Investing in digital to meet your nonprofit objectives

Community Engagement: How technology can help drive an increase in donations, fundraising & supporter engagement

Supporters like volunteers and donors are the beating heart of most nonprofits. As true champions of your cause, their impact ranges from administrative contributions to spreading the message of your mission.

Boosting supporter numbers, interactions and engagement is therefore a very common objective for nonprofits. Luckily, there is such a vast array of ways in which technology can help drive community engagement.

For example, how technology drives fundraising and donations:

• Success recordings - Technology enables your team to track which community engagement campaigns were most successful. Even the simplest CRMs allow you to hone in on the specific details of what worked and what didn’t. For example, if you had successful donation-driving campaigns that targeted a particular demographic or used certain messaging, you would then be able to work those learnings into future campaigns.
• Interaction logs - Being able to record all interactions with your donors helps the full team to get visibility of what successful interactions look like as opposed to unsuccessful. It also helps you track what conversation stage you are at with potential donors, making it easier to see how campaigns are progressing.
• Ability to segment data - Grouping your past or potential donors into categories means that you are able to target fundraising based on donor attributes. You can get really granular in order to make sure that you attempt to engage them with messaging and campaigns that suit their preferences. For example, you might want to segment by location, so you can target them with fundraising campaigns that are local and therefore more relevant to them.

How technology drives volunteers and supporter engagement:

• Interaction logs - As noted above, tracking conversations helps all team members see how conversations are going.
• Success recordings - Understand which volunteer activities attract more supporters.
• Communication analysis - From email messaging to social media engagement, the right technology can allow you to analyse how to communicate best with your supporters.
• Better user experience for volunteers - If your volunteer management systems have a smooth user experience, you will find it much easier to engage and retain your valued supporters. For example, Salesforce NPSP (nonprofit Success Pack) is specifically designed to provide this seamless experience - allowing them to browse volunteer opportunities matched to their skills and availability, and register their support online.

Success Transparency: How tech can increase visibility of your impact?

Without team-wide visibility of the impact your efforts are having, you are essentially working blind. Every nonprofit organisation should have a single source of truth that they use to measure what is working. What’s more, making this information regularly accessible to everyone in the team will ensure that each individual is able to adapt and optimise their approach to match the successes.

This is where digital transformation can have one of the most visible impacts: providing an automated way to ensure that full team transparency.

How technology helps increase visibility of impact:

• Data tracking - You can bank all of the incremental pieces of data to gain both big and small pictures of how your processes are operating. For example:
  • You can track when you got in touch with your volunteers/donors/beneficiaries
  • You can record what offering you provided
  • You are able to record what difference your nonprofit’s offering made in someone’s life
• Consistent reporting - With the right technology, you can set up automated dashboards and reports that pull together all the metrics that matter to you into one convenient place. This frees up your team’s time to spend less time manually gathering data and more time analysing that data and pulling out actionable insights.
• Learning for growth - Using the information that you are now able to house to improve your service delivery and secure future grants.

Success Transparency: How tech can increase visibility of your impact?

Without team-wide visibility of the impact your efforts are having, you are essentially working blind. Every nonprofit organisation should have a single source of truth that they use to measure what is working. What’s more, making this information regularly accessible to everyone in the team will ensure that each individual is able to adapt and optimise their approach to match the successes.

This is where digital transformation can have one of the most visible impacts: providing an automated way to ensure that full team transparency.

How technology helps increase visibility of impact:

• Data tracking - You can bank all of the incremental pieces of data to gain both big and small pictures of how your processes are operating. For example:
  • You can track when you got in touch with your volunteers/donors/beneficiaries
  • You can record what offering you provided
  • You are able to record what difference your nonprofit’s offering made in someone’s life
• Consistent reporting - With the right technology, you can set up automated dashboards and reports that pull together all the metrics that matter to you into one convenient place. This frees up your team’s time to spend less time manually gathering data and more time analysing that data and pulling out actionable insights.
• Learning for growth - Using the information that you are now able to house to improve your service delivery and secure future grants.

Process Efficiencies: How technology can help streamline your nonprofit’s processes

Even at its most basic level, technology is designed to take on processes that once were manual. Doing so frees up human capacity to focus on more useful, creative or insightful tasks.

One of the most famous examples of finding efficiencies through automation is the success story of Henry Ford. Using technology, Ford reduced the amount of time it took to build a car from 12 hours to just 2, subsequently making his cars incredibly affordable, profitable and successful.

Your nonprofit may not be a car manufacturer, but there is certainly lots to be learned from Ford’s example about the potential benefits of using technology to streamline your processes and cut down on wasted time.