Published: August 10, 2020
Updated: August 10, 2020
In these challenging times, it is crucial to keep your donor data organized. Every donor interaction or community engagement presents an opportunity for not-for-profits to connect with, inspire, and retain donors, volunteers, and other key stakeholders, representing the highest lifetime value. However, to do this well takes accurate donor data.
To help you maximize your existing CRM and fuel your fundraising efforts, we've identified four simple ways to manage your prized asset, even if your team is working remotely.
- Create a COVID-19 activity field to track the account, contact, impact level (e.g., high, medium, low), and notes from all COVID-19 conversations.
- Train staff to contact donors for a COVID-19 check-in and track the exchange under the COVID-19 activity.
- Create a dashboard to visualize the impact on your constituents using the impact level. Then record the percentage of constituents that you have, and have not, had a COVID-19 check-in with.
- Align marketing and communication strategies based on impact level.
- Arm your teams with the data they need by sharing access to contacts, accounts, marketing statistics, and activities across departments.
- Create a dashboard to measure how your staff utilizes the system and find ways to encourage data entry (track # of COVID-19 check-ins, # of completed activities etc.).
- Review current Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) practices and use any acquired downtime to streamline your processes, identify workflow opportunities, and increase end-user engagement with training.
- Use branded templates with personalization capabilities to send targeted and consistent communication to all donors and stakeholders.
- Segment and sort profiles using pre-built automation streams to target donors with continuous and appropriate messages based on their impact level, without overburdening your marketing team.
- High impact: focus on helping them now, if not, communicate only to inform.
- Medium impact: focus on how you could support your mission on the other end of the COVID -19 lockdown to add opportunities to your list.
- Low impact: focus on how you could support your mission now to help others manage through the crisis.
- Invest in a CRM solution that enables you to organize, sort, and understand your data. Before you migrate, clean all outdated and incomplete donor records.
- The Microsoft D365 suite of CRM tools in Office 365 is currently helping organizations cope with the COVID-19 crisis.
- The benefits of these tools are far-reaching, and can help your not-for-profit organization enter the other side of the pandemic more productive, and better informed.