7 Benefits Of A Donor Management Platform

Matt ClarkAugust 01, 2017

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A donor management platform is a contact and donor database that helps nonprofits organize their donor data and better understand their donors. Today’s successful organizations – no matter the size – can benefit from the functionality that a modern donor management system provides.

In this blog post, we’ll share how organizations and fundraisers can become more effective with a donor management platform. We’ll also outline seven benefits that it can provide.

1. Understand Your Donors Better

A donor management platform can help you capture vast amounts of data on your donors, advocates, and volunteers. Robust software can also help you discover trends and opportunities right within your current constituent base, as well as provide insight into how to target new prospective constituents. Having this data all in one place is critical to understanding your donors better, helping you improve your relationships and optimize your donor lifecycle.

2. Alleviate The Pain Of Staff Turnover

Although many successful fundraisers can manage their work in their planner or even their own head, a donor management system allows for their knowledge and experience to be shared among their whole staff and board. This is extremely valuable with staff and board turnover. Where previously this knowledge and insight would leave with the outgoing organization member, now all the goals, history, strategy, and data can stay within the nonprofit, not just the individual.

3. Build Transparency With Your Supporters

A good donor management system will grow with your organization. It helps capture and store valuable data that you need to run reports for your Board of Directors, the IRS, and your donors. Keeping your donors in-the-know is an important step to building trust and transparency with your nonprofit’s vital supporters.

4. Always Have Access To Your Donor Data

Cloud-based donor management platforms are always with you when you need it. When you’re waiting in the parking lot of a coffee shop before meeting with a major donor and thinking of ways to connect, you can simply pull up the donor’s record on your phone. This allows you to find the name of their children, see who last communicated with them, and more. That’s why having a donor management system that’s mobile-friendly and cloud-based is so important.

5. Keep All Your Data In One Place

With integrations, a modern donor management platform allows you to connect all of the software tools you’re already using to engage with your donors online. Integrations allow you to connect the fundraising, marketing, prospecting, and accounting tools you need to run your organization every day. This provides a seamless way to keep track of all of your important data.

6. Save Time With Task Automation

You can save valuable time with automated functionality that a donor management platform provides, including scheduled reporting for your staff and board. You can also use task reminders to remind you when it’s time to connect with each of your donors. This is critical to prevent your donors from lapsing. With automation, you’ll free up your bandwidth and focus for your mission.

7. Make Giving Easy

Many donors expect online giving features that will allow them to donate online and have access to their giving records when they need it. A modern donor management platform provides online fundraising tools that make it easy for your donors to continue giving.

Can You Afford A Donor Management Platform?

Some organizations may think they’re too small or don’t have enough funds for a donor management platform. Although it depends, many donor management providers scale their pricing to the size of your organization. More importantly, though, not having a donor management system could cost you when you miss out on donor data that is critical to your organization’s growth.

For most nonprofits, it pays to organize your donor data. For example, this nonprofit was able to make 6-7 times more than it paid for its donor management platform. Read the full story to see how they did it.

Read The Story

Schedule a live demo with our partner Bloomerang, and we’ll show you how easy it is to create and automate reports, utilize online and offline fundraising tools, quickly integrate and access all your data, and ultimately create more time to engage your donors.

Filed Under:   Donor Management