and membership at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Managing a donor database is difficult no matter the size of an organization or its donor base. However, when you are a large, international nonprofit organization, particularly one with chapters across the U.S. in addition to six international affiliates, managing data in a uniform, centralized fashion is even more complex. JDRF, the leading global organization funding type 1 diabetes research, is one of those large, international nonprofits handling data across different chapters spanning the globe.

With the help of WealthEngine, JDRF has cleaned up its big-data business processes and enhanced its fundraising. Here, Megan Martin, former director of data analysis at JDRF (now at American Cancer Society), and Sally Boucher, director of research at WealthEngine, share some data insights.

Learn how liberal arts institution Vassar College executed a crowdfunding campaign for its annual fund and how JDRF cleaned up its donor database management to enhance targeting and fundraising.

The main thing a nonprofit organization should do online is learn how to listen. Did you ever say to yourself, “I wish I knew what my donors were thinking,” or, “It would be great if clients just told us what they need. I can’t read minds”? Online, people tell you what they think, feel, want, and desire. Online, you can read minds. But only if you talk less and listen more.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is just as crucial for nonprofit organizations as for any other type of business. It might be even more complex. Who are your customers? And what do they want?

Whether your nonprofit charges for its services or you give them away, how you treat your "customers" is crucial. And they want what any customer does: easy access, personal interaction, solutions for their problems, fast response to their requests and needs, and a heartfelt thank-you for their participation.

Recently, I said to someone that direct mail is a "melting iceberg." By that I mean that it's big, but continually shrinking due to people's habits changing. So instead of still building around direct-mail CRMs that can output postcards to different households, nonprofits need to focus on different inputs feeding a single CRM.

The person said to me that the term "melting iceberg" might offend nonprofits since so much of their income is still tied to direct mail.

At first I felt bad that it may have come across dismissive. But then I thought about Amazon.

If your lists aren't helping you build relationships, they're pretty worthless. This isn’t just a semantic difference or a slight change in strategy. This changes everything. I’m not suggesting that you burn your email list or abandon social media. They are powerful tools — and once you start building relationships, you’ll find that you increase the breadth of your engagement, as well as the depth of engagement, for each person who interacts with you. So, what does building relationships in the nonprofit space really look like?