Good planning is the foundation of good fundraising.  Far too many non-profits “fly by the seat of the pants” when it comes to fundraising.  They try to do too much, they incorporate every idea they get from their board, management, and major donors, and they fail to evaluate the return on investment for their various fundraising programs.  This leads to staff and board burnout, donor fatigue, and a feeling that there’s got to be a better way to fundraise.

There’s no doubt about it… making asks can be one of the most intimidating tasks for any fundraiser.  The thought of sitting down across the table from someone and asking them to give your organization $5,000 or $50,000 is enough to make many people eschew the profession all together.

You know how crucial it is for your board to be engaged in your development program.  Countless books, articles, and webinars have preached the importance of a board that is active in fundraising, helping you identify and connect with new donors on a regular basis.  That’s good advice… and like most good advice it is easy to understand but hard to implement.

Support Call: Steps to requeue an employee record  ‘In Process’ status yourself.

StratusLIVE and Salesforce both offer nonprofit clouds that bring fundraising, program management, and engagement solutions into one integrated platform. 

Donor churn is the percentage of your donors who choose not to donate again.  Donor churn is an important nonprofit metric to measure and take steps to reduce the number of donors who will not make a donation the following year.

There are a handful of things that can be done to ensure your nonprofit Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation runs smoothly. These only apply to self-hosted installations. StratusLIVE perform these tasks for our hosted customers and they cannot be controlled in CRM Online Instances.

Large software implementations are prone to failure and for good reason. They are typically long, drawn-out processes that for many are akin to a heart transplant. Over the years as an industry we’ve learned “best-practices” that every organization should apply towards a successful implementation project. Ideas like executive buy-in, change management, RFP consultants, and team participation are all concepts that are well accepted and practiced in most projects today. With all the advances in implementation best-practices you would think software projects are having a much higher success rate. Unfortunately, the data does not support this and if anything, the failure rates are getting even worse. How can this be? After spending the last 15 years serving nonprofits and being part of many implementations, we have observed a number of things that the average nonprofit may not be aware of:

The backbone of any non-profit organization is its staff and volunteers.  Without your team working together, effectively and efficiently, everything will suffer at your organization… including programs, operations, and fundraising.

The vast majority of non-profits are struggling when it comes to fundraising. They may be raising enough money to keep their programs going, or even growing… but they’re doing it with too much stress, constant staff turnover, and constant friction in their development program.