Donor Relationship Management

With life returning to the economy and many fundraisers reporting improved numbers, maybe now is the time for your turnaround.

If you own cats, you must buy kitty litter. But your donors don't have to donate to you or anyone else. And if they do decide to give, there are lots of other organizations they can chose to support if their experience with your organization or its website ticks them off. It's easy to forget that customers and donors have choices. So don't.

Implementing a new constituent relationship management (CRM) — aka donor relationship management (DRM) — system doesn't have to be painful. Here are five quick tips to consider before you get started.

With a socially enabled website and CRM solution, you can initiate, respond to and listen in on conversations about your organization. And your donors can gossip their love for your cause to their friends and followers. That is partly made possible by the deep integration capabilities offered by the recently released Facebook Open Graph. This allows the latest website-CRM solutions such as iMIS to associate donors’ Facebook profiles — with their permission — to their constituent records in your database. That means they have granted you access to their social networks.

Sage North America announced that University of the Sciences (USciences), a private health care and science university in Philadelphia that is distinguished as North America’s first pharmacy school, is using Sage Millennium to give it a dynamic approach to constituent relationship management (CRM). Sage Millennium provides USciences with more intimate connections with constituents through the use of relationship trees and a more comprehensive donor database, and real-time data for board of trustee meetings.

To celebrate her six decades, veteran fundraiser Lyndall Stein shares six big mistakes during her career and what she learned from them.

Blackbaud announced that the United States office of World Vision, the Christian humanitarian organization, recently selected Blackbaud CRM to equip World Vision fundraising teams with technology to enhance relationships with donors and increase the number of major donors, churches and corporate partners supporting its mission.

One fundraising database for the whole organization — that crucially meets the specific needs of each department — is the best way to go.

There are 11 fundraising "commandments" I've discovered over the years. Following are the first four; I'll follow with the rest over the next two weeks.

On the face of it, CRM solutions in the cloud are the same as any on-premise solution, except they are hosted in a data center. But true cloud solutions can provide technology, economic and business benefits over the traditional on-premise solutions. The combination of these benefits is driving people to cloud-based solutions, and we will see them all over the next few months. But first, what is the technology case for cloud?