Last week, we unpacked the connection between your organization’s culture and the integrated donor experience. As you align your internal departments to work toward shared goals, the next step is to take a look at your technology. Do you have the right technological tools in place to help you reach your goals?
You cannot truly measure the worth of creating an integrated approach unless you can coordinate your donor engagement efforts and track it with data. The good news is that advances in technology have made it easier than ever to accomplish this effort.
4 Ways to Leverage Technology to Enhance Your Strategy
1. Automate. Let technology do the tedious routine work. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to automate manual routine practices such as creating a welcome series for new names, segmenting your donor file based on interests and communication preferences, and monitoring engagement to help you follow up with donors who express the most interest.
2. Integrate. Find a solution that coordinates with other technology. Having a donor engagement solution that can integrate with your fundraising, finance, and donor management systems is essential for success. As technology continues to evolve, solutions that were once reserved for the leading nonprofits are now available to every organization.
3. Optimize. Enhance your strategies along the way. Another benefit donor communication technology provides is that it allows you to track your progress and gather a significant amount of valuable information you can use to improve your strategy along the way. To know for sure if you should invest more into centralizing your systems, analyze a small group of donors and document everything they are receiving from the organization through every channel.
If your system is decentralized, this analysis will highlight the need for one that is integrated.
4. Allocate resources where data reveals opportunity. Use data analytics that show your donors’ preferences to determine where you should be spending your budget dollars. It’s a poor strategy to budget resources arbitrarily by channel instead of actual results. When you see a positive trend in your analytics—even if it deviates from your original budget—divert resources to it.
When your strategy is reinforced by data, you will know where best to spend your money. Pull
resources currently allocated to specific channels (e.g. telemarketing, direct mail, etc.) and then
redistribute those resources based on available opportunities.
If you’d be more comfortable starting small, design a test or pilot. Focus on a mini-campaign
and measure the results, then tweak and expand using past success as leverage to garner future
resources that create scalability. Though it takes some time, tackling the hard issues internally before launching major campaigns is definitely worth the effort!
Does your current technology enhance your integrated donor experience?
To learn more about how and why you should implement integrated fundraising into your strategy, download the free resource: The Intelligent Fundraiser’s Guide to Integrated Fundraising.