Nonprofits are increasingly adopting automation to work smarter and more efficiently. With advanced business automation, cross-collaboration between departments is seamless, freeing up time to focus on strategic initiatives. Fundraising platforms are enabling organizations to streamline their processes and boost productivity. This trend shows no sign of slowing down.
Where can business automation be applied at your organization?
Donor Management
A donor management system can give a comprehensive picture of each donor, including demographics, wealth profile, engagement with your organization, geolocation, relationships, interests, and much more. This data enables your organization to model future possibilities with these donors, recognize their engagement and support to date, and leverage those relationships. Some examples of automation within donor management include:
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Creating automated processes to recognize donor patterns and setting notifications for gift officers
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Automating donor communications based on certain gift variable triggers
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Allow donors to self-serve by providing them access to dashboards where they can check their giving history, manage monthly recurring gifts, and print out receipts and annual statements
With a donor management system, like StratusLIVE 365 CRM, data can be easily accessed and updated by anyone in the organization.
Marketing & Engagement
Marketing automation allows you to segment and target constituents across multiple channels. An organization can segment its constituents according to a wide range of characteristics, such as demographics, email response rates, social media activity, and preferences. After you have real-time segmentation, you can create customized communications to each person you contact allowing for a more personalized experience. Donors feel more engaged and connected to your cause when they receive a personalized note from your organization.
Using a donor management system, organizations can model and visualize live data in real-time, enabling dashboards, charts, and reports to be fully interactive and accessible by the entire organization. Using intelligent management software can automate processes and improve efficiency.
Some examples of how you can use marketing automation:
- After a donor makes their first donation, send them a series of timed welcome emails
- Test two different subject lines with a small group, then have the winning subject line automatically be used in the email to the entire group of recipients
- Set up an email that will automatically be sent to your donors on their birthday or other special occasions
Events
Using an event platform, you can facilitate and automate the registration process for an event by:
- Incorporating credit card processing to receive your funds faster
- Automating email messaging and notifications to keep participants up to date with all the relevant details
In addition, you can save time by:
- Building event templates based upon your unique specifications that can be set up quickly and even clone past events with the same settings and options
- Utilize feature clusters to add options including t-shirts
- Manage events with multiple sessions or locations
Check out our Event Management platform and learn more about streamlining your events: StratusLIVE Ignite Events
Volunteer Management
Send automated, branded emails to your volunteers including registration confirmation with calendar invitations. Engage volunteers through self-service by:
- Offering multiple events for volunteers to select
- Providing the option to donate to further expand your volunteers’ impact
- Leveraging details about volunteers within your CRM to nurture volunteers into donors
- Supporting social sharing, so volunteers spread the word about their participation within their networks
- Onboarding volunteers through automated messaging
- Providing volunteer shifts to best organize your event and leverage customized registration questions to ensure your volunteers are prepared
Check out StratusLIVE Ignite Volunteer Now to see automation in action.
Financial Processing
With a donor management platform, you’ll be able to automate your financial processes and tie them to your existing banking ledgers. Regardless of the form (cash, credit card, ACH, pledge, gift, and non-cash donations, in-kind) or vehicle (online, event, phone, postal), and destinations, you’ll be able to automate your financial processes.
Benefits of Automation
A lot of organizations shy away from investing in technology because they see it as time-consuming and costly, but the reality is that investing can build stronger donor relationships while improving internal operations, teamwork, and in-house capacity saving money in the long run.
Read our case study on how the National Wildlife Federation replaced its disconnected systems and outdated processes with StratusLIVE and reduced the lead time on fundraising appeals from 6 weeks to a few hours.
“StratusLIVE has helped us make a fundamental shift to a true CRM-based system and bring control back to our internal staff. We no longer need multiple systems, third-party data management, analysis and segmentation vendors.”
– Caroline Itoh, Associate Vice President of Strategic Business Operations
National Wildlife Federation
Driving automation across your organization starts with having a plan and knowing what you can do to advance your mission forward with automation.
If your organization is interested in upgrading but don't know where to begin, StratusLIVE can help!
Contact us today for a short demonstration of how we can transform your nonprofit with technology. We’ll tailor the demo for your specific needs and unique requirements.
