The way in which you engage donors and drive revenue depends on your association management software (AMS). Discover the power of selecting software that supports your fundraising activities.
Here are some helpful tips in selecting the best AMS to empower your entire organization.
Why Do You Need Software To Support Your Association’s Fundraising Activities?
Fundraising has been vitally important to many associations for years, while others are turning to fundraising more recently to help generate additional non-dues revenue. If fundraising is part of your revenue-generating plan, it’s crucial to have an AMS in place that supports fundraising activities.
The software you use will determine your ability to engage donors and drive revenue today, and in the future. When selecting fundraising software for your association, you have multiple considerations to weigh.
One of the most important things to confirm is that the software can help you meet and exceed your association’s fundraising goals. To ensure the investment in your new fundraising software will truly meet your organization’s requirements, talk with your development team about their needs and the limitations of any fundraising software they currently use. This will help you develop a list of must-have features and functionality.
Six Key Fundraising Features To Look For In Your AMS
As you build your list, consider these key fundraising capabilities in your next AMS:
1. Donor Management
To fundraise effectively, it’s essential to think about your members as donors. You should have a donor profile for each of your members that includes a comprehensive view of communications, touch points, interests, giving history, and past campaigns that have inspired giving. So, just as your AMS helps you track contact information, engagement history, and other details about your members, your fundraising software should help you track and report on donor information.
To deliver a great donor experience, your software should also give donors and prospects the convenience of managing their own profiles, contact information, recurring gifts, and saved payment methods through an online donor portal.
For example, fundraising functionality in NetForum AMS by Momentive Software enables you to manage donor data, providing a clear view of campaigns, donors, and fundraising events. It also provides an online donor portal where donors and prospects can view and update their own information.
Data points, such as giving history, event attendance, and volunteering, can help you uncover fundraising opportunities. For example, your members might be more likely to donate after volunteering or attending one of your association’s events – when they’re feeling most connected to your organization. Keeping this in mind, you might target volunteers and event attendees for a special, personalized donor cultivation campaign.
2. Donor Engagement Tracking
Effective fundraising requires the ability to track engagement levels, allowing you to take smarter and faster action when connecting with members. Once members have given, it’s also essential to identify where they are in the fundraising lifecycle and manage their movement forward.
A-Score™ functionality in NetForum helps you measure the engagement levels of each of your members, allowing you to understand which members have given before and which are likely to give again. It also helps you identify where members are in the fundraising lifecycle – including prospective donors, one-time donors, and monthly/repeat donors – and manage their progression forward with targeted communications tailored to their stage in the fundraising lifecycle. You can even assign tasks to staff and key volunteers based on donor behavior.
With NetForum AMS, you can also track and manage campaigns, funds, appeals, and their associated goals. You can specify suggested donation ask amounts that are calculated based on a donor’s historical giving patterns. And you can use built-in analytics and easily build custom queries for reports that will give you insights into your donor members for use in targeted donor communications and campaigns.
Using NetForum, you can automate moves management processes, helping you to cultivate donors more efficiently.
3. A Modern Giving Experience
We’ve all come to expect a modern online experience. We also expect the organizations we interact with to make those interactions easy and convenient. The latest Forum update enables you to accept payments from Apple Pay and Google Pay, making it easier than ever to collect payments.
NetForum helps you deliver a modern, efficient giving experience by:
- Allowing members to set up monthly donations
- Splitting recurring gifts across funds (for example, a member could donate a $100 monthly gift and direct $60 to Fund A and $40 to Fund B)
- Soft crediting a member of a household so that you can have combined family/couple giving totals on the household
- Linking a matching gift to the gift that generated the match
- Personalizing gift acknowledgement emails
NetForum includes functionality to help you identify, encourage, and track matching gifts for your fundraising program.
4. Efficient Gifts Processing
Processing donations is not the most exciting part of fundraising. But it must be done. Making sure you have the right tools in place for gift processing can help you save time that’s better spent on other fundraising activities.
NetForum supports batch gift entry to streamline the processing of checks or credit cards received in person. This feature is a quick way to input multiple gifts at once in a spreadsheet-like format, rather than inputting gifts one by one. You can also use visual workflows to automate everyday, manual tasks associated with gift processing, such as sending acknowledgements and tax receipts.
5. Integration with Other Applications
A key feature to look for is the level of integration the fundraising software allows with other applications. For example, NetForum is part of the connected network of solutions for associations by Momentive Software that includes solutions for membership management, learning management, and career center software.
These solutions work together to provide a comprehensive, personalized, and connected member experience. NetForum can also integrate with third-party platforms and online donation systems.
Ready to scale your software ecosystem? Take the next step with the Momentive Software family of connected solutions. We’re ready to grow with your association.
6. Advanced Reporting and Dashboards
Your fundraising software should help you make informed decisions by utilizing dashboards, advanced reporting, and scheduled reports. For example, NetForum provides dashboards and reporting to deliver the insights you need to make informed decisions. It offers 300 standard reports for visibility into the health of your organization. It also allows you to quickly modify standard reports without needing IT assistance.
NetForum also includes configurable dashboards for a quick view of key data. In just a few clicks, you can drill into graphs and charts to view the data behind them, and then drill further to obtain a list. You can track everything from key donor and member trend data (including growth and retention rates, engagement scores, and event registrations) to the complete donor and member lifecycle. You can also set up automatic report distribution via email to keep key stakeholders at your organization informed regularly.
Nucleus, the first data analytics solution developed for associations, is a Momentive Software product that’s available in-app with NetForum. It works with NetForum to provide advanced data and insights for more informed decision-making. The Nucleus membership dashboard is included for all new NetForum customers.
