Fundraising is hard enough. Your CRM shouldn’t make it harder.
An email from SCVO landed in our inbox recently highlighting their upcoming fundraising workshops, and it got us thinking.
The programme covers some of the big fundraising challenges charities face every day: finding the right funds, developing corporate partnerships, writing successful applications and demonstrating impact to funders.
All incredibly important. But there’s another part of successful fundraising that perhaps gets talked about a little less: What happens to all that information behind the scenes?
The funder you’ve spoken to. The application you submitted six months ago. The major donor who’s supported three different campaigns. The corporate contact somebody met at an event. The reporting deadline that’s quietly creeping closer.
For a lot of organisations, that information lives in a mixture of spreadsheets, email inboxes, documents, mailing platforms and, occasionally, someone’s memory. And that’s where a good CRM can make an enormous difference.
CiviCRM isn’t just a contact database
We work with CiviCRM a lot at Pooka. It’s an open-source CRM built specifically with charities, non-profits and membership organisations in mind, and one of the things we particularly like about it is just how much of an organisation’s activity can sit together in one place.
That includes fundraising.
Instead of simply having a database containing names and email addresses, CiviCRM can help you build a much fuller picture of the relationships surrounding your organisation.
You can use it to manage:
- Individual donors and their giving history
- Regular donations and recurring contributions
- Fundraising campaigns and appeals
- Relationships with trusts, foundations and corporate supporters
- Grants, applications and key dates
- Events and fundraising activities
- Communications with supporters
- Memberships
- Gift Aid
- Online donations
- Segmentation and targeted communications
- Reporting and analysis
And because those things aren’t happening in isolation, neither is the information. Your fundraising activity can become part of the same picture as your communications, events, memberships and wider supporter relationships.
Better fundraising starts with better relationships
This is the bit we think is particularly important. Fundraising isn’t really about transactions. It’s about relationships.
Someone who donated £20 to a campaign might attend an event six months later. They might become a regular giver, they might volunteer, they might introduce you to their employer. Eventually, they might become one of your organisation’s most important supporters.
If those interactions are spread across different systems, it can be difficult to see that journey.
With CiviCRM, you can start bringing it together.
Rather than asking, “How much has this person donated?”, you can understand something much more useful: “What’s their relationship with our organisation?”
That makes better, more personal communication possible, and helps teams build relationships over time rather than treating every fundraising activity as a standalone campaign.
From funding application to impact report
One of the SCVO sessions that particularly caught our attention focuses on writing strong progress reports for funders, because winning funding is only part of the job, you then need to demonstrate what happened.
Who participated? What activities took place? What outcomes were recorded? How much money was raised or spent? What did people tell you? What changed?
When information is collected consistently through your CRM, reporting becomes considerably easier.
CiviCRM can be configured around the information that’s important to your organisation, helping you record activities, interactions and outcomes as they happen.
That doesn’t magically write your impact report for you, sadly, we’ve yet to find the button marked “make funder extremely happy”, but it can make gathering the evidence behind that report much less painful. And, importantly, that information stays with the organisation.
Less spreadsheet archaeology
We have nothing against spreadsheets, they’re brilliant at what they’re designed to do.
But when you’ve got one spreadsheet for trusts, another for individual donors, a third for event attendees, Mailchimp holding your mailing list and several years of useful conversations buried in individual inboxes, things get complicated remarkably quickly.
You end up duplicating information, manually moving data between systems and relying on individual members of staff to remember how everything fits together.
A CRM gives you the opportunity to create one shared organisational system instead.
That can mean less duplication, better-quality data and fewer hours spent trying to work out whether Funders_FINAL_v4_ACTUALLYFINAL.xlsx really is the final version.
Open source matters too
CiviCRM is open-source software, for us, that’s an important part of the conversation.
There aren’t licence fees charged per contact or member of staff simply because your organisation grows. You retain control of your data and the system can be adapted around the way your organisation actually works.
That makes it particularly interesting for charities that want to build their fundraising capacity without becoming locked into expensive proprietary platforms.
It doesn’t mean CiviCRM is completely free – implementing, configuring, hosting and supporting a CRM properly takes time and expertise.
But it does mean that investment is going into building and supporting your system, rather than continually paying licence fees just to access it.
The technology isn’t the fundraising strategy
And this is probably the most important point, CiviCRM won’t tell you which funder to approach, it won’t write a brilliant application, it won’t build a corporate partnership for you and it definitely won’t replace a good fundraiser.
What it can do is give those people much better tools to work with.
The fundraising strategy provides thinking, relationships and creativity. Your CRM provides the infrastructure that helps you remember, organise, understand and learn from all of it.
So if you’re taking advantage of SCVO’s fundraising training over the coming months, we’d thoroughly recommend it. And while you’re thinking about how to strengthen your fundraising, it might also be worth asking another question:
Do the systems behind your fundraising help your team – or are they giving them another job to do?
Because fundraising is challenging enough already. Your technology should be making it easier.
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We’d love to hear what you’re up to. Please get in touch using hello@pooka.co or through the form linked below. Don’t be shy!
