After consulting with over 150 different nonprofit organizations, we understand strategies and workflows to cultivate and grow your constituent base. Built on Salesforce — the most trusted customer relationship management (CRM) software used by dozens of Fortune 500 companies — and combined with our secret sauce, we are able to provide a great solution for donor and volunteer management. Your donor management system isn’t just a database, it’s another member of your team!
Save Time
With a completely electronic database experience, you have the ability to save yourself and your staff quite a bit of time. All data your organization collects via customizable forms using DonorLynk’s Fundraising Suite (donation forms, event registration forms) goes directly into your DonorLynk CRM. This saves your staff time on manually entering data and gives you the opportunity to take up more time with donors and high level volunteers.
Automation can also come in handy when managing volunteers. With the DonorLynk CRM, you can collect volunteer information from customizable forms just like you would from donors. Add in custom questions asking for things like shirt sizes or time availability. This not only saves time for your volunteers, it saves an employee from manually entering each individual paper form you might normally have volunteers fill out. You have the ability to set a mass email to send out a few days before the event to remind your volunteers of the event and add instructions on where to go once they arrive. This gives you time to scramble and get more important things done before the big event!
Minimize Human Error and Sanitize Data
If you’re using a system that does not allow you to ask for additional information on a donation form, it can be difficult to remember which James Smith just donated to your organization when you have 4 other constituents with the same name. Many nonprofits have volunteers come in to help with administrative work and if your system is difficult to navigate, they could easily rekey or duplicate entries. It’s hard to tell what the problem is, and now your database is messy. Customize your forms to collect the data you need. You need to the ability to collect information that is relevant to your organization! Online donations can be automatically recorded matching them to the correct constituent based on other donor information collected. Now you know that thank you letter is going to the correct James Smith, and you have a happy donor!
Incorporate your development plan into your system allowing for automated donor cultivation and stewardship. Set up workflows to notify yourself or a staff member of the next step of your moves management. Once one task in the cultivation process has been marked complete, it will trigger a response to be sent to the next person that needs to take action or send the appropriate email to your constituent. This helps to ensure no constituent falls through the cracks.
Reporting
A CRM that doesn’t allow for specific customizations leaves you stuck with dozens of spreadsheets, a database you only sort of like and lots and lots of sticky notes. It’s very timely and close to impossible to pull reports from this kind of setup. We talked about duplicate records above. They make sorting through your data confusing and cause data to be reflected inaccurately on reports. the DonorLynk CRM allows you to customize EVERYTHING to your liking. Having all of your data automatically populated and in one place will make your reports more accurate and will make creating them much more efficient.
“Salesforce Customization has improved our donor and volunteer relations by equipping us with the means for donors to give and volunteers to sign-up directly through our website. All of the data automatically populates in Salesforce, which limits redundancy of efforts, and saves us time. We can also use it for event registration, making it easy to manage guest lists and add attended events to existing donor profiles in Salesforce.”
—John Roberts, Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville
Ready to take your donor management to the next level? We’re here to help. Get in touch with one of our specialists today!