by Julie Kennon
Whether you're talking about major gifts, grants, or scholarships, pipelines are all the rage. Here's everything you need to know about using them to make donor management and fundraising more efficient.
Nonprofits looking for a fundraising edge might not have to look further than their nonprofit CRM. Donor pipelines are a powerful tool that can significantly enhance your fundraising efforts.
Not every CRM offers this; in fact, very few do! CharityEngine’s fundraising software offers pipelines, or visual representations of individuals moving through stages. In this article, we will explore how donor pipelines can boost nonprofit fundraising and track opportunities, and why they’re becoming an essential tool for sophisticated nonprofits.
Understanding Donor Pipelines
A donor pipeline refers to moving potential supporters through various stages of engagement with your nonprofit. A pipeline approach allows you to segment your supporters, see where in the relationship spectrum they fall, and tailor messaging, channels, and engagement strategies to move them further along in the pipeline.
One use case for the pipeline concept is moves management, which is moving donors from awareness to stewardship. Moves management refers to the actions you can take to move donors through those stages of the donor journey.
Pipelines are visual representations of where donors are in those stages, and understanding the makeup of your donors can help focus your attention on the activities that will help you with engagement and fundraising. A concentration of donors in any one stage should prompt you to look at how you can engage them and encourage them to move to the next step.
Pipeline Application
While nonprofits can map the donor journey, implementing donor pipelines for other processes allows them to actively manage and optimize each stage of the donor relationship.
Let’s look at some different applications where this visual representation is commonly used and can be most helpful. Please note that, in CharityEngine, you can easily customize your dashboards and pipelines to create unique reports based on your nonprofit.
Major Gifts Pipeline
In CharityEngine, our clients use pipelines to track and manage major gift opportunities on a dashboard. Your Major Gifts Officer can enter prospects and track them throughout the journey—identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, stewardship—clearly seeing which stage and which donors need the most attention on a given day.
These stages align with the donor journey stages. With this view, you can see your fundraising at a glance, and go beyond just identifying the donor. You can quickly see the dollar amount, the status of the donation, the priority, the owner, and detail on what the level of engagement is. You can also easily customize the dashboard and pipeline.
This is truly a 360-degree view of fundraising.
Grant Management
Grants are a common source of funds for nonprofits, but applying for multiple grants can quickly cause a tangled mess. When you use pipelines to organize grant proposals and application deadlines, it’s much less likely you’ll miss a deadline or step in the process.
Pipelines can track proposal development, submissions, and review, and even monitor reporting requirements and milestones in active grants. Having the data at your fingertips allows you visually identify and analyze success rates and funding trends, giving you strategic insights to make your outreach more targeted.
Scholarship Management
If your nonprofit has established a scholarship fund, pipelines offer a clear view of applicants, application review stages, approval, and closed records makes the intake and review process orderly. Furthermore, you can track applicant information, such as academic performance, right in the pipeline.
Having data clearly displayed and keeping track of funds disbursed helps with selection committee reviews and decisions, and also helps your nonprofit report on the impact and outcomes of your scholarship program. While scholarships aren’t direct revenue-generating activities, they are critical to your reach and are appropriate for pipelines.
Benefits of Using Donor Pipelines
Donor pipelines—regardless of whether you are tracking the donor journey, major gifts, grants, scholarships, or other processes that can be broken into stages—can transform your fundraising. Here are just some of the ways:
- Donor pipelines allow for personalized engagement, significantly increasing the effectiveness of fundraising efforts.
- Understanding where donors are in the pipeline leads to improved donor retention. Remember, it’s easier to keep a donor than find a new one!
- When a nonprofit knows where donors fall on the journey, it’s easier to allocate resources efficiently. Don’t waste time, money, or energy on engagement that won’t move donors along.
- We often talk about the value of data-driven decision making. With a clear view into conversion rates at each stage of the donor journey, you can avoid veering off path and make decisions that will increase fundraising.
- It’s easier to make informed forecasts, helping with budgeting and planning. You will see what funds are coming down the funnel and can predict when they will be realized.
Why Are Donor Pipelines Important Right Now?
But why are they such a hot topic now? We’ve got a few ideas.
Economic and political uncertainty mean organizations must be more strategic and efficient in their fundraising efforts.
Increased competition for funding (because of increased squeezing of budgets) means that those nonprofits able to make a clear and organized appeal will have better outcomes.
As donors trend younger, targeted and personalized appeals will resonate. Pipelines help track and tailor approaches to different donor segments.
Our increasingly remote workforce means that having a centralized and visually compelling record helps team members stay updated in real time, facilitating efficient collaboration.
Nonprofits focusing on donor retention will find that being able to quickly identify donors and launch a nurture campaign will help their stewardship efforts.
This is a new trend for nonprofits and ensuring that your choice of fundraising software includes pipelines can be one of the most strategic decisions you’ll make.
A Fundraising Edge
Pipelines are a strategic tool nonprofits can use to identify a list of donors that need targeted outreach to move to the next level. The visual representation of process stages, the task management and reminders, and the enhanced reporting from pipeline data prove that this feature is a valuable tool.
Not many CRMs are offering this functionality, making it the perfect time to consider moving your technology over to CharityEngine! Even if you’re not in the market and want to chat about how different platforms can enhance and improve your fundraising, just reach out. We’d love to chat.
