We’re happy to host this guest blog by Blake Groves, . We asked Blake to tell our readers why a solid, healthy donor database system is critical for major gift teams looking to raise more money.
Attempting to solicit major gifts without a solid database backing your efforts is like trying to build a piece of furniture with no directions.
You likely have all the separate components, the donor data, but it’s just sprawled in piles across your floor. If someone were to ask you to select a specific item you might be able to, but you’d be at a loss if you had to start building. Even if you did get the general structure down, you’d probably be leaving out a few parts here and there, and the piece is sure to wobble.
Without the help of a database to make sense of all the donor information you’ve gathered, your nonprofit is facing an uphill battle when it comes to proper donor management. And proper donor management, as you all know, is pivotal for successful major gift fundraising.
To help guide you with your database management in order to maximize major giving, we’ve outlined three common mistakes and solutions fix the problems.
Read through these three major gift mistakes and learn how you can avoid them.
1. Neglecting Your Routine Data Hygiene
Failing to keep your database clean can have a ripple effect on all of your fundraising activities, but especially major gifts. Donors who make large donations - and those that have the potential to - expect your organization to know their current contact information and preferences. How can they make a large investment in your organization if you can’t keep track of the gifts?
It’s crucial to have clean data by removing duplicate records, purging your files of inactive constituents, reducing out-of-date contact information, and staying on top of salutation preferences. With a clean, streamlined, and organized database, your CRM will be better equipped to assist with major gift activities such as:
- Tracking past donations and other acts of support
- Keeping up with acknowledgements and previous interactions
- Designing and disseminating donor communications
- Gauging reactions to various outreach activities
- Estimating appropriate ask amounts
- Coordinating with various other team members
- And more!
A disorganized database is a surefire way to start fundraising from behind, whereas an organized database can be the key to early success. Make sure your nonprofit falls into the latter category.
2. Underutilizing the Data That’s Available to Your Nonprofit
One of the biggest assets of nonprofit CRMs is their data reporting ability. Utilizing the dynamic capabilities of many modern donor databases, your organization can track all sorts of donor behavior. That tracking is a huge help when it comes to formulating your cultivation and solicitation strategies with your major donors.
Major donors don’t grow on trees, but many grow within your pre-existing donor pool and in the donor pools of similar organizations. Aided by the tools of prospect research, you should be able to identify your major giving prospects amongst those groups. Once you identify them, you’ll want to maximize your likelihood of success by leveraging the data-reporting capacity of your donor database.
With the help of your CRM, you can ascertain predictive details of past giving, including a donor’s R.F.M. score:
- Recency of last gift.
- Frequency of giving.
- Monetary value of gifts.
Using the R.F.M. score, you can not only figure out who the best major giving candidates are but estimate the ideal ask amount.
A major aspect of major gift fundraising is strategically personalizing the process. What better way to personalize is there than studying your prospects’ past giving history and customizing according to established trends and preferences?
Raw data can be overwhelming and off-putting. With the organizational and clarifying power of your donor database, that data can not only make sense but be readily navigable.
Speaking of navigating data, let’s move on to the final mistake on this list…
3. Failing to Keep the Whole Team Looped into the Process
No man is an island, and no fundraiser is one either. There’s so much value in fundraising as a team that it is no surprise that most organizations tackle the process as a group.
Sure — every good team has a clear leader and different members of the team have varying degrees of involvement. That being said, a major gift campaign will often require the support of the following:
- A major gift officer
- Various development support staff
- Organizational leadership
- Marketing staff
- The board of directors
- And possibly more.
That’s a wide spread of team members to manage, keep looped in, and focused in the same direction. Enter your nonprofit donor database!
A CRM centralizes your major giving efforts so that any team member can check in on a donor and quickly get up to date on your organization’s progress.
Essentially, you’ll be streamlining your major giving efforts.
Most databases have some variation on the following features:
- A way to manage and organize interactions with prospects and donors.
- A means to write and time stamp notes on activities and interactions.
- A choice to assign certain tasks and to-dos to specific staff members.
Think of your database as the place where all of your expansive major gift efforts come together for the whole team to review. It’s your hub.
This cross-team management can come into play in a variety of ways.
Maybe you have a hard to reach prospect who has a relationship with a leader at your organization. You’re likely to loop that leader into the process to provide an introduction. Once the leader does that, he or she can log the interaction in the CRM, and then your next fundraiser to take the baton can expediently catch up on the relationship by reviewing the notes and data in the CRM.
Or maybe, one of your major gift candidates attends an advocacy event your organization hosts. If your nonprofit has a way to log and track that kind of supporter behavior, it is information that might prove valuable at a later stage in the relationship.
For instance, you could explain how a major gift benefits the specific advocacy cause that the donor was interested in or simply remember to thoroughly acknowledge their participation in such an event.
In a nutshell, your database is like a fundraising home-base for your major gifts team. It’s a place to check in and make sure high-value donor information does not slip through the cracks.
Donor databases are useful to organizations of all sizes, no matter the type of fundraising they are doing.
The more complex the fundraising process, the more necessary a database is. Major giving falls into that complex category and deserves a robust donor database.
