Getting donors is one of the most crucial aspects of any nonprofit organization. That is why it is vital to have the right donor management solution for your organization.

The information below comes from a Donor Management Solutions webinar we hosted leveraging Dynamics 365, SharePoint, the Power Platform, and Azure.

https://youtu.be/YnYwmMHr24c

Today, let’s begin our discussion by focusing on the opportunity for the donor management solution to leverage your donor data. The opportunity is to understand what type of people donate to your organization. Where did you find them?

For example, is your organization very active on social media? Do you have an extensive referral network? Are you getting people that you’re talking to on the street? Your media campaigns may generate interest. How do you find these opportunities? How do you source them?

Also, not only that, who are these people that are, are donating to your organization? For example, a nonprofit like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) has a particular targeted pro profile.

They connect with mothers of middle school and high school-age students to make sure those mothers can have access to the correct information. And they know those mothers will also be more likely to donate to their organization. It’s a targeted profile to ensure they’re helping kids stay safe. That compares very differently, by the way, if you’re in some other organization.

If you happen to work with a community kitchen, your target audience will be quite different. You’ll need to communicate directly with more individual philanthropic individuals who may not be directly connected to the cause.

How do you connect with that audience? Understanding that target profile is vital. And the more you have information to that, that data, that opportunity, and this is something that you could also enter a CRM system, the more you can integrate that into your payment systems.

Once you have the opportunity, you want to connect them and get them to donate to your organization. Other work happens here to build that relationship. Still, for the donor section, we’re helping you integrate it into your payment gateways and website. Whatever you do to get them to that step to donate, you have a path for them to do that. And you could integrate that. And by the way, this doesn’t have to be an external solution.

We mentioned earlier the Power Pages. Maybe you’re using Power Pages to give your donors a place to go where they could set up a donation. And the great thing is, once they’ve made that payment, they also have the information they added.

When people donate, you ask them to enter your credit card information. You’re asking for their name, their email, their phone number. You might ask, why are they donating? You might also ask, how do they find out about you? You start tracking this information. And the great thing about doing this online is that you can monitor mobile and online donations.

You could start tracking that if multiple people visit your portal through their smartphones. That means you know how to find those people better through mobile than through a laptop. It’s all about understanding that information because you can start tracking it once you have it. Then you can start automating your processes. For example, we discussed building the relationship with the integrations.

You don’t just go from finding someone who wants to be a donor to asking them two minutes later to donate. That might work occasionally, but more than likely, people need to build up a relationship with your nonprofit before they donate. You could start creating automated messages to those opportunities and let them know how they can be part of your organization and how they could help your organization. Once they’ve donated, you could also talk about how they could refer others. You can create an Automated Message series to help you with this process.

Furthermore, automation doesn’t just help with connecting the message to the opportunity. The automation also helps with creating reports. I mentioned earlier how knowledge workers spend 50% of their time creating documents, preparing documents and reports. Think about how much better your organization would be if you automate those reports.

So instead of having to spend all that time looking at Excel spreadsheets, they were able to start building up the messages, finding suitable donors, connecting with them, building the relationships in other ways, whatever you need them to do to make sure that they’re getting the most out of their time with your organization.

By automating these messages and reports, you can also have smarter fundraising decisions because this automation means more messages, reporting, and data. All this comes together from all these opportunities, integrations to donor tracking, and the automation to help you create smarter fundraising decisions. This business intelligence component is crucial to that process.

How does it work with the solutions we’re discussing today? Well, it’s simple. Remember that we’ve talked about the first step you need to do is create events and collect donations. And you do this by tracking the opportunities and integrations. There are different tools that you have under the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. You have PowerApps, Power Pages, and SharePoint.

Whichever tool you use, you can collect those donations and create the events you need for your organization. And we’re going to show you how some of this works.

Storing your donor data is a critical component of making sure you can make smarter decisions. You need a way of storing that data to have a way of organizing it. Then, you need a way of organizing to analyze your donor data effectively for better business intelligence. So it all works together. Once you have this process, you can set it up.

You can use whatever tools you need to ensure you can go from collecting donors or collecting opportunities and donations to analyzing that to improving your processes and moving forward.