A 5-Step Tech Audit So You’ll Crush Year-End Giving

You haven’t even bought sunscreen for the summer, and we’re already talking about year-end giving, which may make us look like we’re not reading the room very carefully.

But if you’re a nonprofit planning on growing this year, and/or a nonprofit hoping to knock fundraising goals over the fence, you’re exactly who this article is meant to benefit. Because the savvy nonprofits are taking stock of things now—or somewhere in the middle-ish of the year—to ensure they’re on track to hit year-end goals.

What are these magical harbingers of year-end success? They’re all areas you can address now to ensure you’re aligned and ready to roll when the giving season heats up.

Why Now’s the Time for a Health Check

Any time is a great time to pause and assess your technology and the health of your data, but mid-year is when sophisticated organizations stop to see if they’re well-positioned for the second half of the year.

Many nonprofits begin year-end planning as early as August, setting their sights on GivingTuesday and making sure their infrastructure supports the success they want.

Fiscal year planning is likely starting as well, so identifying gaps and needed services now can help ensure the budget is there to support the initiative.

We all know that once year-end planning starts, it’s like a wheel rolling downhill. It picks up momentum, and chaos often ensues. It’s helpful to walk through a simple audit now so you can confidently head into the fourth quarter!

A Five-Step Nonprofit Audit

We’ve identified five key areas you can examine to see how prepared you are for a fundraising surge. Take a look at each of these and see what kind of grade you’d give yourself – if it’s an A or a B, you’re in good shape. Any lower than that might mean you can make some changes to optimize future fundraising.

1. Check Your Tech

While this may seem obvious, there’s a fundamental question you should ask yourself repeatedly: Is my technology helping me fundraise to the best of my ability or holding me back?

Bear in mind that donor-journey-based fundraising and personalization are now almost required to successfully reach prospective donors. If you don’t use AI, you're missing opportunities to be more efficient.

Can your tech do all that?

More importantly, how can you identify tech that is not enabling your efforts? Look for platform fatigue: manual workarounds, cobbled-together systems that give you disconnected tools and data, or outgrown systems.

A true sign of platform fatigue is when the team seems resigned. It works well enough, or it mainly does what it’s supposed to do. These are not people in love with their software!

It might be time to shop for a new CRM. Although the process seems painful, it can be made much easier if you have a plan!

2. How Clean Is Your Data?

Think about your year-end campaigns. GivingTuesday and year-end campaigns require targeted outreach at scale – you’re going to want to hit everyone in your database, through as many channels as you can.

To do this effectively, you must be able to rely on the integrity of your data.

• Are your records complete?
• Have you rid the database of duplicate entries?
• Are your segments cleanly defined?
• Can you easily query and personalize at speed?

If your data set is clean and unified in one place, the power of automation means you can compound your outreach. You’ll reach more donors in more ways and much more effectively than if you are relying on data that’s pretty good rather than sparkling clean.

If you decide to switch technology, don’t pass up the opportunity to clean your data. Most CRM vendors, including CharityEngine, offer data-cleaning services and support to help you bring in records that will work well for you.

We can’t shout this from the rooftops loudly enough! Dirty data can erode your organization’s effectiveness in huge ways:

• You can’t be sure your audience segments are accurate. So major donors might be asked for a $25 gift to jumpstart their giving, or volunteers might be asked for money before being thanked for their help.
• Your staff will waste time manually cleaning every list, fixing records when donors call, and deduping contacts for every fundraising campaign. Not only is that inefficient, but it will burn out your team before they can even kickstart the year-end giving season.
• Inaccurate reporting means inaccurate forecasting and missed opportunities for optimization. Many duplicates mean your donor retention numbers could look much better than they are, and you won’t know that they need attention.
• Inconsistent or incorrect data can affect compliance, whether GDPR for international donors, CAN-SPAM for emails, or even IRS regulations.
• Finally, dirty data means lower conversion rates, higher donor frustration, higher attrition, and fewer opportunities to engage donors. In a nutshell, it will cost you hundreds or even thousands in donations.

Can you tell this is an important one? Check the cleanliness of your data now so you have time to clean it up before fundraising goes into overdrive.

3. AI and Automation: Are You in the Driver’s Seat?

If you were looking for the perfect day to jump on the AI and automation bandwagon, that day was yesterday!!

Artificial intelligence can help your fundraising in so many ways.

• By analyzing past donor behavior, AI can tell you who is ready to give today and how much the appeal should be. Or tell you which donors are at risk of lapsing.
• AI tools can automatically group donors into like segments for personalization, as well as tailor the content to drive engagement.
• Lean on AI to help you write fundraising emails!

• AI-powered dashboards can give you real-time fundraising performance snapshots, donor engagement scores, and predictive revenue forecasts, letting you make fast, effective decisions.
• And AI can help you find insights along the donor journey, such as points of friction.

You can automate emails to strengthen your donor relationships. Welcome series, birthday emails, and thank-you notes all make them feel seen, and getting automatic receipts for taxes makes you look efficient.

This is an excellent area for you to assess your capabilities. These tools don’t replace human fundraising, but they make it a lot easier and much more effective.

4. Disconnected Data Can Be Costing You

In a way, it’s liberating to connect a bunch of different systems and create a “custom” technology solution that meets your needs. But, while logging into different systems is a bit of a pain, the real pain lies in the fact that your data is housed in as many systems as you’ve cobbled together.

For example, your emails and their performance, like open rates, might be in Mailchimp. Your events and volunteers might be in Eventbrite. And your payment processing data might all reside with Stripe.

That means your data is disconnected. This will slow down campaigns, create reporting chaos, and weaken donor experiences!

Consider the power of data that is all in one system. No syncs, no uploads, one password. And a real-time, comprehensive look at any aspect of donor data.

The challenge before you is to look at your tech stack and see if core fundraising tools are in different platforms. If they are, find a way to consolidate!

5. Can You Communicate Clearly with Your Board?

A savvy board is concerned with growing your nonprofit, and they’re going to ask some direct questions to measure it.

• What’s our donor retention rate?
• In what areas are we growing?
• Which campaigns drive the most engagement?
• Are we on track to hit our year-end goals?
• What trends are we seeing that we should respond to?

To answer these questions quickly and accurately, you need clean, centralized, accessible data, and systems that can report on it in real time. They, and you, need to make data-driven decisions.

Your board, major donors, and even funders of grants or corporate partners want transparency in data. The healthiest nonprofits are an open book!

So ask yourself:

• Can your systems help you answer key questions quickly and confidently?
• Is your data trustworthy so it can be used across teams?
• Can you isolate a weak link—such as reporting—or do you need to search for new technology?
• What’s your very biggest pain point? If it has to do with your technology, pay attention.

Remember, the very best fundraising software will make your job easier. Your vendor should feel like a partner. That might be the biggest tech check of all!

Make Tech the Hero of Year-End Success!

Many things can pop up and surprise nonprofits, so it’s important that you control what you can.

So don’t wait until September to evaluate your technology. Smart nonprofits are putting the pieces in place now, whether it’s cleaning their data, consolidating their systems, maximizing AI and automation, and making sure their tech isn’t a roadblock.

A quick, 5-step audit today means fewer headaches, better donor experiences, and a lot more success when GivingTuesday rolls around. Give these five points a look and see if there’s anything you can fix now. We want to make sure your technology is never slowing you down!

Because nothing kills a year-end sprint like a clunky system, dirty data, or a report you can’t run when the board’s on the line. Let’s make sure none of that slows you down.