5 Examples of How Automation = Better Fundraising
Fundraising is emotional work. We tell stories and build relationships. But we also do a surprising amount of routine, administrative work. So, can we use automation and software for our routine fundraising tasks, while still keeping the personal touch?
Yes. In fact, automating our administrative fundraising work means we have more time (and more energy) for relationship-based fundraising. Let's look at five ways that we actually use automation to build stronger relationships and free ourselves up for real creative thinking - and better fundraising.
One: Streamlined Stewardship.
When it comes to donor stewardship, automation is your friend. You can use your donor database to automate thank you emails, generate great letters and even schedule reminders for yourself to reach out periodically throughout the year. You can go a step further and use a website like thanks.io to automatically send cute postcards, or have your donor database automatically email your ED with a reminder to make a thank you phone call!
Two: Engaged New Donors
A new donor welcome drip is one of the easiest - and most fun - ways to automate basic fundraising tasks. Most CRM's and email marketing tools like Mailchimp can create email drips: a series of emails that go out to a donor automatically, at pre-set intervals. You can use welcome drips to introduce your organization (be sure to include some great stories!), share your impact and engage new donors in your work.
You can also segment your list so that first-time donors get a different email series than repeat donors - meaning that you can focus on building relationships with your most engaged supporters, while still providing valuable content to newer donors.
Read More: Fundraising Ideas to Find New Donors - Without T-Shirts, Candy Bars, or GoFundMe Campaign
Three: Thrilled Recurring Donors
According to Network for Good, setting up a recurring giving program can increase donor retention by as much as 42%. And we're a huge fan of recurring giving - and an even bigger fan of automating it! You could: automatically email them monthly with a sincere thank you (not just the canned receipt!); have a postcard automatically sent on the one-year anniversary of their first gift, or create other email drips focused on meaningful donor engagement.
Four: Organized Grants Calendars
Grants calendar management is high-touch and there's probably no way we can entirely automate it. But if you use a project management tool like ClickUp or Trello you can (and should) create templates and checklists that you can use grant after grant. While this may not strictly be automation, it does alleviate a lot of the brainpower that can go into maintaining your grants calendar. Grab our Grant Calendar Template here if you want to see how we get organized in Trello and Google Sheets!
Read More: Grant Writing is just Good ‘ol Project Management
Five: Simple SOP's
There are a lot of fundraising activities that just have so. many. moving. parts. Even prepping for a board meeting can take ages! Using your favorite project management tool, create a simple SOP that lists out everything you need to do, then adds the links, tools, and other resources you need to mark tasks as done. This is a mashup of automation and project management, but I promise it makes life about a gazillion years easier!In short, automating your fundraising tasks frees you up to spend more time on relationship building - which is the key to great fundraising.
Here’s one of our internal SOP’s-it links to the tools we use and the documents we need to track or update so that we make sure that we never miss a beat!
Taking a few minutes to set up automated systems now will save you hours (and burnout!) in the long run. And using tools that talk to each other makes sure that your data is always where you need it, when you need it. So what are you waiting for? Automate away!