How Do You Attract More Donors and Keep Them Coming Back? By Making It Easier for Them to Donate

Today, there are even more challenges; with the pandemic, collaborating with donors and reaching potential donors became more difficult than perhaps ever before.

As the pandemic progressed, donation revenue dried up and offices closed down, and furloughs and layoffs became the norm. This was all happening as demand for social services went through the roof.

Another complication: changing donor expectations. Today’s donors want more professional and personalized experiences when making donations, especially donations with a higher dollar amount. Not only is this relationship with an organization key to the donor, but the impact of their donations on the organization and mission is very important. Studies show that having that transparency makes donors more likely to give up to 10 percent more. 60 to 70 percent of donors want to see more digital technology around a nonprofit, and 80 percent want to see the impact of their donations.

How do you stay engaged in a way that will attract and retain donors? Since you can’t meet face to face, you’re depending more than ever on other channels, like social media and even emails. Without the right technology to help you reach donors through these channels, what can you do?

One area to look at is technology. What are you using to manage donor communication and relationships? The problem for most non-profits is that they are running multiple point solutions that solve for a specific problem, which causes a significant disconnect because of data that’s siloed and systems that don’t talk to each other.

You need a single, unified system to track donations and the impact that these donations have on each program–not only for your organization but also for your donors. This system should be able to track and organize communications to help you figure out what’s the best channel to engage with each donor and how to engage with them. Being able to analyze each relationship so you understand and can gauge the health of that relationship helps drive that personalization, especially for a major gift donor, and it can also help you determine the right people to focus on at the right time.

Fundraising and Engagement, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and part of the Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit, is the solution. It supports the most common fundraising scenarios across multiple donation types and channels, including major and annual giving, recurring gift programs and membership programs, opportunity and designation management, and household & life event management.

With Fundraising and Engagement your marketing people can plan and execute informed campaigns, while your finance staff, database administrators, and business analysts can benefit from better payment processing, data management, and BI powered by Microsoft Azure and Power BI.

In addition, as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 offering, Fundraising and Engagement is integrated and aligned with Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Finance (ERP) and Sales (CRM), along with the Power Platform. All work together to deliver proactive insights for reporting, which helps you strengthen relationships and uncover new opportunities.