How CRM Can Benefit Nonprofits

Successful nonprofit organizations build relationships and connect with donors and members on a regular basis. Like real businesses, they require a competitive CRM to maintain a strong network of contacts (which includes donors and members), send regular emails on various events and keep in regular touch with high-profile influencers (such as politicians and benefactors).

CRM software companies should target and give attention to nonprofits. Charity donations already exceed $298 billion in US. Nonprofits themselves are ready to invest in a CRM that will simplify donor address management and monitor donation logs and events.

Here’s how a CRM can help nonprofits.

1. Centralized Contact (Donor) Information

Finding the right donor in a CRM is even easier than using labels in an address book because you can use additional filters. A CRM also offers you a centralized platform to check, analyze and monitor donor communications from an introduction to the present. It should allow:

• Single dashboard for all your donors with quick information
• Single-page view of a donor’s activity (emails, recurring donations and events attended)
• Quick calling functionality from the donor’s dashboard
• Documents that have donation acknowledgment

Agile CRM offers easy contact management through various customized tags and filters. So you can filter out donors based on country or city, donation logs and more. It also allows you to get a 360-degree view of the donor’s journey.

2. Create Campaigns

Nonprofits send tons of emails for charity drives, fundraising and other special events. Those campaigns need automation, but not at the expense of personalization. It is crucial to create campaigns that take care of initial messaging and include regular follow-ups about donations. Your CRM should be able to:

• Create a chain of emails including follow-ups based on the actions taken by donor
• Personalized and customized messaging
• Triggered acknowledgment emails once donations are made
• Automatic alerts when emails are opened to complete the next task
• Email analytics about the open rates and link click rates

Agile CRM performs all of these tasks and more. You can also create campaigns using our drag and drop feature and personalize emails based your criteria.

3. Shared Platform

If you opt for a CRM that can manage your marketing and customer service, then all of your communications are saved in a centralized system. You have a shared platform where both your marketing and service teams can see what is happening and what needs to be done. Using a CRM, every team can work in sync when it comes to:

• Sending emails and scheduling appointments with shared calendars
• Assign follow-up tasks based on donor action
• Edit, analyze or add notes on various donors’ contact pages

4. Manage Multiple Events

Nonprofits often conduct multiple events at the same time and juggling them is difficult without automation. This is where your CRM helps in managing various tasks like:

• Send event invitations and event tickets
• Manage registration and invitees
• Manage rescheduling, cancellations and refunds
• Email event schedules and other adverts
• Analyze and report event wait-list and finances

5. Analyze Reports

CRMs ease the pain of preparing manual reports and analytics by automating the reporting of everything from event reports and email analytics to donations and other finances. Agile CRM handles additional reporting like email and link open rates, report history and more. You can also import or export reports depending on what you need.

6. Timely Follow-ups

Fundraising campaigns require timely follow-up alerts so that the responses are sent promptly. Pay particular attention to recurring donation pledges, when a donor is pledging to donate for more than one fundraising event. A CRM can:

• Automate follow-up task alerts when the donor opens the email or responds back with a pledge
• Send recurring pledges acknowledgment along with upcoming event news
• Analyze pledge data from previous years and send pledge emails to old donors

Nonprofits thrive on long-term relationships. With a CRM like Agile, it is easier to build such bonds, because it eases the communication process. It also handles email marketing and record keeping more efficiently. Your customer service will also improve by allowing regular communication with the current donors on their experience and taking feedback.