Can you build a house without the right tools? No way! It would be nearly impossible even to start construction without appropriate equipment. You don’t want to try to hammer nails with a screwdriver, and you surely can’t use a kitchen blender to mix concrete.
Running a nonprofit without the right technology would also be challenging. Deciding it’s time to shop for a new nonprofit CRM is the first step, but choosing a CRM with the features you need can be another hurdle. After all, the tools at your disposal will shape how your team conducts fundraising, handles donor management, and manages internal communications and workflow.
We have been serving nonprofits since 2008, and there really is a CRM that fits every fundraising organization. The question remains: how do you find the perfect technology for your nonprofit? It’s a big decision!
At first glance, all vendors might look the same or claim to have the same features. The first step is determining your must-have features and ensuring the technology matches them.
This guide will delve into essential CRM features and explain how they can help your nonprofit. After reading it, you’ll have a solid sense of what features should be on your list when you’re ready to go CRM shopping.
Ready to dive in?
A nonprofit’s mission is to raise money for a cause, and the right CRM will offer many tools to help with fundraising. At the heart of those tools must be robust donor management software.
The right CRM will provide the tools to track and advance essential relationships. These include:
Donor information is the engine that powers your fundraising platform and all your fundraising efforts. Ensuring your donor management tools can collect, store, and analyze many data points about your donors gives you a solid foundation for any donor engagement campaigns.
Keeping in contact with your donors is easy when you have the right tools, but it’s also complex when considering the network of communications channels. Navigating with a discerning eye can seem a bit overwhelming.
If you have a CRM with native communication tools, your technology makes it easy for you to communicate (and track communications) with donors. The right CRM will help you organize your communication strategy and focus on the intended results.
Key communication features to look for include:
Your donor management and communications tools must have a smooth flow of information between them to leverage all the donor insights your CRM offers. This is another benefit of an all-in-one CRM; not relying on integrations means the correct recipients will receive your messages at the right time and with the most relevant message.
Did you know that major gifts ($1,000 or more) make up about 85% of the average nonprofit’s total revenue? That means that, while every donation matters, it’s essential to make sure your CRM has the tools to cultivate and manage major gifts.
There are features specific to major gifts that you will want to be sure your CRM offers:
Any donor management software should provide the essentials for creating and updating donor profiles. Still, if you look for a system with features specifically designated to help you create and sustain a major gifts program, you might have just the edge your nonprofit needs to take your fundraising to a new level.
If you’ve ever thrown a party, you know that everything from the guest list to the seating arrangements can be a headache. Now imagine the stress when you’re planning an event critical to the success of your nonprofit! You’ll want to have a toolbox full of ways to reduce the chances anything can go wrong.
A CRM with event management software equips nonprofits with the essentials to manage every aspect of your event, with essentials such as:
Another feature to consider is how your event management tools are integrated with your CRM. You will want to track and record data, such as which donors attended or participated, how many completed a post-event conversion like donating, and how your event attendance compares to previous years or events. If your CRM offers native event management tools, you will have all data in one place, making it easy to identify trends and make strategic, targeted improvements.
You know your CRM is an excellent tool for managing internal processes and backend data. Still, software offering membership management features allows donors to interface with aspects of their portfolio from a branded page on your website.
How is this helpful to you as a nonprofit? Your donors will have the ability to answer their questions about past donations and giving history and update or change their payment information, address, communication preferences, or other personal information.
Allowing your donors access to self-service tools means your staff will spend less time answering phone calls and emails containing routine requests, and they will be freed up for other activities and donor outreach efforts. Consumers today are accustomed to managing their information in portals, and this feature can save your nonprofit a lot of time.
Grants can contribute significantly to your overall fundraising strategy. But identifying, applying for, becoming compliant with, and tracking grants can get pretty confusing, particularly if you have more than one staff member responsible for grants.
What’s the best way to manage this process, given that even identifying and applying for one grant can be a months-long, complex journey? A vital software feature is grant management capabilities to keep all your information organized, synced, and available.
Ensure your CRM offers the option to create calendars for each grant, store important documents, and keep all relevant grant information in one secure location. This will impact your bottom line because you will maximize every opportunity, and nothing will fall through the cracks.
Most nonprofit professionals have their hands full, and automating as many tasks as possible will go a long way toward making sure they spend their time doing what matters to advance your cause. Manually entering and updating data is inefficient and unnecessary when you have a CRM with the right features.
It’s important to look at the daily tasks that take a lot of time and match the automation and workflow processes that most clearly fit your needs. Here are some benefits to consider:
Measuring your progress, identifying areas that need work, and ensuring your resources are allocated appropriately are critical aspects of keeping your nonprofit healthy. You can only make data-driven decisions when you can create reports and identify trends, so the right CRM should come with some basic capabilities:
We also recommend that you take a look at data comparison features. CRMs that allow you to compare a variety of data fields can empower your team to make the right decisions on your fundraising strategy, focusing your efforts on what historical data proves to be successful. The more fundraising tools native to the CRM, the easier it is for you to pull these reports and leverage all the data you have.
Asking the payment processing question can feel like you’re opening a can of worms! There are so many fees, things to consider, and many options. Having the right tools or, even better, in-house payment processing capabilities can make this headache go away. It’s tricky, though, to understand payment processing for nonprofits, and it’s well worth your time to get educated before you start evaluating systems.
Let’s look at some features that are crucial to nonprofits:
A last bit of advice is to ask whether a payment processor is PCI-compliant or PCI-certified. This is a stamp of approval from the Payment Card Industry, which has developed standards consumers can trust. PCI-compliant payment processors must adhere to guidelines and continually assess their internal processes to avoid violations. But if a payment processor is PCI-certified, it’s an entirely different story. This certification requires a rigorous process and a comprehensive audit by a qualified security assessor. It takes months to achieve instead of the weeks it takes to become PCI compliant. A PCI-certified payment processor gets a gold star.
Did you know that a payment processor can only collect up to 85% of your sustainer pledges? That last 15% is lost due to passive churn, or credit cards being declined. This passive churn is widely accepted in the nonprofit world because there's not much payment processors can do to regain that 15%.
The only way you can get that extra 15 cents on every dollar is with subscription billing technology, highly specialized software that can take your sustainer revenue from 85% to 98%. CharityEngine has subscription billing technology, and our clients routinely see their sustainer revenue collection hover around 98%.
Other than CharityEngine, which other payment processors serving nonprofits have subscription billing technology?
None.
Now that you understand the essential features of a CRM, you might be frustrated to find a lot of almost perfect systems that are missing one or two features you now know are critical for your nonprofit.
This isn’t a problem if you choose a genuinely all-in-one CRM like CharityEngine. With native tools and in-house payment processing, this CRM checks all the boxes. Rather than piecing together one program to send emails, another to run events, and yet another to accept and process payments, every tool you need to run a successful nonprofit is in one place.
Remember how we mentioned that all nonprofit CRMs can sound the same? Ask each about what they offer and what makes them different. PCI-certified payment processing is one of CharityEngine’s differentiators, as well as the scalability of the solution. From a small, local humane society to one of the top 50 charities in the world, CharityEngine’s clients have all found the perfect solution to help their nonprofit grow and thrive.
CharityEngine’s CRM offers every one of the features detailed in this article. Some of the tools our clients like the most include:
When you’re ready to look at CRM solutions, check out CharityEngine’s all-in-one CRM. It will equip your nonprofit with every feature you need and will keep all your donor data in one place so you can gain insights and plan for strategic growth.