Your donor database should give you information about your constituents on the individual level and provide you with analytics and reports at an organisational level. Your CRM’s reporting functionalities should allow you to see:
- • How many donors you retain: First you need to map out your repeat donors and their average spending per donor. Non profit organisation need to address how high or low their retention rate is, figuring out donor commitments is very important to your non profit donor sustainability and to keep them well informed about their fund or donation. That might mean changing your communications tactics, offering more fundraising events, or finding ways to humanise your interactions with your constituents.
- • Cost per Acquisition: On this point, you are required to see how much it cost your organisation to acquire a single donor towards your investment over the time. Donor acquisition cost is how much donor you get in return divided by dollars you have spent for all your marketing activities.
- • Data Segmentation: Your database should allow you to segment your constituents into categories. For example, try to run a report to see how many donors also volunteer and how much the typical donor gives in a month or year. You can run reports to look at how much donors who earn more than $100,000 give or how much people with incomes under $50,000 give.
- • Donors Lifetime Value: Understanding the lifetime value of donors allows you to finetune your fundraising efforts. For example: after campaign type identification, it is evident that silent auctions type have higher lifetime values and engagement rate than those who send a volunteer checks in responses to email marketing. In this way, non profit is able to focus their resource towards more effective marketing channel.
More Data Traction
Data isn’t worth much unless you know what to do with it. There are several ways you can leverage your donor database to boost your fundraising, retain more donors and attract new ones.
Reporting capability for Internal and External Stakeholders
The reports you can produce from your donor database or CRM software allow you to show stakeholders, such as your nonprofit’s board or corporate donors, and how well is your Non Profit is doing so far. Generating a meaningful report is an important task to maintain constituent retention and creating an added value towards the business relationship. Many decision makers in Non Profit Organisation believe the power of regular reporting towards long term business relationship with stakeholders. Most of stakeholders are able to get a comprehensive view towards the development of the organisation and clear view towards their direction in the longer run based on this report.
Most of modern CRM has this feature. Particulary, Microsoft Dynamics 365. Being deeply integrated within Microsoft Business Software ecosystem, Dynamics 365 is integrated with Power BI, an advanced reporting tool, for comprehensive yet user – friendly reporting generator for all purpose.
Reconnect With Inactive Donors or Volunteers
In most modern CRM such as Dynamics 365 for Non Profit, personal touch can be added into the business processes. Non profit need to track and check in with particular donor when they have fallen off the radar. A certain reminder or notification can be created before hand and / or an automation process is running in the background creating a set of activities to your organisation.
For example, a set of rule is established, when donor isn’t active for certain time, a personal reminder is sent out to them and a notification is returned to the donor owner in the system.
The personal touch is critical here, as you want the donor to know that you are interested in maintaining or re - establishing the relationship with them. If you can, avoid sending form letters or emails. If a donor has said you can call them, you might try to do that.
You can also use the information in your Dynamics 365 Fields Service or Non Profit to connect with volunteers who might have stopped volunteering. In some cases, it can be due to scheduling issues or other concerns. Communicating with inactive volunteers allows you to find a time or volunteer option that will work best for them and your organisation.
When to Scrub Your Donor Database using Dynamics 365
It’s a good idea to regularly clean up the database and check up on your constituents to make sure that the details you have on them are correct and current.
One way to do that is to ask donors to verify their contact information and contact preferences regularly. You can send a “verify your contact info” message when you send out year-end appeals, for example. Or, you can ask people to check a box when donating if their contact information has changed since they last communicated with your organisation.
You might also want to manually review your database from time to time, either quarterly, semi-annually or annually, to make sure you don’t have duplicate records for donors. When reviewing your database, keep an eye out for constituents who have been inactive for some time, such as for at least 12 months.
Go ahead and pull non-responsive constituents and those who specifically ask to be removed. If they become interested in donating or volunteering again at a later date, you can always add them back in.