Last night, Eliet Henderson from BayKeeper and I led a discussion on fundraising with CiviCRM at the CiviCRM Meetup in San Francisco. We had a good mixture of organizations from across the Bay Area that are using CiviCRM to manage volunteers and students, in addition to donors. It sounds like we end up asking ourselves similar questions: how can we structure personal data in useful ways? Whether we plan to send fundraising appeals or volunteer schedules, many of the same tasks, such as building lists based on activity history, still apply. This presentation was specifically designed to provide developers with a better sense of what features we use in order to raise money. And introduce new users to CiviCRM terminology for common fundraising tasks. You can find a copy of our slide deck, and soon, the audio recording of the presentation attached to this blog post, thank you Adrian!
Our conversation started out with an overview of the donor lifecycle. Potential donors indicate that they are interested in your organization by subscribing to newsletters or attending events. With a product like CiviCRM, you can capture their contact information and information about which initiative attracted their attention. You should ask anyone who follows your organization for a donation, since she has already indicated that they cares about your work at some level. If she responds positively to your fundraising appeal, you want to send a thank you letter as soon as possible. You can build trust with donors over time by updating them on how their donations have been used. Updates can be as simple as a letter from program staff or an event, but they lays a strong foundation for asking the donor to give again next year. In review, the donor lifecycle tends to follow these stages: attract, ask, thank, update, and ask again. Keeping those in mind, let’s look a little closer at how CiviCRM can help move donors through each stage.
Attract
When preparing a fundraising appeal, build lists based on what attracted someone to your organization. This allows you to target your best guess at someone’s motivation for supporting your organization. If someone signs up for your mailing list on math education, don’t ask her to support your arts program. You can do this by creating Groups or Smart Groups based on Advanced Searches of their Activity records. Groups are the basis for mailing lists, whether used for weekly newsletters or special campaign announcements. You can look at how long subscribers have been interested in your organization by searching for an Activity that took place five or six years ago. You might also want to look at how many Activities potential donors participated in recently and use different language for a group of people who attended every performance last season versus only one. In major gifts fundraising, characterized by more personal fundraising strategies, you can also look at Relationships a potential donor may have with program staff or other members of your supportive community. Staff and existing supporters can be incredible advocates for your cause that make an ask far more compelling to potential donors.
Ask
You’ve sent an email inviting someone to meet about making a financial investment in your work. But it’s been two weeks and she hasn’t written back. Don’t worry, but you do want to follow up with a second invitation. If you get in the habit of logging Activities like emails, meetings, and phone calls in CiviCRM, you can set an automatic reminder at the bottom of each Activity Record that will appear in the Activity View for your Contact Profile. Recording what you learn from these activities can help multiple people in your organization cultivate a relationship together. You wouldn’t want a colleague to duplicate effort, especially if it results in a donor being asked twice. CiviCRM allows you to accept pledges, break Pledges down into installments, and send email reminders when the next installment is due. Most organizations, I have spoken with, however, only accept and record money as a Contributions.
Thank
As soon as someone donates, you want to set in motion all the steps required to send a thank you letter. That includes entering the check as a Contribution, recording information in the Contact Record, selecting Communication Preferences a donor might indicate (such as “only email, no print”), and whether someone helped you secure the donation. Especially with major gifts, board members and volunteer fundraisers can play an important part in the solicitation process. You can record their efforts to get someone else to give as a Soft Credit in the Contribution Record. Soft Credits appears underneath donations made directly out of someone’s pocket in the Contribution Tab of their Contact Profile. Even though you probably have more people to thank than you can handle, thanking community members who deserve soft credit can encourage them to help you again in the future.
CiviCRM will dramatically increase the efficiency of thanking hundreds or thousands of people personally. Their Message Templates allow you to insert Tokens that pull information from multiple contact records before send a bulk mailing. You should not have to send emails individually if you just want to change the recipient’s name and salutation. CiviCRM Tokens use the Smarty language, which allows you to build more complicated conditionals. For example, if a field in someone’s record indicates that she has volunteered for your organization, you can add a line to her thank you letter saying, “We appreciate your ongoing service as a volunteer in addition to your generous donation.” Conditionals are essential if you plan to use the Print to PDF function in CiviCRM. Many fundraisers are used to creating a mail merge in Word that allows them to edit text for individual letters, but the Print to PDF function relies solely on Message Templates in CiviCRM and allows no opportunities for editing afterwards. In reality, the Smarty language and carefully thought out message templates can personalize messages for you automatically.
Why do we go to such lengths for a little bit of personalization? I find that it makes a big difference. Donors are people can support the mission of your organization in a variety of ways. We strive to recognize their contributions to our cause across a variety of activities, including but not limited to, whether they write their government representatives in response to an action alert or contributed some code to one of our tech projects. I encourage fundraisers to take a holistic approach to donor cultivation. In CiviCRM, you need to record information about participation if not in Activities than in Custom Fields—and incorporating that information into your communications. Motivations to give range wide and are generally tied to deep personal or emotional connections with a worthwhile cause. We want to encourage community participation by not just thanking donors for their financial contributions.
Ask Again
Showing someone how you have used her donation to affect positive social change is the best the way to grow a relationship. You can report on the success of your work at an event or by sending a letter. Eliet and I agreed that this category of communication should not include an ask. Instead, think of it as laying the groundwork for a later ask, after your donors have built trust in your organization’s ability to fulfill promises. Over the course of a year, you have hopefully learned more about your donors and added to the Notes and Activities associated with their Contact Record. Personal information can be the basis for segmenting your constituents, so you don’t ask donors who care about math education to support your arts program. They might still give you money, but it might not be as much. Fundraising best practices recommend that you include a specific donation amount in every appeal. That will require you to build a custom token that can pull data such as the amount and date of someone’s last donation from Contribution Records. But it’s worth the effort, if you are interested in increasing support for your work from existing donors over time.
Evaluate
Reports are an invaluable part of fundraising. Without them, you would have no idea if all this effort is resulting in more donations for your organization. They can also help you make informed decisions about what stage of the donor lifecycle you should devote more resources to in order to keep donors moving from one stage to the next. The few reports all fundraisers really need answer the questions: how many new donors have I attracted (acquisition), how many existing donors have I retained from one year to the next (retention), and how many donors have increased the level of their donations from one year to the next (upgrade). CiviCRM comes with a number of reports that can help you pull these numbers. They include the Donor Summary (Repeat), LYBUNT and SYBUNT, and Activities reports. You can also run reports on intangible measurements such as how many meetings or phone calls did you have with donors last month to answer the question, should you have more?
There are always more meetings you can have, more letters you should write, and more events you should host in a year. But you shouldn’t have to waste more time entering checks and or searching for Post-It notes with crucial information on them. CiviCRM can help dramatically increase the efficiency of common fundraisings. With the few italicized terms I have introduced here, I hope you will be better able to navigate more complete CiviCRM resources found at documentation.civicrm.org. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me kellie@eff.org.
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