The days of fundraising via door-to-door solicitations and other outdated methods are in the past for most organizations—but is your nonprofit taking a truly modern approach?
While you may not be using old-fashioned fundraising methods and ideas, there are ways your organization could update its strategy using technology. For example, using specialized pledge fundraising software for your walk-a-thon can help you reach wider audiences and make donating more convenient, ultimately driving more revenue.
In this guide, we’ll cover the top benefits of using fundraising software and how to choose technology effectively.
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Maximize resources and revenue.
As a nonprofit, school, church, or other mission-driven organization, you may rely on limited resources—funding from donations and grants, the helping hands of volunteers, and the time you have between other mission-critical tasks. Technology helps you make the most of the time, support, and money you have to work with.
99Pledges’ guide to fundraising platforms lays out all of the top features to look for in your software. Here’s how each feature will help you allocate and maximize your existing resources:
- Easy setup: Launch campaigns quickly without the need for extensive technical knowledge. This saves time, allowing you to focus on engaging donors and creating compelling marketing campaigns. For the biggest impact, choose a solution that handles setup for you.
- Shareable donation pages: Empower supporters to independently spread the word about your fundraisers, essentially fundraising on your behalf. They should be able to share the page in just one or two clicks via email, text, social media, etc. This checks one more task off your list and increases the impact of your promotional efforts.
- Flexible payment options: Choose a solution that accepts and processes all major payment options, such as debit and credit cards, PayPal, GooglePay, and ApplePay. This way, donors can contribute in the way that is most convenient for them. You’ll secure more funding and save time that would be spent managing payments manually.
- Access to fundraising coaches and other resources: Leverage the expertise of a fundraising coach and get knowledge from fundraising webinars, templates, and guides. Seek out technology that provides these resources so you don’t waste valuable time and money on trial and error.
- Accurate data tracking tools: Track your campaign’s progress in real time to determine whether you’ll reach your goal. Identify ways to boost performance before the campaign ends and allocate resources to the strategies that will have the most significant impact.
- Communication capabilities: Look for a tool with built-in communication tools, such as automated thank-you emails and donation receipts. This speeds up the process, works with limited marketing budgets (after all, the tools are included in the subscription), and enhances your donor stewardship strategy through timely follow up.
How to unlock this benefit: Look for software with time-saving, efficiency-driven features. For example, choose software that automates repetitive tasks or a service that handles setup and payment processing for you.
Watch out for hidden fees or minimums. Often, “free” software will actually take a set percentage of your fundraising revenue or require you to raise a certain amount to avoid fees. Both of these policies can diminish your revenue.
Increase engagement.
Fundraising technology can also increase engagement from supporters, helping you reach new audiences, inspire more social sharing and advocacy, and boost donations. Specifically, technology encourages more participation by:
- Making it easy to contribute: According to 360MatchPro, 63% of donors prefer to give online. Technology helps you align with this preference, lowering the barrier to entry for supporters and boosting conversions.
- Promoting sharing: Ask your supporters to share links to your donation page, message their friends with the details for your text-to-give campaign, or talk about the campaign's impact and purpose on social media. Create clear instructions for sharing the campaign, and ensure the software you choose makes sending or posting a link as easy as possible.
- Offering convenient, interactive features: Interactive features like polls or virtual events keep your audience engaged for the duration of the campaign. Or, you might offer tools that make participating more convenient. For example, if you hold a read-a-thon fundraiser, you should choose software that provides online reading logs for participants to track their minutes with.
- Enabling gamification: Use fundraising data to inspire friendly competition or unite supporters behind a common goal. For example, share a fundraising thermometer that updates in real time to show your progress toward a goal. Or, for peer-to-peer campaigns, create individual leaderboards that show which participants have raised the most money for your campaign.
How to unlock this benefit: Consider how the software you choose will function for your supporters. Is the front-end user interface easy to navigate? Does the tool truly make donating and engaging with your organization as convenient as possible?
For example, let’s say your organization wants to boost matching gift revenue by encouraging supporters to submit matching gift requests to their employers. In this case, you might seek out a matching gift tool that automatically submits match requests after supporters donate, making it exceptionally quick and easy to secure the matched gift.
Enhance scalability.
As your organization grows, you’ll need to secure more donations, hold larger campaigns, send more marketing messages, and store much more data. To accommodate this growth, you need software that supports you in scaling up your fundraising efforts.
Fundraising technology can offer engaging, personalized campaigns even as you grow your supporter base through:
- Features that automate repetitive campaign management activities that could quickly balloon into hours or days of work, like sending emails, tracking donations, and creating reports.
- Personalized marketing at scale with features like segmentation and data-driven insights. Create segments of donors based on shared characteristics, develop targeted content for each segment, and launch the campaign!
- Consistently tapping into new audiences through peer-to-peer campaigns, shareable donation pages, and flexible donation options that work for a diverse group of supporters.
- Additional capabilities or add-ons for managing other areas of your operations, such as volunteer or event management.
How to unlock this benefit: Scalable technology is typically very comprehensive, offering a variety of out-of-the-box features. Look for tools with extensive customization capabilities and integrations that will allow you to expand and shape the software to your changing needs in the future.
Avoid technology with strict caps on data storage, the number of seats your organization has, and very niche tools (e.g., software designed specifically for small nonprofits). This will limit your organization going forward, forcing you to eventually upgrade to a new solution.
The right technology will take repetitive tasks off your plate, freeing up time for you to develop creative new strategies. By making your staff more efficient, streamlining and personalizing communications, and extending your reach, you’ll be able to grow your supporter base and foster deeper connections with donors, all while securing the funding you need.
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