This is a guest blog post and is being posted with permission from Tim Sarrantonio of NEON CRM.
If you’re a nonprofit professional, you know the value of your own time. That’s why you’re online right now, trying to find the latest technology insights and best practices to help in your job. Or maybe you’re watching cat videos. But hey, we all need a break now and then!
Part of the battle in the nonprofit world is struggling between the number of hours in a day versus the daunting number of items on today’s to-do list. And don’t even get me started on tomorrow’s list.
To help with all of that, you enlist technology and smart team members to lessen the load. One technology that nonprofits are using today is donor research software. Never heard of it? Stay tuned, we’ve got you covered!
THE IMPORTANCE OF AN ORGANIZED CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
In the nonprofit world, organization is important. Not only is it important because it helps your overall operation; but it is also important for employee morale, strategic goals, and your fundraising efforts. The customer relationship management (CRM) system, also known as a donor management system, is often the first place that gift officers, development managers, and others go to engage a donor, log a meeting, and yes, even assess the gift potential of a donor.
So, imagine logging into NeonCRM to look up a new prospect that you have an upcoming meeting scheduled with. If your CRM is organized and well documented you’ll see this person has given gifts of $500 for the last few years.
That’s interesting, you may be thinking. And a few more questions probably come to your mind. Who else are they giving to? How much are they donating to other organizations? Do they have the potential to be a major gift prospect? Could they be giving us more? And that’s where donor research – or fundraising intelligence – comes in.
WHAT IS DONOR RESEARCH
The fundraising industry and donors themselves are changing. Donor retention is going down and the competition to secure funds is going up. And that’s a big challenge. It’s more important than ever to find the right prospects and turn them into lifelong donors who advocate for your mission.
Donor research, or fundraising intelligence, is a term for the powerful donor information that is used to identify top prospects and make educated gift asks to the right person at the right time. It is a key component of a proactive, predictive fundraising strategy.
Having deeper intel on your donors can help you identify new donors, learn more about current donors, and expand your fundraising pool. Donor research tools like iWave deliver invaluable wealth and philanthropic indicators that help you understand a prospective donor’s capacity and inclination to give.
There are three key indicators that development professionals use to identify these qualified prospects.
Affinity: is this prospect already passionate about your cause?Propensity: does this prospect give regularly to other organizations?Capacity: does this prospect have wealth to give?
With this information at your fingertips, you can be more confident in your gift asks and in your interactions with your prospects. Making room for a tool that gathers this information for you is a great way to stay ahead of the curve. You can be sure you’re getting the most out of your current donors and aren’t missing out on new ones!
ONE GREAT TOOL + ANOTHER GREAT TOOL = MORE MAJOR GIFTS
Your day-to-day job most likely takes you into a few different tools throughout your day. You’re using your CRM to manage your donors and track your latest events. And if you’re already using a donor research tool to find more information and discover new donors, that’s another platform on your list.
Sometimes, managing technology can be a job in itself. Software platforms, no matter how straight forward, take time to learn and manage. And when you’re dealing with more than one system, it can be even more complicated.
So, how much time do you spend flipping back and forth between your systems? How awesome would it be if you could see this powerful fundraising intelligence without leaving your CRM? With the new integration between iWave and Neon One, you are able to enrich your internal Neon One data with iWave’s billions of wealth and philanthropic indicators. This means intel such as historical giving, real estate holdings, philanthropic causes supported, capacity ratings, and more – without leaving Neon!
MORE SOPHISTICATED FUNDRAISING WITH IWAVE FOR NEON
Using two best-in-class technologies together will enable you to accelerate your fundraising efforts. As an example, say your typical approach to research was to sort through lists of prospective donors or search for information on a name-by-name basis. Imagine being able to sort those prospects by their iWave score, and then bubble up the best prospects directly within NeoncRM? Let’s look back at that donor who has been making annual gifts of $500. What if with the click of a button you could see that they’ve actually donated more than $250,000 to other charitable causes and have real estate holdings totaling more than $10 million. Are we blowing your mind yet?
Integrating your CRM with a donor research tool like iWave also enables you to batch score multiple prospects to uncover top prospects based on their capacity and inclination to give. Pretty cool, right?
START LEVERAGING POWERFUL DONOR INTEL TODAY
The incredible work that is done every day in the nonprofit sector is nothing short of world-changing. And we love being a part of that. Development departments today have much more donor information, or fundraising intelligence, at their fingertips than ever before. Let’s start leveraging it! By understanding your prospect’s giving history and wealth capacity, you can confidently present the right major gift ask to the right person at the right time. Sounds like this could be the best decision you’ll make this year, doesn’t it?